Word: blood
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...jolted Maria Felix Flores from her sleep shortly after midnight on the muggy, tropical night of Feb. 22. She dashed into the adjoining room to find her adult son Carlos and his wife Maria Josefa sitting upright in bed with the lights on, panicked by the sight of their blood-drenched sheets. (Read "Could There be Real Monster Bats...
Their feet were sticky and warm with blood, but neither felt any pain and couldn't figure out the source of the gush. Flores, however, took one look at the messy scene and knew exactly what had happened: the vampires were back in her little Nicaraguan town. (See pictures of "90 Years of Vampires on the Screen...
Vampires normally feed on the blood of livestock. But when cattle populations are suddenly sold off or moved to greener pastures, the bats seek alternative sources of blood. So far, none of the human victims have tested positive for rabies. But the government isn't waiting for an outbreak to take action. On Tuesday, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry sent two of its seasoned vampire hunters to the community to catch the winged pests and wipe out their colony, discovered at the bottom of an abandoned 200-ft. well that no one ever thought...
...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, and all are found in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America...
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...