Vampire bats rapidly fuel running with essential or non-essential amino acids from a blood meal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In most mammals, running is fuelled by oxidization of endogenous carbohydrates and lipids while amino acids contribute little (< 5–10%). Common vampire bats ( Desmodus rotundus ), however, specialize on a unique, protein-rich blood diet. Therefore, we hypothesized that (i) vampire bats would rapidly begin utilizing dietary amino acids to support running metabolism, and (ii) that relative reliance on essential and non-essential amino acids would be similar. We fed bats cow’s blood enriched either with isotopically labelled glycine (non-essential amino acid) or leucine (essential amino acid). Bats were exercised at speeds of 10, 20 and 30 m min −1 on a respirometry treadmill, allowing us to assess metabolic rate (i.e. O 2 consumption and CO 2 production) and track the oxidation of labelled amino acids in exhaled CO 2 . Vampire bats oxidized amino acids as their primary fuel as indicated by a respiratory exchange ratio (RER = ratio of CO 2 production to O 2 consumption rates) of approximately 0.8–0.9 at all speeds, with the labelled meal accounting for as much as 60% of oxidized fuels at peak usage. Similar oxidation rates indicated bats did not discriminate between essential and non-essential amino acid use. These findings reiterate how strongly metabolism can be shaped by a specialized diet.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".