Bat Week officially begins today. It’s the one week where Earth’s only winged mammals get top billing. Often associated with disease, vampires , and other generally unpleasant things, bats are actually important pollinators and play critical roles in our ecosystem.

“They’re just so cool and so interesting. During first forays into bat studies, it was just one question after another,” Rachel Page , an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, tells Popular Science . “The more I sort of scratched the surface, the more interesting it became—which is the fun part.”

One reason bats are so interesting to scientists like Page is that they are surprisingly similar to humans. Here’s how.

Sharing food with friends

Sharing a meal with good company brings immense joy for us humans. For many vampire bat species (subfamily Desmodontinae), sharing food is a matter of survival . They survive exclusively on blood and can only go about two nights without a blood meal before they die.…