 |
| Photo by John Abbott, used by permission |
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!
