Hairy bat tongue may lead to breakthroughs in medical technology

Scientists studying a tiny bat from Central and South America have found that the strange way it uses its tongue to lap up nectar may help us to design new medical technologies.

This new study looked at the Pallas's long-tongued bat and the way that they use their long tongue to get nectar from deep inside flowers. Since they are known for having the fastest metabolism of any known mammal, close to the speed of a hummingbird's, they need to visit numerous flowers during the night to feed. They can't hover outside the flower they feed from for very long, so they have evolved to have a special tongue to help with this. This tongue, which is about twice as long as their head, has special hairs at the tip that normally lie flat against the tongue. Just before it reaches the nectar, blood engorges the tip of the tongue, causing these hairs to become erect, turning the tip of the tongue into something like a mop.

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"They hover for just a few seconds over the flower corolla, and then they probe their tongue deep into the base of the flower tube and soak up nectar," said lead author Cally Harper, an ecology and evolutionary biology grad student at Brown University, in an interview with NPR.

"And then very close to when the tongue is maximally extended, these hairs become erect," she said in the interview. "And when that happens, a space is created between each of the rows of hairs on the tongue tip. And nectar is loaded onto each one of those spaces."

As Harper says in the video below, this discovery has the potential to help design new medical instruments for use in surgery.

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This is pretty amazing stuff. Even as we become more technologically advanced, scientists are looking more and more back to nature for inspiration on how to overcome challenges in fields like architecture, engineering and medicine. It doesn't seem like there's ever going to be a time (at least in the near future) when nature won't have something new to teach us.

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