60 Awesome Amazing Facts About Bat | Amazing Facts 4U
- The scientific name for bats, Chiroptera, is from the Greek cheir = hand + pteron = wing, or “hand wing.”
- Bats live on every continent except Antarctica. They are found almost as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far south as Argentina and the southern-most tip of South Africa.
- A bat is the only mammal that flies. Bats make up about twenty percent of all mammals.
- There are amazing 1100 different bat species. Most bats are brown and black, but a few are colorful shades of orange or red.
- In the United States, there are about 45 kinds of bats; the three most common are the big brown bat, little brown bat, and Mexican free-tailed bat.
- More than half of all bats in the U.S. are endangered. Both loss of habitat and a mysterious illness called “White-Nose Syndrome” are major reasons for the decline.
- There are two main groups of bats: larger fruit-eating megabats and microbats.
- Megabats are also known as fruit bats or flying foxes and typically live in warm climates. They use their large eyes to find food in the dark and they tend to roost in trees rather than in caves, crevices, or old buildings.
- Microbats are generally much smaller and use echolocation to find insects. Microbats are typically found all over the world.
- There are several differences between megabats and microbats. The megabat has two claws, one on its thumb and one on its next finger. Microbats only have one claw, on the thumb. Megabats have better developed brains than microbats and they also rely more on their senses (sight and smell) and less on echolocation.
- Scientists believe that bats first appeared 65-100 million years ago along with dinosaurs. Megabats may be more closely related to primates (monkeys, apes, and humans) than they are to other microbats.
- Approximately 70% of bats eat insects. The rest are frugivores, or fruit eaters.
- Bat wings are made from finger bones covered by thin layers of skin. The wing membranes of a bat make up about 95% of its body surface area. A bat’s wing membrane helps the bat regulate body temperature, blood pressure, water balance, and gas exchange.
- The world’s largest bat is the giant golden-crowned flying fox, a rare fruit bat living on islands in the South Pacific. It is facing extinction due to hunting . It has a wingspan of 5 to 6 feet (1.5 to 1.8 m).
- Amazingly the world’s smallest bat is the bumble bee bat of Thailand, which is smaller than a thumbnail and weighs less than a penny. It may be the smallest existing mammal.
- In Southeast Asia, small club-footed bats roost inside bamboo stalks. To reach their home, the bats squeeze into an opening as small as 0.4 inches about the width of a fingernail.
- A group of bats is called a “colony. The Bracken Bat Cave in Texas is the largest known bat colony in the world with amazing 20 million bats. When the bats leave the cave, the group is so large that it looks like a huge storm on radar. The bats will eat over 200 tons of bugs in one night.
- Only about 5% of all U.S. caves have the right temperature and water conditions suitable for bats.
- A single brown bat lives longer than most equally sized mammals, with a life span of nearly 30 years. Mice often live less than two years.
- Amazing fact is that most bats rest, sleep, mate, and give birth upside down. They hang upside down so they can fly away quickly if needed.
- Bats are not blind and, in fact, many bats can see quite well; some species can even detect ultraviolet light.
- Bats are the only mammals capable of powered flights. Bats are more efficient fliers than birds due to their multi-jointed wings.
- Unlike birds, which flap their entire forelimbs, bats flap their spread-out digits.
- Amazingly some Mexican free-tailed bats can fly up to 250 miles (402 km) in a single night. They can fly up to 10,000 feet (3,048 m) high and reach speeds up to 60 miles per hour (97kph).
- Most female bats fly with their young clinging to them, and some species have false nipples that their pups grasp during flight.
- Amazingly bats always turn left when exiting the cave.
- The mouse-eared bat has a heartbeat as low as 18 beats a minute during hibernation, compared to amazing rate of 880 beats a minute when active.
- Amazingly the leg bones of a bat are so thin that most of the bats can’t walk. Vampire bats are the only bats that move well on the ground.
- A single brown bat can catch around 1,200 mosquito-size insects in one hour.
