A study of vampire bats on a treadmill has revealed how they use blood for energy. Video

Canadian scientists have conducted experiments with vampire bats running on treadmills. This was done in order to understand how they use blood for energy. After all, they have a very unusual way of obtaining energy from protein due to their specialized diet.

The vampire bat is one of the few species of bats that can skillfully maneuver on the ground. The video shows one of them using its wings to run along a path at a speed of up to 30 meters per minute, sky.com reports.

The bat uses this ability to stealthily sneak up on sleeping prey such as cattle, pigs, and chickens before making an incision with its razor-sharp teeth.

Most mammals get most of their energy for movement from fat and stored sugar, but the three species of vampire bats feed on the blood they take from their victims, which is rich in protein but low in fat and sugar. Therefore, it is unclear how their metabolism works, as the amino acids that makeup proteins typically provide less than 10 percent of the animals' energy during exercise.

To find out more about their metabolism, Kenneth Welch and Giulia Rossi from the University of Toronto in Canada studied twenty-four vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) captured in Belize. The bats were fed cow's blood containing amino acids with labeled carbon atoms and then placed on a treadmill in a small box, New Scientist writes.

Scientists analyzed the carbon dioxide they exhaled on the treadmill. The ratio of CO2 to oxygen (respiratory exchange rate) remained the same at all speeds. This suggests that the bats' main source of energy was protein-rich blood, rather than the carbohydrate and fat stores that most other mammals prefer to use.

The researchers say that this shows how much metabolism can be shaped by a specialized diet since the diet of vampire bats is relatively low in carbohydrates and fats.

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