Spider Bats

A Cave Spider Bat combing the dark caves for food to bring it's young

### Tips

If you see any long gooey strings in caves - there's a good chance there's Spider-Bats. Also - might want a bath.

## Other Information

### Behavior

Coast - Cautious and CarefulCave - Reckless and Aggresive

### Diet

Small to Large Creatures

Spider-Bats are horrible cave dwelling creatures who live mainly in Congerian coastline caves, near enough o the water to be able to feed on their favorite meal - crabs, lobster, and other various shellfish. The relatively harmless coast Spider-Bat gets a bad rap due to their cousins, the Deep Cave Spider-Bats.

## Description

### Basic Anatomy

Spider Bats resemble a mixture of the two creatures for which it is named. It has the body of a normal vampire bat, and has the long leathery wings of them. However, a Spider bat can have anywhere from one to four pairs of wings- thanks to it's ancestors octo-pedal DNA, as well as a large spider's abdomen replacing its rear. The creature stores its silk gland within this abdomen as well as it's lungs, heart, and digestive tract. Also scarily protruding from the creatures' sides is its eight long spider legs that hang limp beneath it when it flies.

The creature has eight eyes as well, although they only work in darkness. The creature also has echolocation to help protect it during thee day. However in deep caves or late at night the Spider-Bat combines it's darkvision and echolocation to become an apex predator. Most of the Spider-Bats who live closer to the surface in coastal caves are relatively small, the size of an average fruit bat. However, the deeper-dwelling cave spider-bats are usually bigger, as they must take down bigger prey than their coastal family.

### Feeding and Excretion

Spider-Bats have sharp teeth with which they attack bigger prey. A coastal spider won't dare attack any creature that is bigger than a cow, however the deep-dwelling cave variants attack anything with reckless abandon, hoping to procure themselves a meal or die trying. The cave spider-bat has venom in it's frontal fangs, and the type of venom can vary depending on which and how deep in the cave the bats are found. Generally speaking, the most common type of venom that the spider-bats have is a type of paralysis that if left untreated can cause organs to shut down.

Spider-bats eating method is quite strange however - it has a bats body and mouth but cannot digest solid food like a bat - making the spider-bat technically more spider than bat. Thus, the bat head will rip apart prey with it's sharp teeth and imbue them with acidic enzymes regurgitated from it's digestive tract. The devoured bits of prey are then held in a sort of second stomach in the bat's body. After the enzymes finish melting the creature, the liquid food is absorbed into feeding tubes which directs the liquid to the creature's other stomach, where the nutrients are taken from the meal. Any left over material dries up and is excreted through the anus as long dark violet stringy strands of goo.

### Silk Glands

The Spider-bats silk gland, like all spiders, is kept in it's abdomen. The creature does not make typical webs as other spiders, but rather it usually makes long suspension wires from it's web. Coastal spider-bats then comb the beach for crabs, clams, oysters, or any other edible delights it can find. If the creature can find a shellfish it will return to it's wire, usually a minimum of thirty feet off the ground, and drop it's prey to smash it's shell. The creature sleeps suspended upside down from this wire, and if the spinner is a mother the children will usually be suspended from the same wire, huddling as close to mother as possible.

Cave Spider-Bats make much more malicious use of their silk. A Spider-Bat nest will often have many types of traps set in place by Spider-Bats. One such trick is the creature's 'sticky floor' technique. A hunter bat will cover a five foot area with silk, making it extremely sticky and difficult to scape from, even for creatures as strong as orcs. Other tricks include webs around tight corners, suddenly shooting a large strand of silk at a target unexpectedly to ensnare them before they know what's happening, and waiting for hours on end suspended above the ground - waiting for prey to pass so it can silently lower itself down with webbing and inject it with paralysis poison for an easy meal.

Other then hunting and nesting webbing has a wide variety of uses for the creatures. Often the eggs of these creatures will be hidden somewhere high up, and secured using webbing - children will use their gland to make silken parachutes before their wings develop, and Cave spider-bats which make large nests in unoccupied caves use webbing to completely cover the heart of their nest, in which the young are usually kept and where most of the creatures go for rest after hunting.