I'm Flora Licksman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Happy Halloween.

On today's podcast, a monster mashup, an ode to three quintessentially creepy creatures, bats, spiders, and snakes.

They're kind of scary, too.

I mean, I'll grab one because I'm desperate to collect them for our research, but even I am a little bit reluctant.

Starting with a bat tail that will haunt your nightmares, particularly if you are a robin.

The greater noctool bat is Europe's largest bat species with a wingspan of about a foot

and a half. And here to tell us more is Dr. Elena Tena, national coordinator for the Spanish

Bat Atlas Project. Elena, welcome to Science Friday and tell us about this bat. Thank you very much, Laura.

Very nice to be here. I really like that we talk about bats here with Halloween because people

associated with fear and these kind of things, but they're not dangerous and they're impressive

and really exciting. And I think it's very cool to talk today about the

greater knockpool bat and what is doing. This is the first time we just recorded how the greater

knock full bat capture and eat this bus while they're migrating. And I think the results are really,

really impressive. Okay, let's just take a step back in case people missed it.

These are bats that eat migrating birds.

Exactly.

Like, they are main insectivores here in Spain and in Europe.

All the bats we have, they are insectivores.

But in the case of the greater noctal bats sometimes opportunistically it can eat some birds during

migration so first of all we knew that because we found some feathers on the poops of the bats

and the thing is that when we did the DNA of the pieces of the of the bats we realized that they

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