Yes, several bat species actively hunt and eat scorpions. The most well-known scorpion-eating bat is the pallid bat, found across western North America, but species in Africa and the Middle East also rely heavily on scorpions as a food source. What makes these bats remarkable isn’t just their taste for venomous prey, but the biological adaptations that let them shrug off stings that would be dangerous or fatal to other small mammals.
The Pallid Bat: North America’s Scorpion Hunter
The pallid bat (Antrozous pallidus) is a medium-large bat that lives in arid regions from southern British Columbia through Montana and down to central Mexico. Its range stretches across the American West, from California and Baja California east through Texas, Oklahoma, and southern Kansas. Sometimes called the desert bat, it favors rocky outcrops in desert habitats but also turns up in oak and pine forests and open farmland.
Scorpions are a regular part of the pallid bat’s diet, alongside crickets, centipedes, cicadas, lizards, and even the occasional rodent or cactus fruit. What sets this bat apart from most others is how it hunts. Rather than chasing insects through the air using echolocation, the pallid bat is a ground gleaner. It uses a foraging tactic called passive listening: its exceptionally large ears are evolutionarily tuned to detect specific sound frequencies produced by prey walking on the ground. The bat listens from a perch or while in low flight, pinpoints the sound of a scorpion moving across sand or rock, then swoops down to grab it.
How Pallid Bats Survive Scorpion Stings
The pallid bat regularly takes on the Arizona bark scorpion, the most venomous scorpion species in North America. For a mouse of similar size, a sting from this scorpion can be lethal. Researchers tested this directly by injecting pallid bats with bark scorpion venom at the dose that kills 50% of mice (1.5 mg/kg). It had no effect on bat behavior. Even at nearly seven times that concentration (10 mg/kg), three out of four bats showed zero reaction.
The mechanism behind this resistance is still not fully understood, but the evidence points toward changes in the bat’s nerve cells. Scorpion venom works primarily by hijacking sodium channels, the tiny gateways in nerve cells that transmit pain and other signals. When researchers sequenced the pallid bat’s nerve cell genes, they found amino acid substitutions in those sodium channels that may reduce the venom’s ability to latch on and cause damage. These substitutions showed signs of positive selection, meaning evolution has actively favored them in scorpion-hunting bats.
Interestingly, the pallid bat’s resistance works differently from the only other well-studied venom-resistant mammal, the grasshopper mouse. That mouse has a specific mutation that blocks the bark scorpion’s venom from triggering pain signals. The pallid bat lacks that same mutation entirely, suggesting it evolved its own independent solution to the same problem. Researchers also tested whether something in the bat’s blood neutralizes venom before it reaches nerve cells. It doesn’t. Venom incubated with pallid bat blood serum remained just as potent when injected into mice, ruling out a blood-based defense.
Scorpion-Eating Bats Outside North America
The pallid bat isn’t the only species with a scorpion habit. In Africa, the Egyptian slit-faced bat (Nycteris thebaica) is an opportunistic predator that eats scorpions as a major portion of its diet when they’re available. This bat uses a different hunting strategy: it hangs upside down from a tree, surveys the surrounding area, then drops down to snatch prey from the ground, walls, or rocks. It also catches insects in flight, making it more of a generalist than the pallid bat.
The desert long-eared bat (Otonycteris hemprichii), which lives across the arid and semi-arid regions of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and as far east as Pakistan, may be the most scorpion-dependent bat of all. Scorpions can make up as much as 70 percent of this bat’s diet. Unlike the pallid bat, the desert long-eared bat uses a quiet form of echolocation sometimes described as “whispering” to locate ground-dwelling prey, combining that with passive gleaning to find scorpions, beetles, crickets, and cockroaches near ground level. It roosts in rocky crevices or occasionally in buildings.
Why Scorpions Are Worth the Risk
Scorpions are a high-value meal for a desert bat. They’re large, protein-rich, and abundant in arid environments where other food sources can be scarce. For a bat that has evolved resistance to venom, scorpions represent a food source with very little competition. Most other predators of similar size avoid them.
This niche specialization also helps explain the pallid bat’s unusual anatomy. Its ears are proportionally among the largest of any North American bat, not for echolocation but for picking up the faint rustling of arthropod legs on desert ground. Its wing shape supports slow, maneuverable flight close to the surface rather than the fast aerial pursuit used by insect-hawking species. Everything about the pallid bat’s body reflects a predator built to land on the ground, grab something dangerous, and fly away with it.
The relationship between bats and scorpions is a striking example of predator-prey evolution. In at least two lineages on different continents, bats have independently developed the ability to eat one of the most well-defended invertebrates on Earth, each arriving at the solution through different sensory and physiological adaptations.