SCIENCE LAB. SCREAMS : VAMPIRE BAT WORKOUT [1]

SURE they want your blood. But they have a thirst for exercise too. With gargoyle-like faces, razor-sharp fangs and a thirst for blood, vampire bats are nightmare fuel. And that's before they start running.

Unlike most bats, which largely avoid the ground, vampire bats are capable, runners using their folded wings to propel them forward.

This helps them stalk livestock - and occasionally unsuspecting humans.

These pursuits of prey can drain a lot of energy. And the palm-size bats' blood-based diet is lean on carbohydrates and fats, which most mammals rely on to generate energy.

Because vampire bats can't load up on carbs, they seem to rely on the proteins in the blood they slurp up

In a paper published in the journal Biology Letters, Kenneth Welch, a biologist at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and his colleagues demonstrated that vampire bats rapidly generate energy by burning protein-building amino acids. [ Jack Tamisiea ]