When it Comes to Bats, It’s Time to Turn the Tables
Big, Scary, and Out to Get You…or So You Think
People are generally afraid of what they do not see or understand. Today, this tendency to fear or vilify the unknown is reinforced by social media, which portrays bats as thirsty bloodsuckers that will come find you in the darkness. Nothing brings this to the forefront quite like Halloween: when most people think about bats, they think about blood-thirsty Dracula and big, scary fangs. They also tend to think about disease. With bats usually comes a fear of rabies or Ebola, and now, the novel coronavirus. But we have more reasons to celebrate bats than to fear them.
There are currently over 1,300 known species of bats worldwide. In fact, one in every five known mammals is a bat. Of these, guess how many feed on blood? Three. Those three bat species, which are known as vampire bats, are restricted to the tropics and preferably feed on large, non-human animals, such as tapirs or cattle. Also, most bats are tiny! Their bodies are typically around the size of your thumb.
That brings us to the negative reputation of bats as vectors of disease. The truth is, bats do carry latent viruses, and because they often live together in large groups, virus transfer among bats is easy and common. However, when disease outbreaks in humans are linked to bat populations, there is usually an intermediate host and almost always evidence of humans intervening in nature, placing people closer than they should be to wildlife. Points of contact between humans and bats are usually traced to poaching, wet markets (where live animals are sold as food), or habitat edges; as people either destroy or develop native habitat, they encroach into spaces where wildlife lives. Of note, scientists are more concerned that humans will infect bats with the novel coronavirus than vice versa. In fact, bat researchers halted field work this year to keep the bats safe.
Bats Are Friends, Not Foes, to the Environment
When simply left alone, bats are not only harmless, but also very important for the environment. In fact, bats are commonly considered to be keystone species, or species on which many other plants or animals in an ecosystem largely depend, such that if we were to remove bats, the ecosystem would change drastically.
For so many different bat species to exist, bats had to undergo what scientists refer to as “niche partitioning” so they wouldn’t outcompete each other for limited resources. In other words, each bat species evolved differences in form, or the way it looks and the physical characteristics that it has, and function, or the ‘way of life’ it follows, including where it lives and what it eats. There are dark colored bats and light colored bats, bats that live in caves and bats that live in trees, bats that echolocate and bats that do not, and, while most bats eat insects, others feed on nectar, fruit, or small vertebrates.
Because bat species live in different places and do different things, they provide a diversity of ecosystem services, or positive benefits provided for the environment and, in turn, people. For example, ecosystem services may include provisioning services such as food production, or other benefits, such as climate maintenance or disease reduction. Most ecosystem services provided by bats take the form of interactions between bats and plants on which people depend.
From Farm to Fork (by Way of Bats)
The main bat-plant interaction that benefits people is pest suppression, or the process by which bats consume the insect pests that feed on our plants. Some bats are believed to consume more than half of their body mass in insects each night! To put this into perspective, an average maternity colony of one million Mexican free-tailed bats, weighing 12 g each, could consume up to 8.5 metric tons of insects in a single night. That is equivalent to the mass of three African elephants or more than five mid-sized cars. When accounting for the fact that farmers would have to pay more for pesticide applications, and would have more damaged crops, if bats were not present, bats save farmers billions of dollars each year. Farmers commonly try to attract bats to their farms by setting up bat boxes, or bat-friendly homes, on their property.
Bats that do not consume insects perform ecosystem services, too. Bats that feed on floral nectar get pollen on their faces and heads, then transport the pollen from flower to flower, aiding in plant reproduction. Tequila lovers, this one is for you: bats are responsible for pollinating agave, the plant used to make tequila. Bats that feed on fruit orally eject or defecate the seeds while they fly, which facilitates seed dispersal. Through pollination and dispersal, bats promote forest regeneration after disturbances and promote overall ecosystem health. There are also accounts of cultural groups that are dependent on eating and exporting fruits almost entirely pollinated or dispersed by bats.
Bats Need Our Help
Unfortunately, many bat populations face a multitude of threats. A major conservation issue is the continued spread of White Nose Syndrome, a cold-loving fungus that causes North American hibernating bats to deplete their fat resources prematurely during hibernation. A more geographically widespread threat is wind energy development; wind turbines present great hope for renewable energy, but collisions with wind turbines is a major cause of bat mortality globally. Habitat destruction and Climate Change also threaten many bat species with local extirpation or extinction as environmental conditions become unsuitable for survival.
It is time to take a stand in support of our bats. Even small actions, such as learning more about bats to help rectify their public reputation or installing a bat box in your backyard, can make a big difference in bat conservation.
