Bats: 10 Essential Bat Facts, Plus Photo Gallery!
Bat fact 4: Vampire bats do not suck blood; they simply lap it up like a dog or cat drinking water.
Vampire bats feed almost exclusively on blood, mainly from cattle, horses, and wild mammals. To access its food, a vampire bat uses its teeth to pierce the skin of an animal while it sleeps and consumes just two tablespoons of blood. Vampire bats rarely bite humans, although a blood anticoagulant found in vampire bat saliva is being tested to help treat stroke victims.
Pictured: Vampire bat
This is actually not true. Recent studies have shown that bats belong to a clade called Laurasiatheria, that includes moles, shrews, cetaceans, ungulates, carnivores, pangolines, etc. Primates, on the other hand, are more closely related to lagomorphs and rodents than to bats. A good review of the higher-level phylogeny of mammals is “The new framework for understanding placental mammal evolution” BioEssays (2009) 31: 853-864
I didn’t realize bats pollinated! This is especially good since I had heard that honeybees are disappearing (I guess due to insecticides or other reasons – I’m not sure why).