Despite the fact that bat caves have a thick bat, bats are like little cats because they are very clean and spend most of their time preening when they are not eating or sleeping! One of the remarkable facts about bats is that in Africa, bats play a major role in fetish ceremonies and some traditional inventions. Because they are nocturnal birds that prefer to sleep upside down, they are among Africa’s most bizarre animals. Answers Africa brings you some of the fascinating facts about bats .
Bat Facts – General
1 – Bats are the only mammals capable of true,sustained flight, as opposed to simply gliding through the air, as do flying squirrels, colugos, and some possums. Their wings are in fact their front legs, with the part they flap being the hand, made up of extremely elongated fingers connected by a thin membrane called the “patagium”. This membrane also extends to and continues between the much shorter legs.
2 – Of the approximately 1,240 known species of bats worldwide, it accounts for around a fifth of the world’s classified mammal species. Their order, Chiroptera, is divided into two suborders, the megabats, or flying foxes, which primarily eat fruit but are less specialized, and the microbats, which are the echolocating, highly specialized bats.
3 – Bats can be found almost anywhere on the planet in pretty much every habitat except for the two poles and a few small oceanic islands. As long as there is a place where you can safely rest or “rest” – such as caves, crevices, or suitable man-made structures – and where you can forage, there will likely be bats sooner or later. They have even been known to bite leaves to form for themselves “tents” in which to perch if no other suitable place can be found.
4 – Bats have an exceptionally long lifespan for their size – they are known to live for around 20 years and at least one brown bat has been documented to have lived for 30 years. Compared to rodents of a similar size that only live a year or two, this is phenomenal!
6 – At the other end of the scale the largest bats are a selection of the fruit bats (genus Pteropus) and a so-called flying fox, the giant goldcrown, which despite its name is not actually in the same genus – its genus is Acerodon. Weighing up to 1.2kg and with a wingspan of up to 1.7m, it probably wouldn’t notice if it nosed on one of its tiny relatives!
7 – The local name for bats in many languages, translated as “mouse”, they are, for example, “Bald Mouse” (Chauve-Souris) in French, “Blind Mouse” (Murciélago) in Spanish, and “Old Mouse” (Saguzahar) in Basque. In Old English they are known by the picturesque “Flittermäuse”, which also corresponds to the Swedish name Fladdermus and the German Fledermaus.
Bat Facts – Properties
8 – In general, the two suborders of bat, megabat (Megachiroptera) and microbat (Microchiroptera), are identified as distinct by four characters.
- Megabats generally do not use echolocation (exception: Rousettus and his relatives).
- Megabats have a claw on the end of the second finger;
- the ends of the megabat ears close into a ring and
- Megabats have undercoat where microbats have guard hairs or are bare.
9 – Although bat wings are true wings, they are similar to bird wings only in that they are formed from their elongated front legs. Bats’ wings are very delicate, with flexible finger bones and an elastic membrane that allows bats to maneuver very quickly and accurately. The delicate nature of the membrane means that it can be torn easily, but can also regrow and heal very quickly.
11 – One of the strange facts is that all mammals are protected from blood by one-way valves in their veins, but bats have taken this step even further – they also have these valves in their arteries.
12 – The tube-lipped nectar bat (AnouraFistulata) holds another record – relative to its body size, its tongue is the longest in any existing mammal! This is designed to allow it to dip into the long cups of some of the flowers it feeds on and pollinate them over time. Then, when she pulls her tongue back, she rolls it into her chest!
Bat Facts – Behavior
13 – Bats are very specific about what they eat. Almost three quarters only eat insects, and almost all others eat fruit. Only a few species specialize in eating animals in addition to insects, e.g. B. the fish-eating bats and of course the vampire bats.
14 – Bats are vital to the ecology, scatter fruit seeds and pollinate flowers wherever they live, and the insectivores help keep pest numbers down. Contrary to popular belief, bats can see very well too, thanks – they just don’t see as well as most mammals.
15 – The echolocation system of bats is quite simple in principle; The bat emits ultrasonic sounds at a volume of up to 130 decibels – making them the most intense sounds in air. She then analyzes the echoes to get detailed information about everything around her.
16 – The main problem bats might have with this system is being sensitive enough to identify and analyze the echoes while making sure they don’t stun themselves on those loud outgoing calls! Different bats get around this in two different ways: one, when calling, the bat will pinch its ears shut, then stop calling and relax the ears in time to hear the return (“low duty cycle echolocation”), and the other, its ears are tuned to a very small, very specific frequency range and emit calls just outside of that range because the Doppler shift caused by their flight movement occurs and the echoes return to the range they can hear (“high duty cycle echolocation”). ).
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17 – The insectivorous bats have developed a clever ability to deal with their ears – they have become very sensitive to the sounds that moth wings make when flapping. how they move on the ground. They do this through the complex ridges on the inner surfaces of their ears, which help them focus on these sounds.
18 – Bats usually mate in the fall, delaypregnancy until spring, then give birth to a large, well-developed live young. The baby spends the first few days clinging to the mother’s breast and feeding from her nipples. However, when it gets bigger, it stays in the roost and waits for the mother to come back to feed it. The mother feeds her offspring until they are as good as adults, as bats cannot hunt until they have fully developed their wings, which is around 6-8 weeks for microbats and four months for megabats.
19 – Bats drink water and have developed twomethods of acquiring it; Some fly low over the water, dropping their lower jaws and carefully collecting a drop to swallow. Repeat this process until they are full. Others fly a little lower and let their chests come into contact with the water, then settle somewhere and lick off the moisture. However, this wasn’t discovered until scientists managed to develop cameras that could take over 1,000 photos per second to capture the bats in action!
20 – Yes, there are vampire bats and yes, they do exist and only feed on blood! There are three types; Common vampire bats that feed on mammals, the white-winged and hairy vampire bats (someone ran out of imagination to name these!) that feed on birds. They don’t “suck” the blood like traditional vampires, however – they pierce the skin with their sharp fangs, but then fold back a small flap and lick up the bulging blood, which doesn’t clot because of an anticoagulant in their saliva. However, they rarely take enough blood to seriously damage their prey, although secondary infections can be a problem.
Finally, vampire bats rarely bite humans, and in any case, they have lower rabies rates than other animals like skunks and foxes (and not at all in the UK, of course). In fact, only a small fraction of bat bites have ever caused rabies in a human, and since bat bites are so rare in the first place, that incidence becomes so small as to be negligible! That’s all the interesting bat facts you know now.