Being a vampire can be brutal. Here’s how bloodsuckers get by.
What’s most remarkable about real-life bloodsuckers doesn’t show up in movies
By
Susan Milius
12:00pm, October 18, 2017
Jennifer Zaspel can’t explain why she stuck her thumb in the vial with the moth. Just an after-dark, out-in-the-woods zing of curiosity.
She was catching moths on a July night in the Russian Far East and had just eased a Calyptra, with brownish forewings like a dried leaf, into a plastic collecting vial. Of the 17 or so largely tropical Calyptra species, eight were known vampires. Males will vary their fruit diet on occasion by driving their hardened, fruit-piercing mouthparts into mammals, such as cattle, tapirs and even elephants and humans, for a drink of fresh blood.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/blood-real-vampires-animals
