Another Halloween is upon us, and that means stories about animals that poke you full of holes and eat your insides!

But this year, instead of looking upon these vampires in revulsion, perhaps we can find a little common ground. Even our most-hated blood-suckers are plagued by creatures that thirst for blood.

“Blood-feeding is a lifestyle which has evolved independently in many groups of animals,” says Tommy Leung, a parasitologist at the University of New England in Australia. Called hematophagy, eating blood is common, he notes, and “found in over fourteen thousand living animal species, even in groups that most people might not have suspected.”

Only three out of the nearly 1,400 known bat species are vampires. But did you know that