A prominent part of modern folklore about bats imagines them as the transformed bodies or souls of dead people who are not at peace and who prowl the night sucking the blood of human victims: Vampires! This folklore undoubtedly is responsible for much of the fear and dread that people have of bats, and those of us who engage in public education programs about bats invariably expect questions about vampires—the real bats, or otherwise.
Folklore linking bats and vampires is particularly intriguing because there are, in reality, three species of bats that subsist on the blood of birds and mammals. All three are restricted exclusively to New World tropical regions where their main prey are domestic livestock, primarily cattle, and fowl [BATS, Spring 1991, "Vampires: The Real Story"].
In the Neotropics, there are a variety of folktales about bats thirsty for blood. Folklore from the Arawak Indians of Guyana tell of bats sucking the blood of both men and their fowl. Guyanese Indians also maintain that oil from the seeds of a liana (called "bat's bane" by Creoles) will cause attacking bats to die. Legends of large bats that kill and, in some cases, eat people occur in folklore throughout much of South America, as well as from the Mayas of Mesoamerica. Effigies on pre-Columbian ceremonial knives and other artifacts also show that bats were closely associated with ritual sacrifices, usually through decapitation, in which human blood was offered to appease and nourish the gods [BATS, Spring 1991, "Bats and South American Folklore"]. The real vampire bats of the New World tropics may have inspired these myths and the pre-Columbian association of bats with blood sacrifice. However, the bat-vampire lore that is so prominent in modern books, pulp magazines, and movies* is not based on myths from South and Central America.Dracula, Barnabas, Vampirella, and the others were born in vampire traditions from Europe.
The existence of blood-eating bats in the New World tropics was first made known to Europeans by the explorer F. De Oviedo y Valdes with the publication of his Sumario de la natural historio de las Indias in 1526. Shortly afterward, in 1565, M.G. Benzoni (La historio del mundo nuevo) provided a graphic description of his toes being bitten by bats while he was asleep in what is present-day Costa Rica (vampire bats were not formally described in the scientific literature until 1810).
Vampire bats feed only on blood, a fact that sets the human imagination racing. The three species are medium-seized, with adult wingspans of 320 to 350 mm and weights of about 40 grams. While they are larger than most of the bats of the temperate zones of the world, vampire bats are much smaller than Gigantic Flying Foxes, which weigh in at 1,500 g. Horror movie depictions of vampire bats often use flying foxes as models because larger bats are easier to photograph. This contributes to the public perception of vampire bats as large, terrifying animals. But animals that feed on blood, whether they are insects, leeches or bats, tend to be small because blood is a precioous commodity and hard to obtain in large amounts.
