Evidence for bat-like flying mammals appears as far back as the Eocene Epoch, some 50 million years ago.

Bat Cultures

Bats have had a long time to become steeped in cultural superstitions and myths. For example:

Australian folklore: A bat represents a human incarnation, and killing one can shorten your life or result in a heavy fine. 

Maya religion: The Mayan bat god, Camazotz, appears as an anthropomorphized leaf-nosed bat in sculpture and stories. His name translates to “death bat” or “snatch bat”. 

Buddhism: Some Buddhists believe a small bat perched on the right shoulder signifies good luck, longevity, and happiness. 

Spiritual practices: Many practices associate the bat with themes of rebirth, intuition, and darkness. They are believed to guide people through difficult or frightening transitions. 

Chinese culture: The Chinese word for bat (福 Fu) sounds like the Mandarin word for prosperity and luck. Because of this, many feng shui practitioners include bat symbols in their decor. Red envelopes of money presented to children at New Year traditionally include five bats in their design.

Polynesian religion: While fleeing from her husband, the goddess Leutogi’s brother sent his pet bat to rescue her. When she became the goddess of fertility and night, she showed her appreciation by adopting the bat as one of her totem animals.

Modern Western Culture

In Western cultures, such as ours, people often associate bats with bad luck, death, witchcraft, vampires, and darkness. Some Westerners believe that a bat flying into the house is a sign of death or that the occupants will soon leave. As someone who lived with bats in the attic—literally—for years, I can personally testify that neither of those things happened.

Some believe that hearing a bat call while flying in the early evening is a sign of bad luck. Despite many close encounters with bats, I’ve been extremely fortunate!

So, darkness, yes. Death and bad luck, no. As for witchcraft and vampires, keep reading.

The real skinny on bats is that they are an important species that impact our daily lives in ways we might not even realize. Bats play important roles in their ecosystems as natural pest controls, pollinators, and seed dispersers.

Bat Pest Control

Most bats (about 70%) consume insects, like mosquitos, helping to control insect populations that can carry human diseases, or beetles, which damage agricultural crops. Economists have estimated that the pest control provided by healthy bat populations is worth over $50 billion!

Most North American bats are insectivorous. Insect-eating bats capture their prey by foraging on the wing, catching flying insects from a perch, or collecting insects from plants. Some species of bat seize insects with their mouths. Others use their wings or tail membrane to trap prey. Bats disable large insects with a quick bite, then envelop the insect in a basket formed by its wings and tail, and carry the insect to a perch for eating. Bats have sharp teeth to chew their food into tiny, digestible pieces.

Each night, bats eat thousands of insects!  Big brown bats fly at dusk, often using the same feeding ground each night. They fly in a nearly straight course 30 feet in the air, often emitting an audible chatter. One little brown bat can catch 600 mosquitoes or more an hour. The endangered Indiana bat, which weighs about three pennies, consumes up to half its bulk every evening. This insect-heavy diet helps both foresters and farmers. 

Carnivorous bat species—which are more rare and eat small animals like fish, birds, mice and frogs—also act as a natural control on their prey’s populations. 

Plant Helper

Fruit bats and nectar bats are key players in helping local plants by dispersing seeds as they fly, which assists pollination. For example, the lesser long-nosed bat is the primary nighttime pollinator for the saguaro cactus in the Sonoran Desert, which spans from southern California and Arizona into northwest Mexico. Like a hummingbird, the lesser long-nosed bat can hover at flowers, using its 3-inch-long tongue — equal to its body length — to feed on nectar in desert environments.

Desert ecosystems rely on nectar-feeding bats to pollinate giant cacti, including the organ pipe as well as the saguaro of Arizona.

Without bats, say goodbye to bananas, avocados, and mangoes.  Over 300 species of fruit depend on bats for pollination. Bats help spread seeds for nuts, figs, and cacao — the main ingredient in chocolate.  

Bats Inspiring Medical Marvels 

About 80 medicines come from plants that rely on bats for their survival. Research on bats has also led to advances in vaccines.

Donald Griffin, an American zoologist, coined the term echolocation in 1944. Griffin worked with Robert Galambos, a neuroscientist, to demonstrate the phenomenon and determine precisely how bats used echolocation. While bats are not blind, studying how bats use echolocation has helped scientists develop navigational aids for the blind.

Scientists have also been studying the secrets behind bats’ relative longevity. Biologists hope that understanding how the telomeres on strands of bat DNA protect cell growth may lead to breakthroughs in preventing or reversing aging and cancer growth in humans.

Vampire bats have a protein in their saliva that researchers have modeled to help stroke patients. Their anticoagulant property keeps the blood of prey flowing without clotting so the bat can eat its meal. This enzyme — named Draculin — has been found to break up blood clots in the brain that cause strokes in humans.  The opposite of frightening, vampire bats are a fascinating and important species that are contributing to science. 

Vampire Bats 

But what about bats feasting on human blood? Mostly just myth. First of all, only three bat species are blood-suckers—meaning 0.0025% of bats eat blood to survive—and they only suck the blood of other mammals and a few birds. These three vampire bat species live in Central and South America; none are native to the U.S.

The vampire bat feeds mainly on the blood of cattle, horses, and wild mammals such as deer and peccaries. The harm from such bites isn’t from blood loss, which is relatively small, but rather from the exposure of the livestock to secondary infections, parasites, and the transmission of viral-borne diseases.

