Carnivorous Plants: Tiny Bats Make Crappy Tenants
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With a body built like an angora sweater, Borneo's car key-sized Hardwicke's woolly bat has made a comfortable home for itself inside a compromised location:
The blades of a carnivorous pitcher plant.
According to research by Ulmar Grafe, an associate professor at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam, the woolly bat's decided to forgo the whole "roosting upside-down in a cave or vampire pad" thing, and instead takes refuge inches away from the sticky digestive sap found at the depths of the pitcher plant's prey-trapping cavity.
Rather than snack on its tiny tenant, the plant chows down on the bat's nutrient-rich dung—a rare treat in the nitrogen-poor jungles of Borneo.
For its symbiotic part, the landlord provides the woolly winged rodent safe haven from predators and ectoparasites that typically loiter where bat's hang.
Nepenthes rafflesiana, also known as Raffle's Pitcher-Plant, evidently doesn't mind being used as a toilet; in fact, Raffle's restroom may owe its very life to the bat's generous booty. The Raffle's species captures far less prey than its planty peers, and possesses little by way of insect-wooing juju, making it unfit for survival in the book of jungle law. Proving there's something out there for everybody, reports theorize the flesh-eating plant may have evolved specifically to feed on the woolly little guy's guano.
While there's much to learn about cohabitation and tolerance in this odd example from Mother Nature, readers are expressly dissuaded from paying rent with anything other than cash or check.
http://www.takepart.com/news/2011/01/27/carnivorous-plants-tiny-bats-make-crappy...
The blades of a carnivorous pitcher plant.
According to research by Ulmar Grafe, an associate professor at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam, the woolly bat's decided to forgo the whole "roosting upside-down in a cave or vampire pad" thing, and instead takes refuge inches away from the sticky digestive sap found at the depths of the pitcher plant's prey-trapping cavity.
Rather than snack on its tiny tenant, the plant chows down on the bat's nutrient-rich dung—a rare treat in the nitrogen-poor jungles of Borneo.
For its symbiotic part, the landlord provides the woolly winged rodent safe haven from predators and ectoparasites that typically loiter where bat's hang.
Nepenthes rafflesiana, also known as Raffle's Pitcher-Plant, evidently doesn't mind being used as a toilet; in fact, Raffle's restroom may owe its very life to the bat's generous booty. The Raffle's species captures far less prey than its planty peers, and possesses little by way of insect-wooing juju, making it unfit for survival in the book of jungle law. Proving there's something out there for everybody, reports theorize the flesh-eating plant may have evolved specifically to feed on the woolly little guy's guano.
While there's much to learn about cohabitation and tolerance in this odd example from Mother Nature, readers are expressly dissuaded from paying rent with anything other than cash or check.
http://www.takepart.com/news/2011/01/27/carnivorous-plants-tiny-bats-make-crappy...
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- Animal Videos and News, Plant, Bats, carnivore, 2 more
