Word: batted
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After examining the two, Flores discovered both had been bitten on their toes; the clean incisions and the profuse bleeding were telltale signs of a vampire bat attack. The vampire's bite is quick and razor sharp, so the sleeping victim doesn't feel the incision; and the animal's saliva contains a strong anticoagulating agent that leaves the victim bleeding for hours after the bite...
Flores, who was bitten last year, thought her town's vampire problem had been solved when government vampire hunters wiped out a bat colony in 2008. But once again, this sleepy town is being haunted by the winged menaces...
While biological warfare might seem an extreme measure to some animal-protection advocates, international bat expert Merlin Tuttle, founder of Bat Conservation International, says that's the best way to handle vampires. The problem, Tuttle says, is when people - motivated by fear, ignorance or both - target all bats for extermination by dynamiting caves, which causes enormous environmental damage and often kills thousand of beneficial bats that eat insects, pollinate flowers and even disperse seeds as part of natural reforestation. Blood feeders, on the other hand, are extremely rare - only three out of 1,100 species of bat are vampires...
Confusion about bats is understandable, considering the scientists who named them were equally confused. According to vampire-bat expert Bill Schutt, a zoologist and author of the book Dark Banquet, about 10 species of bats were erroneously named "vampires," while the true blood feeders were given more innocuous-sounding Latin names. "Bats [with scientific names that include] Vampyrum, Vampyrops, Vampyrina, Vampyressa, Vampyriscus and Vampyrodes aren't sanguivores [blood feeders], while Desmodus, Diaemus and Diphylla are true vampires," he says...
...when people act on their ignorance and kill beneficial bats, they are really putting themselves at even greater risk from the real blood-feeding terrors of the night: mosquitoes. Many more people die each year from mosquito-born diseases than from bat-transmitted rabies. And as someone who's already had dengue fever, I'm much more afraid of getting bit by mosquitoes than vampires...