From a collaborative work done at the Munich Centre, Max Planck Research Centre for Ornithology and the University of Gautemala comes amazing new research observations that bats see the world in UV light. It's a different universe altogether. Researchers York Winter and his team have published their findings in a recent issue of the prestigious science journal Nature.

Their observations were made on bats from Central and South America who live on nectar from flowers. The flowers that the bats visit capture UV light and reflect strong UV radiation at night.

Bats have small eyes - less than 2 mm and their eye lenses lack a UV filter. Normally UV light damages the eyes but because of their very small size, the eyes of bats remain unaffected.

The flower-visiting bats use their rod receptor for UV-perception and catch the UV-photons with the so-called beta-band of their photoreceptor. In bats a single photoreceptor is responsible for the perception of light radiation over the whole wavelength spectrum from about 310 nm to 600 nanometres.

Reference:
York Winter, Jorge López & Otto von Helversen Ultraviolet vision in a bat. Nature, vol. 425, 9. October 2003 p. 612-614