Meet the strange shape of bat language

In addition to being the only mammals capable of flying, they are also the ones with the highest metabolism. This causes their bodies to burn half their body fat every day. So the little animals have a need to eat almost all the time.

To make eating more efficient, bats have a tongue full of special hairs that help capture the sweetest nectar with each lick. This amazing discovery was made with the high speed video you can check out below.

The bat in question is Glossophaga soricina, a species that lives mainly in South and Central America. Biologists already knew the animal had a hairy tongue, but they thought these fibers were passive.

Cally J. Harper, who conducted this new study, explains that the findings point to an active movement that happens with the change in blood flow, causing the tongue to pick up larger amounts of nectar.

"When the cold begins, the hair on our arms is raised up and this movement is very similar except that on the hair, it happens through the muscles, while the fiber in the bat's tongue is fed with blood, " Harper explains. .

The images were captured on a Phantom v10 - a very high speed camera - using 500 frames per second. By decreasing the speed of the images, it is possible to clearly perceive the movement of the hair, called in the study of "papillae".

But how does this happen?

The researchers realized that what happens there is a hydraulic movement - the same process that develops erection in mammals. What puzzled scientists was that no such rapid hydraulic movement has ever been observed. While mammal erection is slow enough, the fibers in bat tongues take an impressive 40 milliseconds to stand up.

Then Harper and the Brown University research team began testing languages ​​taken from dead bats. They injected tongues in saline solutions as a substitute for blood and found that as the tongue grows, the fibers get longer and thinner.

As the muscles contract, it causes the length of the tongue to increase. At the same time, it squeezes the blood (or saline) into the tips of the papillae, generating the incredibly fast hydraulic process.

The language of other mammals

If you have pets at home, you may have already noticed that your dog or cat has powerful, high-speed tongues that can bend when drinking liquids. The movement of the tongue makes them able to carry huge amounts of water to the mouth.

But you have surely noticed that when animals try to drink water, they spill large amounts of liquid back into the bowl or across the floor. According to Harper, this does not happen with bats.

Nectar drops are caught between the papillae, which makes bats ingest much more fluid than other animals. For the researcher, this is an evolutionary advantage, which would explain why it appears only in one species.

Technologies inspired by bat languages

Harper doesn't want to let his studies die around. For her, the system behind bat tongues can help a lot in medicine, serving as the basis for surgical devices that alter their structures hydraulically.

"A technology based on these languages ​​could be very useful for keeping blood vessels open during surgery or even keeping parts of the gut open, " she said. “Some surgeries such as angioplasty or gastric procedures rely on ancillary technologies made of metal and other rigid materials. I think it would be great if we could create a soft and flexible medical tool, something that could minimize damage to the blood vessels. ”