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posted by martyb on Thursday October 19 2017, @10:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the type-O+ dept.

An article in Science News examines some of the challenges inherent in feeding on blood:

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.

Zaspel, however, thought she was outside the territory where she might encounter a vampire species. She had caught C. thalictri, widely known from Switzerland and France eastward into Japan as a strict fruitarian.

Before capping the vial with the moth, "I just for no good reason stuck my thumb in there to see what it would do," Zaspel says. "It pierced my thumb and started feeding on me."

Make that eight-plus vampires. Zaspel, an entomologist now at the Milwaukee Public Museum, is still puzzling over the genetics of the moths at the two Russian field sites she visited in 2006. Males there will bite a researcher's thumb if offered, yet genetic testing so far shows the moths are part of a vast, otherwise mild-mannered species.

Not just moths, but mosquitoes, ticks, bed bugs, and bats, too.


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:26PM (#584846)

    those aren't ducks, those are bats!

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