Carollia bat eating Piper fruit

Uploaded on Sep 21, 2011
This is a nice close-up showing how Carollia perspicillata feeds on Piper fruits. What the bat is eating is actually an infructescence consisting of thousands of individual fruits of Piper sancti-felicis. The bats eat the fruits off of the central rachis as if it were corn-on-the-cob, yum!

• Carollia bat eating Piper fruit

• Carollia bats in flight cage

Uploaded on Sep 21, 2011
This is Carollia perspicillata eating fruits of Piper sancti-felicis in a behavioral experiment designed to test the effects of fruit secondary compounds on bat feeding preferences. The video shows nicely the use of infrared tape to identify individual bats. It's an easy temporary marking that will last several days in the flight cage but can be removed after the experiments and prior to releasing the bats.