Since today is Halloween I decided to blog in the spirit of this spooky day! We have all heard the stories about Vampires. Dark, mysterious creatures who walk the earth at night, sucking the blood out of humans. The inspiration for these blood-sucking creatures came from one of today’s most popular species, the vampire bat. It is the one of the most common bat’s known and lives on mammalian blood alone. It is because of the genetic changes on these bats that allow them to evolve and live on a diet of pure blood.
Like humans, vampire bats have a plasminogen activator, which is a protein that breakdowns blood clots, activated in their saliva. This allows the bat’s to drink the blood without it clotting up. However, David Liberies, a geneticist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, has discovered modifications in these bats plasminogen activator since they split off from fruit and insect eating bats.
David and his team of researchers did a study on three species of bats who all three are on a blood only diet. One of the species, the hairy-legged vampire bat which feeds on bird blood, PA (Plasminogen Activator) gene looks a lot like a species of bat that dose not feed on blood, but by activating the PA in the saliva could be enough of a change to blood flowing freely, David says. The two other bats that feed on livestock acquired mutations to prevent their PA proteins from causing the blood to clot.
The common vampire bat have also acquired several copies of the PA gene although David and he team are not sure why. Additional adaptations played an important role in the evolution of vampirism, says zoologist at Field Museum in Chicago, Bruce Patterson.
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