Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 20.6% (64 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 4.2% (13 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 0%
• Hindsight Bias - 7.7% (24 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 0%
• Framing Effect - 9.7% (30 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 0%
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 5.5% (17 hits)

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A discovery about this bat’s diet was hiding in a Renaissance painting

A discovery about this bat’s diet was hiding in a Renaissance painting

Last fall, scientists documented the greater noctule bat snatching songbirds out of thealr for a snack.

But while this was a finding relatively new to science, a Renaissance artist knew enough to include the behavior in one of his paintings.

“Air,” a 1611 allegorical painting by the Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the Elder, depicts more than 60 different airborne species.

One of them, in the upper right, appears to be a greater noctule bat (Nyctalus lasiopterus), researchers report June 29 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

And in its tiny, oil-painted jaws, it holds a songbird.

While scientists only directly documented bats snatching birds in the past year, researchers have been publishing clues suggesting that the animals counted avians in their diets since the early 2000s, says Ilias Foskolos, a bioacoustician at Aarhus University in Denmark who was not involved in the work.

Foskolos has recorded sounds of greater noctule bats catching, dismembering and eating songbirds.

“It’s an intense event, let’s put it that way,” he says.

The birdnapping takes place at high altitudes, Foskolos says.

But evidence falls to earth eventually.

Researchers have identified telltale feathers from up to 31 songbird species in the excrement of greater noctule bats.

Brueghel was a native of Brussels, but visited Italy, where the greater noctule bat lives and hunts.

Even at the time people “probably knew that they go for birds from their droppings,” Foskolos says.

The finding shows that art “can be a valuable source of natural history information,” Romero-Vidal says.

While “artists often exercised considerable artistic license,” he says — the Greek muse Urania has yet to be spotted, with bats or otherwise — “they can still preserve valuable observations about the natural world.”