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Oral vaccines could take advantage of these animals' grooming behavior; test immunizations make them glow under ultraviolet light.
There is only one kind of mammal that survives solely on blood; vampire bats. These flying, biting creatures are some of the most feared animals-so Daniel Streicker has his work cut out for him when he tries to convince people that they're worth saving. Streicker is an ecologist at the University of Glasgow who studies rabies in vampire bats, especially in South America. He's quick to point out some striking features of these bats: "They share blood with one another, they hop around with remarkable agility for a bat, and they are so socially tuned in that you almost think that they are curious about what we're doing when we catch them," he says. Other researchers in this field sometimes call bats "sky puppies," because they say the bats look like tiny, adorable puppies with wings.
Streicker's research has important public-health implications: According to the World Health Organization, tens of thousands of people die from rabies every year. In Africa and Asia most transmission to humans occurs through dog bites, but in the Americas, bats are the major source of human rabies. In the South American towns where Streicker works, children are bitten frequently by vampire bats (although...