‘Vampirous’ insects found in Laguna

MANILA, Philippines - Bats, in popular culture, are often associated with vampires due to the penchant of some species – three, to be exact – to feed on blood of other animals.

But in Laguna, scientists from the University of the Philippines-Los Baños (UPLB) have discovered something unusual: the presence of several species of “vampirous” insects feeding on bat blood.

“Bat flies suck blood from bats for their meals, so we call them bat ‘vampires’,” UPLB Museum of Natural History research associate James Alvarez said.

“These bloodsuckers are seldom collected and studied,” he added.

Alvarez – along with Museum curators Ireneo Lit Jr. and Phillip Alviola – recently published a new checklist of bat fly species from the Philippines with the known distribution and bat host species.

“We updated the last checklist because during our 2011 bat survey in Mt. Makiling, we observed quite a number of bat fly species parasitizing on collected bats,” said Alvarez in an article released in the museum’s website.

He noted the discovery of one bat fly species, previously found only in Mindanao, in Mt. Makiling.

“The new host and distribution records update the checklist of 20 species of nycteribiid bat flies which have been recorded in the Philippines,” said Alvarez.

Disease management

UPLB researchers noted the importance of looking into the presence of bat flies in a certain area as it may play a role in the future management of diseases that could be transmitted from animals to humans.

“We have to look at bat flies more seriously because they feed on hosts which are known to carry diverse and virulent disease-causing pathogens,” Alvarez said.

He stressed, however, that there is no reason to panic as “incidence of bat bites are very rare, even rarer than the incidence of people making contact with bats.”

Alviola, who serves as the museum’s curator for non-volant mammals, said bats are major reservoirs of zoonotic viruses worldwide, including those that cause respiratory syndromes, hemorrhagic fever, rabies and other deadly illnesses.

He said that the number of emerging and re-emerging bat-borne diseases globally has increased in the past years and this has raised concerns on public health.

“There is a potential health risk when a human is bit by a bat,” he said.