Vampires Plague Nicaragua!
Spunky the Wonder Toad
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.
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.
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.
"The vampires are dangerous. Of course we are scared," says her neighbor
Alberdina del Carmen Reyes, whose rustic wood-plank shanty is filled with
gaps big enough for the flying mammals to sneak through during the night.
Reyes' 5-year-old granddaughter was attacked in her sleep several weeks
ago and awoke to a similarly gory scene in her bed. "The government tells
us to cover our beds with mosquito nets at night," says Reyes, "but we
don't have the money to buy them." Many of the impoverished families in
this countryside community of Llano Grande 2, Masaya, have similar vampire
tales. The government reports that more than 70 people here have been
bitten by vampires in the past year.
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 to cap.
Nicaraguan animal veterinarians Jose Amador and Carlos Ivan Iglesias don't
exactly fit the Hollywood role of the dashing Van Helsing, but their
arrival in the village was treated like a celebrity event. As the two men
set up their capture nets around the well, local residents greeted them
with gifts of bread, plates of food, coffee and a liter of some
unrecognizable brand of soda. As the town folk retreated to their homes,
dusk gave way to night and only the outlines of the wind-blown palm trees
could be seen swaying against the starry sky of the moonless night. Amador
and Iglesias, whom I had been talking to moments earlier in the dark, were
suddenly snoring in their hammocks. I sat in the back of pickup truck
trying not to smell like vampire bait and hoping I wasn't in charge of the
hunt.
"We got one!" Iglesias yelled 20 minutes later, before I even realized he
was out of his hammock and inspecting the perimeter net. In an instant,
Amador was at his side, and the two men
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
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.
But 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.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1882094,00.html
Spunky the Wonder Toad
>untangled the aggressive baby vampire from the net, grabbing it carefully
as it squealed and hissed madly, trying to bite its handlers through their
gloves. The veterinarians applied a poisonous gel to the body of the
captured vampire and released it, allowing the animal to return to its
roost, where the other bats - up to dozens in the colony - would dutifully
lick it clean, killing themselves in the process.
>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,
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.
>
>But 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.
>
>http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1882094,00.html
Villages infested with vampire bats are one thing. But Nicaragua has its
own folklore of blood-sucking monsters. From tales of the infamous
chupacabras - the mythical alien, kangaroo, batdog that feeds on the blood
of goats and chickens - to the lesser-known comelenguas, an unseen beast
that feeds on the tongues of sleeping cattle, most Nicaraguan farmers can
hold their own when it comes to telling vampire stories around a campfire.
But, perhaps just like The X-Files, there could be an element of truth to
some of the legends.
In 2002, when the chupacabras was supposedly terrorizing a rural farming
community outside the colonial city of Leon, a former government vampire
hunter told the local press that the real blood-sucking culprit was a
giant vampire bat with a 5-ft wingspan, which he claims to have once
caught in the northern mountains of Nicaragua. Bat experts and other
vampire hunters insist there's no way a vampire could grow that big, but
zoologist Bill Schutt says the hunter could have caught the Vampyrum
spectrum, a monstrous carnivorous bat found in Nicaragua. The Vampyrum
spectrum is an extremely rare predator with fierce teeth and a three-foot
wing span. But, Schutt notes, it's not a real blood feeder, despite its
name.
Still, there was once a true giant vampire bat and some experts think that
creature of the late Pleistocene, the Desmodus draculae, may still be
alive today in some remote corner of the world. Nicaragua perhaps?
Unlikely, Schutt says, but not impossible. "I'd jump up and down if one
were discovered today," Schutt said. The farmers of Nicaragua, however,
may not be as happy
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1882097,00.html