Can You Really Sleep Through a Vampire Bat Drinking Your Blood? | Smartest Year Ever (June 16, 2025)

Vampire bats don’t just live in horror stories—they’re real, they’re precise, and they might be the most unexpectedly polite bloodsuckers in the animal kingdom.

In this kickoff to Weird Animals Week, Gordy dives into one of the strangest mammals on Earth—a warm-blooded, heat-seeking crawler that walks, leaps, and drinks blood without waking its victim. From the Amazon jungle to modern medicine, this episode uncovers the biological marvels behind a creature that’s as unsettling as it is fascinating.

Why don’t their victims feel a thing? How can they drink blood for 40 minutes straight? And how did their saliva end up in stroke research labs? (draculin)

Stick around for some of the weirdest facts you’ll ever hear about a mammal that can run like a frog, share meals like a best friend, and maybe—just maybe—save your life one day.

Weird Animals Week runs all week long with a new strange creature every day. Subscribe so you don’t miss tomorrow’s.

Sources:

• Greenhall, A. M., & Schmidt, U. (1988). Natural History of Vampire Bats. CRC Press.
  

• Streicker, D. G., et al. (2012). Ecological and anthropogenic drivers of rabies exposure in vampire bats. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279(1742), 3384–3392. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.0538
  

• Park, Y., et al. (2019). Comparative genomics reveals insights into the evolution of vampire bat adaptations. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 3(4), 587–595. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0839-5
  

• Catania, K. C. (2015). Leaping vampire bats. Nature, 522(7556), 267–270. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14421
  

• Riskin, D. K., et al. (2006). Bats go head-under-heels: The biomechanics of jumping in the common vampire bat. Biology Letters, 2(3), 505–508. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2006.0508
  

• Galetti, M. (2004). The Lost City of Z. Excerpts referencing vampire bats in South America.

  
  

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