60 Fun Facts About Bat

Bats are the only mammals capable of doing what?

Flying squirrels, colugos and sugar gliders only glide; bats flap and stay up.

The bat order name Chiroptera comes from Ancient Greek words meaning what?

A bat's wing really is a hand: long, spread fingers stretched with a thin membrane called the patagium.

Roughly what share of all classified mammal species are bats?

Only rodents outnumber them, with at least 1,500 bat species described so far.

Kitti's hog-nosed bat, the world's smallest bat, is nicknamed after which insect?

It is arguably the smallest mammal on Earth by body length, at just 29 to 33 millimetres.

About how much does Kitti's hog-nosed bat weigh?

It lives in limestone caves along rivers in western Thailand and southeast Myanmar and was unknown to science before 1974.

Kitti's hog-nosed bat leaves its roost for only about how long each evening?

It comes out for a brief evening feed and another 20 minutes at dawn, then spends the rest of the day in its cave.

The giant golden-crowned flying fox, one of the world's largest bats, is found only in which country?

It eats mostly figs and is endangered by deforestation and hunting for bushmeat.

Roughly how wide is the wingspan of the giant golden-crowned flying fox?

At around 1.6 metres it is wider than many adults are tall, on a body weighing about 1.5 kilograms.

Which species is the fastest bat, clocked at ground speeds of about 100 mph?

That makes it a contender for the fastest horizontal flier of any animal, bird or bat.

Why can a roosting bat hang upside down for hours without getting tired?

The grip is passive, so the bat has to work to let go rather than to hold on.

Besides their lungs, bats can take in oxygen through what?

Blood vessels lie so close to the surface of the wing skin that gases diffuse straight through it.

Tiny hairs dotted across a bat's wing membrane mainly help it do what?

Each hair sits in a small bump and works like a set of built-in airspeed sensors.

Why do bats rarely fly in the rain, according to one explanation?

Being wet also costs them extra energy, so most sit out downpours.

Which insects can produce ultrasound that jams a bat's sonar?

Other tiger moths use ultrasound as a warning that they taste bad, an acoustic version of bright warning colours.

Most fruit bats cannot echolocate, but the Egyptian fruit bat manages it by making clicks with what?

The clicks come slow and steady, then speed up sharply as the bat closes in on an object.

The 52-million-year-old fossil bat Onychonycteris, showing flight predated echolocation, was found in which state?

Unlike modern bats it had claws on all five fingers and probably alternated flapping with gliding.

What colour were the Messel Pit fossil bats, the first fossil mammals to have their colour determined?

Palaeochiropteryx and Hassianycteris lived about 48 million years ago.

The oldest known wild bat, a Siberian bat, was recaptured how many years after it was first tagged?

Bats live around three and a half times longer than other mammals of their size, and hibernators live longest of all.

A newborn bat pup can weigh up to what share of its mother's body weight?

To manage it, the two halves of the mother's pelvis are joined by a flexible ligament that can spread during birth.

In most bat species, how many pups does a female give birth to per litter?

The pup usually emerges rear-first, possibly so its wings do not tangle on the way out.

Blood-feeding vampire bats live in the wild in which part of the world?

Just three species feed only on blood, and two extinct relatives have been found as far north as the United States.

Vampire bats are the only mammals known to use which sense to find blood vessels near the skin?

Heat sensors around the nose do the job; the only other vertebrates with the trick are pit vipers, boas and pythons.

How does a well-fed common vampire bat help a roost-mate that failed to find a meal?

The favour tends to be returned later, a textbook case of reciprocal altruism in animals.

Which kind of movement can vampire bats manage that most other bats have almost lost?

They use a bounding gait powered by the forelimbs, useful for stalking sleeping livestock.

What keeps a vampire bat's upper incisors permanently razor-sharp?

They are sharp enough that museum staff have cut themselves handling the skulls.

Desmoteplase, based on an anticoagulant in vampire bat saliva, was trialled for which condition?

The same saliva compounds keep a bite wound bleeding while the bat laps up its meal.

The greater noctule bat is unusual among bats for hunting which prey on the wing?

It intercepts small migrating songbirds at night, high above the ground.

The spectral bat of the American tropics, with a wingspan approaching one metre, holds which record?

It is also the biggest bat in the Americas and can carry off a dove that weighs almost as much as it does.

The Honduran white bat roosts under 'tents' it makes by biting through the leaf veins of which plant?

A leaf folded into a tent lives only about seven and a half weeks, so the bats keep building new ones.

The Honduran white bat's bright yellow ears and nose get their colour from which pigments, a mammalian first?

Researchers study how the bat handles lutein in hopes of understanding macular degeneration in people.

White-nose syndrome, which has killed millions of North American bats, is caused by what?

It grows on hibernating bats and makes them burn through their fat reserves twice as fast, so they starve before spring.

White-nose syndrome was first identified from a 2006 photograph taken in a cave in which US state?

The pathogen most likely arrived from Europe on human traffic; European bats carry it without dying.

