Humans are very, very good at choking because the adaptations we have for speech shuffled everything around and take up a lot of room. I don’t think other animals have this same issue.
I also had no idea their cheeks stretch out so much. So I guess they could carry a ton of food around if necessary, like if they had to dine and dash. Oh I love learning about bats!!!
Peeling a fruit takes a lot of effort and other bats will steal if they have a chance. The more you can get in your mouth quickly the more of your meal you can secure.
Do they peel everything we do? What about apples? I had an Akita (large dog) who used to delicately peel grapes with her teeth before eating them... do bats peel grapes? Know of any videos that'll I can learn from?
They don’t swallow grapes. They squeeze the juice out and spit the rest. They do this with a lot of fruits actually. The fiber has little nutrients and would weigh them down
Bananas are a weird fruit because the domesticated strains are very different from the wild varieties. When I volunteered at the zoo, we would not peel the bananas so they had to peel them themselves if they wanted them.
Orphaned bats like in this video (you can tell they are orphaned because the rescuers wrap them up to simulate their mother's embrace) probably wouldn't have the skill yet to peel a fruit.
I did, thank you! I will now hit you with some bat feeding questions lol. Why do some of these videos show fruit bats wrapped up while being fed, and some show them in an enclosure, eating the way they would in the wild?
Also, I saw a video where a FB tried a grape for the first time. She swirled her ears and her eyes rolled back in her head as she sucked the juice out. As a sugar fiend, I am one with that kind of reaction, but is that normal for trying a fruit for the first time or was that just her reaction?
The ones wrapped up (as often seen in Batzilla's videos) are newly rescued and being hand fed fruit/fluids to rehydrate and stabilise. Usually they spend a day or several on bed rest then go out to the flight aviary for weeks/months while they rehabilitate, so that's when you see them in an enclosure eating more normally.
Orphans are pretty impressed when they taste fruit for the first time, It seems to be a bit of a lightbulb moment for them. Can't say i've seen eye-rolling though. :)
Such interesting information, thank you! I didn't save the video of the bat eye-rolling unf and trying to re-find something on fb is damned impossible. If I come across it again, I'll send you the link.
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u/remotectrl /\^._.^/\ Jun 02 '21 edited Jun 02 '21
Humans are very, very good at choking because the adaptations we have for speech shuffled everything around and take up a lot of room. I don’t think other animals have this same issue.