Facts about Bats!

By Calianne Sok & Maya Wakabayashi  ​

 Bats are wonderful creatures, unique in their own ways. Their lifestyle is very interesting. Here are some facts and some information about bats. Enjoy!     

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What Do Bats Eat?
-70% of bats eat insects. Also there are fruit eating bats, nectar eating bats, and carnivorous bats that eat small mammals, such as lizards, frogs, and birds.
-There are also blood sucking vampire bats in South America.

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How Many Types of Bats are There?
-There are about 900 species of bats, including the Old World Fruit bat, the Microbat, Indian Flying Fox, (the first image all the way at the top), the Megabat, Natalus, and many more!
-Some bat populations have numbers that go into millions, while other populations are very low.
-Giant flying foxes are a type of bat that live in Indonesia.

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Where Do Bats Live?
-Bats can be found almost anywhere in the world except for really cold or really hot places.
-Bats make their homes in caves, tree cavities, crevices, and buildings.
-Some species of bats are solitary while others have colonies with up to more than 1,000,000 bats.
-For most bats to survive during the winter, some species migrate, some hibernate, and some go into torpor, which is a state of physical of mental inactivity or lethargy.

What are Bat’s Special Powers?
-Bats have a very good sense of hearing; they hear sounds from sound waves bouncing off of other objects to see how far or close they are, which they can do in a split second. It is also known as echolocation.

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What Happens During a Bat’s Birth?
-When a pup is first born, it weighs up to ¼ of its mother’s weight which is equal to an average human mother giving birth to a 31 pound baby!
-Male bats do not help raise their babies, pups are typically cared for in maternity colonies, where females raise the pups.

Here are Some Interesting Facts...
-The Palaeochiropteryx (pal-ee-oh-ky-rop-ter-iks) is one of the oldest bats known. It is sadly now extinct. (There is an image of the skeleton on the left)          
-Bats are the only mammal that can actually fly.
-A group of bats is called a colony.
-For the size that bats are, they are the slowest reproducing mammals on the planet.

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-Bats are called pups when they are babies.
-One little brown bat (a species of bat) can consume up to 1,000 mosquitos in only an hour! It is also one of the world’s longest living mammals for its size. It can live up to 40 years old!
​-Flying Foxes have wingspans of almost 6 feet! (On the right, there is an image of the rare white flying fox.)

                                                                           Quiz ​
    Try to do this whole quiz without looking at the text! Also they are not in order of the text.
            (The answers are at the bottom.)

1. How many different species of bats are there in the world?
2. True or False? Some bats eat Lizards.
3. What kind of bat(s) have a 6 foot long wingspan?
4. How fast can a bat find things in the dark/how fast can a bat locate how close or far they are in the dark?
5. What bat do you think is the biggest bat? (not in the text)
6. What do you think is the smallest? (not in the text)​

1. True: Some bats do eat lizards.
2. The Flying Fox has a 6 foot long wingspan.
3. In a split second, bats can locate where things are in the dark.
4. The Flying Fox is the biggest bat known to humans.
5. The Kitti’s-Hog Nosed bat is the smallest bat in the world.