It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a rat-grabbing-bat!
For the first time, a brown rat has been caught on camera actively hunting bats. The never-before-seen footage shows the rat grabbing a snack at hibernation sites in northern Germany. While it’s undeniably impressive that rats can grab their supper mid-air, the new footage does not bode well for the bats. According to a study recently published in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation, rat predation may cause enough damage to significantly threaten local bat populations.
Brown rats are, in fact, the very same rats that scurry around New York City subway stations and drive tiny cars. Also called the Norway rat, these rodents are highly adaptive and excellent breeders. And wherever humans are, you can bet brown rats are living there, too. Despite their bad rap, rats are incredibly smart. They can think ahead, imagining solutions to problems, beat AI at recognizing hidden objects, and can even learn their own names. But their superior rodent brains can also make them excellent little hunters.
For this study, researchers set up thermal and infrared cameras to keep tabs on two bat hibernation sites in the towns of Segeberg and Lüneburg-Kalkberg, Germany. The two main species at the sites are the furry, short-eared Daubenton’s bat (Myotis daubentonii) and the lighter-colored Natterer’s bat (Myotis nattereri).
The team analyzed camera footage captured over several months between 2021 and 2024, during times when the bats were most active. The footage revealed a new apex predator in the brown rat. (We’re only mostly kidding.)
The researchers observed two distinct bat-hunting strategies. Some rats stood upright as they grabbed the unfortunate bats mid-air. Others closed in on the unsuspecting bats as they rested on the ground.
Capture and predation of a landed Daubenton’s bat by a brown rat. Video: Gloza-Rausch et al. (2025) Global Ecology and Conservation.
In Segeberg, the team captured 13 of these astonishing kills on camera. The researchers also catalogued a total of 52 rat-ravagged bat carcasses scattered across the cave. Similar findings were also documented in Lüneburg-Kalkberg.
While that might not seem like a ton of bats, the team calculated that even a small rat colony (roughly 15 rats) could kill upwards of seven percent of the roughly 30,000 bats that spend their winters in Segeberg. And that’s a problem—both for bats and for people.
“Management of invasive rodents at important bat hibernation sites supports biodiversity conservation,” the team wrote in the study. Managing these bat-murdering rats also, “reduces potential public health impacts as part of a One Health strategy (an approach that considers the health of humans, animals and the environment together).”
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