- The pipistrelle bat weighs less than two pennies and is only as long as a person’s little finger. Yet it can eat 3,000 insects in one night.
- Bats can find their food in total darkness. They locate insects by emitting inaudible high-pitched sounds, 10-20 beeps per second and listening to echoes.
- Bats can hear frequencies between 20 Hz and 120,000 Hz. Humans can hear between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz. Dogs can hears between 40 Hz and 60,000 Hz.
- Fishing bats have echolocation so sophisticated that they can detect a minnow’s fin as fine as a human hair protruding only two millimeters above a pond’s surface.
- Amazingly the bats that feed on frogs can tell the difference between safe and poisonous frogs by listening to the male frog’s call.
- Bats are the slowest reproducing mammals in the world for their size, and pregnancy is longer in bats than in other animals of their size. Bats have only one pup a year.
- Amazing fact is in most bat colonies, all the females birth their babies at the same time.
- Some female bats, especially those that hibernate, can control when they give birth by storing the male’s sperm inside their body, which delays fertilization, or by slowing the development of the embryo inside them.
- Amazing fact is that bat mothers can find their babies among thousands or millions of other bats by their unique voices and scents.
- Bats are clean animals cleaning themselves and each other meticulously by licking and scratching for hours.
- There are only three species of “vampire bats” , bats that live off the blood of animals. Vampire bats are the only mammals in the world that live entirely on blood.
- The story of Dracula originated in Eastern Europe but real vampire bats are found only in Central and South America.
- Vampire bats do not actually “suck” blood. Instead, they typically “lap” up two teaspoons of blood a night with their tongues.
- The blood moves through the bat’s mouth in two channels under its tongue. Its body uses only red blood cells, and amazingly within two minutes of starting to eat, the bat’s body rids itself of blood plasma in the form of urine.
- Some white-winged vampire bats pretend to be chicks. Once in position under the hens, the bats feed on their blood.
- Rarely will a vampire bat bite a person but if it does, it will then probably come back the next night to feed again from that same person. Amazingly, vampire bats can tell people apart by the way they breathe.
- A vampire bat that has found a meal may sometimes share the blood with other hungry vampires at the vampire roost. The vampire that found the blood vomits it to feed its friends.
- Scientists have been able to use the anticoagulation agent in vampire bat spit to treat human stroke victims and human heart patient victims.
- The tube-lipped nectar bat (Anoura fistulata) has the longest tongue, relative to body length, of any mammal. The bat retracts its tongue into its rib cage when it’s not being used.
- In the winter, some bats may hibernate for months at a time. Hibernating little brown bats can stop breathing for almost an hour during hibernation to reduce their energy needs.
- A bat uses 30-60 days of stored energy to wake up out of hibernation. That is why it is so important to not disturb hibernating bats.
- Some seeds will not sprout unless they have passed through the digestive tracts of a bat. Additionally, bats spread millions of seeds every year from the ripe fruit they eat.
- Amazing thing is that approximately 95% of the reforestation of the tropical rainforest is a result of seed dispersal from bats.
- Amazingly bats keep hanging upside down even after they die.
- Bat droppings, called guano, are one of the richest fertilizers. Bat guano was once a big business. Guano was Texas’s largest mineral export before oil!
- During the U.S. civil war, bat droppings were used to make gunpowder.
- The amazing fact is that a rabid bat can bite you in your sleep without you knowing!
- Wind turbines kill tens of thousands of bats every year. Rather than being struck by turbines, many bats appear to be killed by a sudden drop in air pressure near the spinning blades. The tiny blood vessels in their delicate lungs explode.
- In China and Japan, bats are symbols of happiness. In Chinese, the words for “bat” and “good fortune” are both pronounced “fu.”
- Fruit bats are a traditional food source for the people of Guam and they have been hunted to almost extinction. Guam now imports bat meat from other islands and serves as a major trade center for bat meat.
- Bat Conservation International claims that 150 big brown bats can eat enough cucumber beetles in one summer to save farmers a billion dollars a year. Those beetles would have had 33 million larvae to attack the crops.
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