Which insect's DNA turned up in nearly 72% of little brown bat droppings in a Wisconsin study?

The popular claim that a bat eats 1,000 of them an hour is an overstretch; a lab test suggested closer to 340.

A lactating little brown bat may need to eat insects equal to what share of her body weight nightly?

Even a pregnant female eats about 61% of her weight nightly, which is why bat colonies matter so much to farmers.

Bracken Cave, summer home to some 20 million bats, lies just outside which city?

The colony is there from March to October, and Bat Conservation International owns the cave and 1,500 acres around it.

The world's largest urban bat colony lives under the Congress Avenue Bridge in which city?

Up to 1.5 million bats emerge at dusk each summer, drawing about 100,000 tourists a year and a minor-league hockey team name.

Bat Conservation International was founded in 1982 by which bat biologist?

His public education campaign turned a frightened city into one that now markets its bats as an attraction.

Bat droppings, mined from caves for use as fertiliser, are known by what name?

It is rich in nitrogen, phosphate and potassium, and whole cave ecosystems depend on it for food.

In traditional Chinese medicine, bat droppings go by a name that translates as what?

Its Chinese name is yèmíngshā; the practice drew fresh scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic.

About how many species of flowering plant rely on bats for pollination?

Bat-pollinated flowers tend to open at night; pollen sticks to the fur while the bat drinks nectar.

Lesser long-nosed bats, summer migrants to Arizona, feed mainly on which night-blooming plants' nectar?

Some fly as far as 1,600 kilometres a year following the bloom, which is why the tequila plant has a bat to thank.

In a 2005 US survey, which species made up 40% of all bats killed by wind turbines?

It is a long-distance migrant, and most deaths happen during the spring and autumn migrations.

What was the profession of Lytle Adams, who proposed the WWII 'bat bomb' in January 1942?

An acquaintance of Eleanor Roosevelt, he got the idea on a visit to a bat-filled cavern and wrote in barely a month after Pearl Harbor.

What code name did the US Navy give the bat bomb programme when it took over in August 1943?

Each casing held over a thousand hibernating bats with tiny timed incendiaries; the plan was overtaken by the atomic bomb.

In January 1982, Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat thrown on stage in which city?

He thought it was rubber; by his own account it bit back, and he was vaccinated for rabies afterwards.

Which rum brand's bat logo was inspired by fruit bats in the rafters of its first distillery in Santiago de Cuba?

The founder's wife pushed for the bat, a symbol of good health and good fortune, and it helped customers who could not read spot the bottle.

In the 1993 picture book Stellaluna, a young fruit bat separated from her mother is raised by what?

Author Janell Cannon wrote it partly because so few children's books featured bats at all.

In which country's traditional culture do bats symbolise happiness and the 'Five Blessings'?

The five are longevity, riches, health, love of virtue and a peaceful death; in the West bats got vampires instead.

Camazotz, the bat spirit serving the underworld lords in the Popol Vuh, belongs to which civilisation's mythology?

The name means 'death bat', and in the story he snatches off the head of one of the Hero Twins.

In which Shakespeare play do witches add bat fur to their brew?

The Weird Sisters' cauldron scene helped cement the bat's Western reputation for witchcraft.

Who played Batman in the campy 1966–68 ABC television series?

It ran 120 episodes, airing twice a week on consecutive nights for its first two seasons.

A bat crest on the coats of arms of Valencia and Palma is tied to a legend about which medieval king?

One version says a bat landed on his flag before he took Valencia in 1238; another says a bat warned him of a night raid.

Which football club's earliest badge, used from 1899 to 1910, was crowned by a small bat?

The bat came from the city arms; Barcelona's civic coat of arms also lost its bat early in the 20th century.

Despite the saying 'blind as a bat', how many bat species are actually blind?

Microbats have small eyes but still sense light; most have mesopic vision, working only in low light, while megabats see rather well.

In extreme heat, what do bats use to cool themselves down?

Dark wing membranes soak up sun, one reason bats avoid flying by day; the flying fox Pteropus hypomelanus also fans its wings while roosting in the heat.

Which dialectal English word for a bat matches the German 'Fledermaus'?

Middle English used 'bakke', probably related to Old Swedish natbakka; the modern word 'bat' only appears in the early 1570s.

During torpor, a bat's energy use can fall by as much as what percentage?

Body temperature can drop to as low as 6 °C; hibernating bats stay torpid for 99.6 percent of their hibernation period.

What colour do the wings of at least six North American bat species glow under ultraviolet light?

The photoluminescence was found on 60 museum specimens, on the wings, tail membrane and hind limbs; nobody is yet sure why.

Unlike birds, microbats use a polarity-based magnetic compass, which lets them distinguish what?

Birds instead read the strength of the field to judge latitude on long journeys; the bat mechanism may involve magnetite particles.

In 1758, Carl Linnaeus placed the seven bat species he knew of in which order?

About twenty years later Johann Friedrich Blumenbach gave bats their own order, Chiroptera; more than 1,500 species have since been described.