Weird Animal Wednesday...Bats! Batman always seemed like he didnt want many friends. What a shame because we should all be friends with bats. If youre unsure maybe these top 10 reasons to have web-fingered friends will change your mind! After reading through let us know if weve convinced you. The $3 billion dollar comment was the one that did it for me! “How do I Like thee. Let me count the ways.” 1. Bats eat insects like beetles, fruit flies, mosquitoes, mayflies, stink bugs, and moths (which were once hungry caterpillars). Humans classify these insects as “nuisances” at best; they are also disease vectors and threats to agriculture. Economic estimates put bats’ services as worth at least 3 billion dollars in yearly agricultural savings because they decrease the need for pesticides and for our time to apply those pesticides. The savings in reduced mosquito sprays haven’t been quantified, but consider that the bat can eat its body weight in those darned insects that can make our time outdoors pretty awful. 2. Bats are indicator species that reflect the general health of insect populations. 3. Bats that eat fruits and are responsible for spreading species such as mangos, wild bananas, dates, and figs over broad geographical areas. This function is critical in tropical areas in Asia and South America, where non-cultivated fruits are important to locals’ diets. 4. Bats also pollinate fruit-bearing plants, usually by drinking nectar from flowers adapted to attract and accommodate the bat’s visit. In the southwest, the Brazilian free-tailed bat provides a special service for tequila drinkers. The agave plant, source of this intoxicating beverage, has traditionally enjoyed visits by these bats which incidentally pollinate its flowers. But as tequila production scales up, growers are dispensing with pollination, harvesting the plant before it blooms, and reproducing agave by cloning. If the bat could speak, it might ask you to drink only organic tequila or tequila harvested after the agave’s reproductive cycle. 5. Bats are the only mammals that fly. “Flying” squirrels just glide; so much for Rocky, the Flying Squirrel. 6. They use their webbed hands to fly, folding the wings on the upswing, and unfurling them on the downswing. 7. Bats are not blind. They rely on other senses like smell and echolocation to find food and avoid predators in the dark. Nectar bats locate their favorite flowers by “mapping” that flower’s outline – cup-shaped, tubular, or protruding stamens. The Virgin Flower from Belize, Mucuna holtonii, actually changes shape after a bat imbibes its nectar. Subsequent bats shun the non-virginal shaped flowers in favor of a virginal one, because a virgin flower has more nectar. This adaptation provides for the largest number of flowers to be pollinated. 8. Some nectar-feeding bats have “hairy” tongues that swell when unfurled from their rostrum. These expandable “hairs” allow them to “mop up” nectar more efficiently – sort of like cats’ tongues on steroids. In fact, there are cases of flowers that can be pollinated by no other animal except a specific species of bat whose morphology allows it to access the desired nectar. 9. Bats can sing. In the case of the Brazilian free-tailed bat, these songs can approximate real language in their composition, with varied but consistent patterns used for socially specific contexts like mating, warning, and echolocation. 10. Many bat species are social, nesting together year after year. Some socializations are complex: colonies might assemble as all-male or all-female, then “meet up” when mating season rolls around. In this context bats do have “friends”. Some even find “true love” and mate for life. floridabats.org ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2766192/ ngm.nationalgeographic/2010/12/bat-crash/quammen-text wired/2012/10/halloween-bat-gallery wired/2011/04/bat-value/ pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1222726110.full.pdf+html bats.org.uk/pages/why_bats_matter.html edis.ifas.ufl.edu/uw203 youtu.be/QQjzikH7z_Y
Posted on: Wed, 21 May 2014 20:45:01 +0000
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