Bats? I say "Yahoo!" not "Boo!"

Photo by John Abbott, used by permission

Halloween makes me shudder but it’s not the goblins, ghosts, and zombies thumping on my door. It’s the rubber bats on elastic strings with painted-red mouths agape and fangs bared.

The singing zoologist afraid of bats? Nope. It’s that I can’t stand the way SOME people use images of bats to creep folks out! In an effort to counter the season's bad bat PR, here are some bat FACTS  that might change your perspective. 

Bat fact #1: Bats are the second largest group of mammals. Of the 5,700 mammalian species, about 1,240 of them are bats--nearly 22%!  Rodents are the biggest group with nearly 2,300 species.

Bat fact #2: A bat’s wing amounts to a webbed hand with super-long finger bones.  Many bats can manuever better than birds and have specialized sensory cells in their wings that can feel when they’ve trapped an insect. 

Bat fact #3: Bats are divided into the fruit bats (usually bigger) and insectivorous bats (usually smaller). We have mostly the latter in the US but we do have some fruit bats in the deserts of the southwest.

Bat fact # 4: Fruits bats are thought to be primary pollinators and seed distributors in many tropical rainforests.  If we lose fruit bats, we’ll lose huge numbers of rainforest trees and other plants!

Bat fact # 5: The large flying fox (Pteropus vampyrus), from southeast Asie, boasts the greatest wingspan: nearly 5 feet!

Bat fact #6: San Antonio, Texas, is home to the world’s largest colony of bats: up to twenty million in the summer!  That’s also thought to be the largest colony of mammals anywhere in the world! While more famous, Austin’s Congress Avenue bats number “only” about one and a half-million. They're the largest urban colony of bats. 

Bat fact #7: Some bats can eat more than their own weight in bugs each night. Thus, the mass of bugs those 20 million bats in San Antonio consume would be equivalent to the weight of 93 elephants. Thanks, bats!

Bat fact #8: bats are NOT blind. Many do, however, depend primarily on their hearing to find their ways through the dark. Note, however, that most fruit bats do not echolocate; hence those big-eyed, fox-like faces. 

Bat fact #9: Bats will NOT get caught in your hair. Insectivorous bats navigate by echolocation and the system is so precise that they can easily detect even the poofiest of hairdos.  When a bat flies close to me I like to assume that it’s snagging a bug that was about to feast on ME!

Bat fact #10: You should NEVER handle a bat. Rabies is truly scary and bats, like all mammals, can carry the virus. Skunks and racoons actually carry the virus and transmit it to us more commonly than bats but, still, there’s a risk.

I once had a student show me a bat that they had found on the ground, put in a shoebox and passed around their kindergarten class! Fortunately, no one was harmed but, my goodness, this shows the importance of educating folks about wildlife!