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Some bats use their hairy tongues to slurp up nectar from flowers, and now we know why they’re so good at drinking. The spacing of their tongue hairs has evolved to be almost exactly optimal for sucking up as much nectar as possible.
To figure out how the hair-like protuberances on a bat’s tongue help it drink, Alice Nasto at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her colleagues molded rubbery surfaces with differently-spaced nubs on them, and dipped the model tongues into a viscous oil.
As …