Transylvania's Dracula is getting competition from the Dyphilla ecaudata bat in northeastern Brazil, one of the world's three species of vampire bat.
Brazilian researchers have discovered that this small mammal has begun feeding on human blood due to the "degradation" of the local ecosystem caused by man.
Research leader Enrico Bernard of the Federal University of Pernambuco Zoology Department says the species lives in a cave in northeastern Brazil's Catimbau National Park, some 300 km from Recife, the regional capital.
The park, which is calculated to have some 2,000 caves, has a very dry climate and Bernard's team has been monitoring one of the caves in the region for the past three years where there is a colony of bats living near the entrance.
After analysing the excrement of the bat colony, researchers were surprised to find that - in addition to chicken DNA - there was also human DNA in a few of the samples, indicating that the bats were feeding on human blood.
Bernard said that the land of the people living in the park area was not "expropriated" when it was declared a national park in 2002, and people still live there in "rickety homes with little protection" from the elements - or bats on their nightly forays.
Given the lack of big birds in the region, the traditional sources of their blood meals, the bats have had to resort to feeding on human blood at times.
The normal amount of bird blood that the bats consume in a single "meal" on their night time flights is about a tablespoon, and they are primarily after the fat it contains. However, human blood is thicker and has a higher protein content.
Bernard says "there is no need for panic." However, if the bats are now resorting to human blood for their meals, this does pose a public health problem since they can carry rabies.
In 2005, Brazil registered its largest outbreak of rabies transmitted by bats in the northeastern state of Maranhao, with 20 people dying of the disease.
