Have you noticed the abundance of bats flying around town lately? Are they visiting you in your home? Although they can be quite a nuisance, bats are quite fascinating, they can also wreak havoc on your home and your sanity!
Bats make up a quarter of all mammals. Yep, you read that right. A quarter of all mammals are bats. There are more than 1,100 species of bats in the world. That’s a lot of bats! Bats are the only mammals capable of continued flight.
Reproduction
Gestation is 40 days – 6 months (bigger bats have longer gestation periods).
Litter size is mostly one pup. For their size, bats are the slowest reproducing mammals on earth. At birth, a pup weighs up to 25 percent of its mother’s body weight, which is like a human mother giving birth to a 31 pound baby! Offspring typically are cared for in maternity colonies, where females congregate to bear and raise the young. Male bats do not help to raise the pups.
Did You Know?
70% of bats consume insects, sharing a large part of natural pest control. A single little brown bat can eat up to 1,000 mosquitoes in a single hour. There are also fruit-eating bats; nectar-eating bats; carnivorous bats that prey on small mammals, birds, lizards and frogs; fish-eating bats, and perhaps most famously, the blood-sucking vampire bats of South America. Don’t worry, we are only surrounded by the little brown bat.
Echolocation
Some bats have evolved a highly sophisticated sense of hearing. They emit sounds that bounce off of objects in their path, sending echoes back to the bats. From these echoes, the bats can determine the size of objects, how far away they are, how fast they are traveling and even their texture, all in a split second.
Bats find shelter in caves, crevices, tree cavities and buildings. Some species are solitary while others form colonies of more than a million individuals.
The average bat will probably outlive your pet dog. Bats are one of the world’s longest-living mammals for their size, with life spans of almost 40 years. Considering that other small mammals live only two years or so, that’s impressive. More than 50 percent of bat species in the United States are either in severe decline or are listed as endangered. Industry, deforestation, pollution, and good old-fashioned killing have wiped out many bats and their habitats.
Fewer than 10 people in the last 50 years have contracted rabies from North American bats. Due to movies and television, bats are thought to be germ machines, bringing disease and toxins to innocent victims. Not true. Bats avoid people. If you are bitten by a bat, go to the doctor, but don’t start making funeral arrangements – you’ll probably be fine.
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Photo courtesy of Bat Busters
