Some people believe that if they bite you they turn you into a vampire, well that isn’t true except the fact that they do actually suck blood.In truth there are only 3 species in central and south america that feed only on blood and none in north america. Vampire bats have a wingspan of only 8 inches and are the size of an adult’s thumb which isn’t that big. Did you know that the common vampire bat also has specialized thermoreceptors on its nose, which help it find where the veins of animals are and if they are close enough to the surface of the skin. If people didn’t know about their gory diet no one would really care about this small critter, they would think it was just another bat. Vampire bats do not suck the blood of humans although they do suck the blood from cattle, horses, pigs and large birds. They don’t actually use their teeth to suck the blood from their supposed victims, they just use their teeth to cut them open so they can lap up the blood. When they cut open the animal the are choosing to feed off of they spit into the cut so it numbs the animals skin and makes it so the blood doesn’t clot so they can drink til they’re full. Vampire bats have a very useful way of finding prey, it’s called echolocation. They use echolocation to find prey and to navigate. Vampire bats have been miss represented because of all the horror films that they’ve been in. They are actually quite harmless and will avoid you unless you are threatening their pups, which are baby bats, and if you do that they’ll probably just scare you away by flying at you and hissing. So do not think badly of vampire bats because their saliva is better than any known medicine for blood clotting so these little bats may soon be able to prevent heart attacks and strokes which we humans have yet to be able to do even with all our advanced technology.