Rats caught on camera hunting flying bats (2025) | Hacker News Reader

Rats caught on camera hunting flying bats (2025)

scienceclock.com

88 pointsakg13052214 comments

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Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45730366

Rats are the best! :)

No they're not.

Werewolf mouses?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K9mO5QzOIQ

Been posted 4 times. HN loves rats eating bats.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=rats+bats

While predation by rats is curious news, much more common (here in the US at least) is predation by raccoons.

Conservation-minded management practice is often to build a "bat friendly" gate at the entrance of a significant bat cave or an abandoned mine portal. These gates are the ideal perch for hungry raccoons to pluck bats right out of the air. Bats emerge from entrances like this near the ceiling, when possible, specifically to avoid predators. Poorly designed gates are the opposite of "bat friendly" and turn the safe entrances into buffets for raccoons.

Why do we care about protecting bats? They're the #1 predator for night-flying insects, which are often crop destroying pests. Every bat we lose equals more chemical pesticide that farmers must use to efficiently grow crops.

I'm not sure if I'd call it full-fledged PTSD, but I have some guilt associated with an incident of a rat invasion in my house. We initially used glue traps with the hope that we'd catch the rats and maybe be able to release them outside. What happened instead is that one of the rats was caught, chewed its arm off to escape, bled all over my house, and eventually died.

I don't like rats, and I don't really even have a huge issue with killing them, but I certainly don't want to torture them. If I had used a snap trap, the rat would be dead in about a second. With the glue trap he was suffering for hours, probably in immense pain.

I don't think rats are cute anymore and I'm not sure that glue traps should be legal.

It's not your fault!! :) you didn't know that would happen if you did you wouldn't have done it. :) So yeah: Those traps should be illegal. I understand why people kill rats, I eat meat, but I appreciate folks who do it as painlessly as they can. I love rats sooooo much, probably irrationally so because they helped me a lot through my parents divorce when I was a wee boy, they're very bonded animals, they accept you in as part of their life and show incredible amounts of affection towards you. On top of that, they're intelligent!

I mean, they were really messing up my house. They knocked over an entire shelf in my pantry, which I admittedly was kind of impressed by considering that shelf was full of stuff any not light. They were eating through plastic containers and eating/shitting in our food.

We had to replace all our food containers with very thick plastic containers or glass containers, and after the disaster with the glue traps we hired an exterminator who patched up all the holes they were getting in from and laid a lot of snap traps, which as far as I can tell, killed them immediately and thus they didn't suffer.

I'll admit that I don't really love the idea of killing mammals; but I do love my house staying together.

100% agree on banning glue traps. Snap traps aren't perfect though. I had to finish off a mighty survivor of one once. The rat was huge. When I heard the rattling in the shed I panicked and grabbed a shovel lying nearby. My mind has erased the memory of what happened next, I just remember the aftermath and being splattered with lots of rat blood. I deeply regret doing that and wish I had let her limp away to an uncertain fate. I stopped setting traps after that and just let them run rampant through the moldy old walls of that place until I moved.

I had to choke back a little because the happiness of people like you existing was very strong. That is some extremely admirable kindness.

This research was from northern Germany and I am wondering if it is something which has gotten as far as Berlin because we used to have a bat population across from our house due to a location near a park and cemetery. Since last summer the bats seem gone (and mosquito population much on the rise).

I suspect this behaviour has been going on for centuries, even millennia, just that no one has been in the position to see or film it.

Some people pointed out on the other thread that the rat would be near blind, but they also have excellent hearing and sense of smell to work around that.

Go to the larder, Ratty! Go to the larder! It's where the grub is. Clever fellas.

(2025)

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