Bats are fascinating members of North America’s mammalian fauna; diminutive, captivating, and the only mammals capable of true flight. Yup, flying squirrels aren’t flying squirrels.

At least 1,400 species worldwide compose the order Chiroptera; exhibiting considerable taxonomical, functional and ecological diversity. Diversity characterizes every facet of bat ecology, from geographical range to morphology to foraging and roosting behavior.

Chiropterans are the second-most speciose mammalian order, containing an incredible 1,411 species. Globally, bats contribute immensely to biodiversity, constituting approximately one fifth of mammalian diversity worldwide – i.e., every fifth mammal’s a bat!

The distribution of bats includes every continent except Antarctica, and flight provides the opportunity to access locales unavailable to terrestrial mammals; allowing bats to inhabit deserts, riversides, forests, cities, and islands.

Although the most common diet of North American species comprises various insects; the vast range of dietary items includes fruit, nectar, fish, amphibians, birds, small mammals, and blood!

North American microbats exploit the vast abundance of nocturnally active insects, using two foraging strategies to acquire prey.  Aerial foraging bats detect prey by echolocating, or “emitting a series of brief frequency modulated, mostly ultrasonic sounds and detecting the fine changes in the returning echoes that result from the reflection of the sound off a target.” Alternatively, substrate gleaning bats locate prey via olfactory, visual, and auditory cues, subsequently ‘gleaning’ prey from surfaces (e.g. foliage, tree bark, leaf litter). Many species, including the little brown bat and the northern long-eared bat, exhibit foraging flexibility, employing both gleaning and aerial hawking techniques!

Chiropterans spend over half their lives subjected to the conditions of their roost (home) environment.  Not only are roosts valuable sites for mating, hibernation, and rearing young; they often facilitate complex social interactions, offer protection from inclement weather, promote energy conservation, and minimize risks of predation.

To offset the extreme temperatures of winter and seasonal famine, bats either migrate or hibernate. Similar to summer roost selection, bats choose hibernacula that provide the optimum temperature and humidity.  Bats typically commence hibernation with fat reserves amounting to ≥ 25% of their body mass.  In hibernation, body temperature may plummet to that of the environment, heartbeat decreases to approximately 20 beats per minute, and breathing may slow to five breaths per minute!

Of the 47 bat species inhabiting the United States, more than half are endangered or species of special concern.  Misconceptions, human activities (e.g., deforestation, fragmentation, conversion of native habitats), and now white-nose syndrome, imperil North America’s bat populations.

Myth | Bats are blind.

Bats acquire, communicate, and interpret information through visual, acoustic and olfactory signals. Although vision may not provide the same level of acuity as echolocation, it does appear to play an important role relative to the timing of emergence from day roosts, locating prey, escape responses, and orientation.

Misconception | All bats carry rabies.

Misconceptions concerning bat rabies dominate society, and continue to be misrepresented and sensationalized by the media. Less than half of 1% of bats contract rabies; the odds of anyone dying of rabies from a bat are less than 1 in 100 million. Merlin Tuttle, founder of Bat Conservation International, stresses that “dog attacks kill as many Americans annually as die of rabies from bats every 15 years, and we are hundreds of times more likely to die from a car collision with a deer, a bicycle accident, or from falling down the stairs.” For people who vaccinate their pets and do not handle wildlife, the odds of contracting rabies are incalculably small.

Misconception | Bats are rodents.

Bats are incredibly special and ipso facto, they belong to Chiroptera, a distinct order of mammals. In fact, bats exhibit life history traits (e.g., life span, gestation length, litter size, size at birth, age at sexual maturity) typical of elephants and pandas; not rodents.

Myth | Bats will get caught in my hair.

Echolocation permits bats to orient themselves with respect to their environment and to assess the size, shape, distance, relative velocity, elevation, nature, and movements of objects. Flying at speeds of 3-4 m/sec, bats can detect 1 mm diameter wires at a distance of 2 m, fly unhindered through an array of 0.2 mm diameter wires, and capture mosquitoes and fruit flies at rates of up to two/sec (Henson 1965). Another study (Grinnell and Griffin 1958) indicates that bats are capable of detecting small wire at distances of 5500 times the wire diameter, and well before the bat indicates by its flight pattern that it’s aware of them.