When it comes to creeps, ghouls, and monsters, few are as popular, scary, and sexy as vampires. Between books, movies, and even television shows, few horror creatures have been around as long and with as many different versions.
Some vampires can turn into bats or monsters, some are afraid of crosses, and some vampires even sparkle. One thing they all have in common, though, is their need to drink blood.
Spectacled flying foxes are often at the hospital. The smaller ones are brought out to the veranda in the morning to ensure that they get enough sun. There, they can just hang around and flap their wings while warming up.
This tube-nosed bat was born at the hospital after it's mother was rescued from a barbed wire fence. When mothers give birth at the hospital, both are kept until the baby starts to fly. They are then released back into the wild together.
Flying foxes are often some of the hospital's main patients. The hospital is trying to help the orphans of the thousands of flying foxes being killed by the government on Mauritius, an island about 4,000 miles away from Australia in the Indian Ocean.
The hospital has recycled fur coats so that the baby bats can snuggle up in them. The coats were donated by Snuggle Coats, a company that dissembles fur goods and sends them to animal groups at no charge for rehabilitation purposes.
A lot of bats that come to hospital are suffering from tick paralysis. This mom and baby pair got to snuggle before the mom was euthanized as a result of her sickness. The baby remained in the care of the hospital, where it grew perfectly well in the nursery.
The hospital has some bats that will never recover enough to be released back into the wild. This leaf-nosed bat, Diadem, has lost too much finger bone and membrane to survive on her own. She is now used as an educational bat for when tourists visit. Tickets are less than $20 to see these beautiful animals up close and help the cause.
So how much blood would a vampire really have to drink to stay undead? Well, Duke Harten at Dose.com actually did the math to figure it out.
First, if you assume a vampire needs the same amount of calories a regular human needs, then an average blood-sucker would require almost 3,000 calories a day to maintain its weight.
Human blood contains 900 calories per liter. Considering the human body has about 5 liters of blood in it, a vampire would need to completely drain one human each day to survive. Harten presented another method of calculating a vampire's daily blood intake derived from nature: The vampire bat.
Living in colonies of 100 bats, these bats can drink the blood of 25 cows per year.
Do some math and it turns out that a vampire-bat-person would need to drink 55 liters of blood per day. That's basically enough blood to drain all the members of Nickelback twice. It would come out to 4,015 people a year.
Either way you look at it, we sure are glad vampires aren't real.