Personally, I’d rather not be bitten by Hipposideros diadema (photo Tigga Kingston)

This was the title Julie and I did not use in the outreach promoting her paper looking at bite force in 35 species of Malaysian bats (we talked about dogs instead). If you said Hipposideros diadema,  you really need to read the paper, and if you said the Kerivoula you probably intuitively got the main finding of the paper, that how hard a bat bites scales with size. However, the relationships between size and bite force differ across families and mechanical advantage plays a role independent of size. There is a very nice general public summary that Julie put together here (scroll down until you see Julie with a Cheiromeles :-))

For those interested in the use of collections for ecological research, the paper provides regression equations for the major families (Rhinolophidae, Hipposideridae, Vespertilionidae) that can be used to estimate bite force from skull parameters and even field measures (body mass and forearm length).

Juliana Senawi, Daniela Schmieder, Bjorn Siemers and Tigga Kingston (2015). Beyond size – morphological predictors of bite force in a diverse insectivorous bat assemblage from Malaysia. Functional Ecology doi: 10.1111/1365-2435.12447

You can email Julie or myself for a pdf.