A numerical analysis of the effect of insect collecting: After finding a dead bat yesterday, I decided to play with some numbers to try to compare my effect on insect populations as an insect collector to that furry little guy. What I found was pretty surprising. A bat can consume 1,000 insects per hour (dang, theyre good!), and species that hibernate, like our Little Brown Myotis, are active for about 6 months, or 180 days. Assuming they actively feed for 5 hours per night (a conservative estimate), that means they consume about 900,000 insects per year. Bats generally live for more than 6 years, so most bats eat at least 5,400,000 insects throughout their lives. That means my insect collecting has amounted to 0.3% of the insect-eradicating power of one single bat. Now, here comes the sad part. White Nose Syndrome has killed an estimated 6,000,000 bats in the past decade here in North America! This disease was likely spread to North America by human activity, and our bats have no immunity to it. That means 32,400,000,000,000 insects that should have been bat food have been allowed to multiply unchecked because of these bat deaths. In order to eliminate these and bring insect populations back to where they should have been naturally, it would take 2,160,000,000 (2.1 billion) insect collectors each building a collection comparable in size to what I have. I guess the moral of the story is that insect population numbers are unfathomably huge. And bats are awesome at what they do. :)
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 21:39:46 +0000
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