Diphylla ecaudata, a bat native to northern Brazil, may have recently adapted to feeding on human blood. These bats, which primarily feed on several species of birds, have felt the effects of climate change making their preferred food source more difficult to find. When researchers tested the DNA of blood in these bats’ stomachs, they found cattle and human blood mixed with the expected birds. However, evidence points to D. ecaudata still relying primarily on their preferred birds for food.

Because the true vampire bat of Central and South America feeds on blood, a popular misconception has been to link it to the human vampire legend. The Eastern European tale of a vampire dates back to the Middle Ages. There are no vampire bats native to Europe or Asia. They weren’t even known to exist before the 1500’s, when explorers visited the New World and observed their unusual eating habits. Scientists named the bat for the legend rather than the legend originating with the bat!

Fascinating Animals

Besides being useful, bats are just plain interesting. This isn’t surprising, given that there are over 1,400 species of bats worldwide.  Only rodents have a greater number of species. Bats are native to nearly every climate except extreme deserts and polar regions.

Bats have amazing abilities:

• Mexican free-tailed bats can fly 10,000 feet high.
• Townsend’s big eared bats can pluck insects from foliage.
• To reduce their energy needs, hibernating little brown bats can stop breathing for almost an hour.
• The Honduran white bat, a snow-white bat with yellow nose and ears, cuts large leaves to make “tents” to protect its small colonies from drenching jungle rains.
• The ancestors of the endangered Hawaiian hoary bat (‘Ope’ape’a) traveled over 3,600 kilometers from the Pacific Coast almost 10,000 years ago to become Hawaii’s state land mammal.

If you’ve seen one bat, you’ve seen one bat! Bats come in many colors, sizes, and shapes.

• The spotted bat, which lives in Texas, is black with a white patch on each shoulder and the rump.
• Other bats have patterns so bright biologists call them butterfly bats.
• Some bats, such as the Eastern red bat, have long angora-like fur varying in color from red to black and white.
• The bumblebee bat of Thailand weighs less than a penny.
• Some of the large bats known as flying foxes, such as those living in Indonesia, have wingspans up to 6 feet.
• The eastern pipistrelle, which lives in most of the eastern United States, is also called the pygmy bat because of its small size. Its fur is yellowish brown, darker on the back. The back hairs are tricolor: gray at the base, then a band of yellow brown, and dark brown at the tip.

Flying foxes live only in tropical and subtropical areas including Australia and eat primarily fruit and nectar. Other species of bats are carnivorous, preying on fish, frogs, mice, and birds. As discussed above, the fabled vampire bat feeds on blood. All bats living in the United States and Canada eat insects, except 3 species of nectar-feeding bats living along the Texas-Arizona border.

Bats are Mammals!

Because they fly, many people think of bats as birds. Instead, bats share the characteristics of all mammals (hair, regulated body temperature, the ability to bear their young alive and nurse them). They make up a fifth of all mammal species on earth. 

Bats are the only mammals to truly fly.  Other “flying” mammals, such as the flying squirrel, only glide through the air for short distances. True flight requires a flight stroke, or flap of the wings, to thrust the animal through the air. Because of their unique wing structure, bats have great maneuverability — some say, even better than birds!

Bats may be small, but they’re fast little buggers.  How fast a bat flies depends on the species, but some can reach speeds over 100 miles per hour according to new research.

Bat Life

Procreation

A baby bat is a pup, and a group of bats is a colony. In many species, the males and females roost separately except when mating. In migratory species, mating occurs in the fall and winter. The female stores the sperm until spring when ovulation and fertilization occur.

Most bat mothers give birth to a single pup. However, the evening bat typically has two pups per litter. The eastern red bat averages two or three pups per litters. The seminole bat and the yellow bat can have three or four pups per litter.

In May or June, the females congregate in large colonies and give birth. Mother bats form nursery colonies in spring in caves, dead trees and rock crevices. Bats benefit from maintaining a close-knit roosting group because the group increases reproductive success, and it is important for rearing pups.

The female hangs head up as the young is born, feet first. She catches and holds the new born in a pouch formed by a special membrane. The baby bat, already large and well developed, crawls to the mother’s nipples to feed until they are 6 weeks old. Like other mammals, mother bats feed their pups breastmilk, not insects.

Bats have one of the slowest reproductive rates for animals their size. Most bats in northeastern North America have only one or two pups a year, and many females do not breed until their second year. Their relatively long life-span somewhat offsets this low reproductive rate.

Bat Growth

Newborn bat pups are blind and furless. In the evening when the mother forages for food, she may, for the first few days, carry the young with her. Later the baby remains behind, clinging to the wall or roof of the cave or shelter. The mother may return several times during the night to feed her young.

Young bats born in June or July reach their full size in 4 weeks and are usually able to hunt by mid-July. Females are mature at 8 months, and males mature in their second summer.

Aged Bats

The longest-living bat is 41 years old.  It’s said that the smaller the animal, the shorter its lifespan, but bats break that rule of longevity. This may be because bats have a high number of genes involved in DNA repair and control of cell division. Although most bats live less than 20 years in the wild, scientists have documented six species that live more than 30 years.  

The little brown bat, common in North America and in West Virginia, is the world’s longest- lived mammal for its size, with a life-span over 32 years, although it is generally rare for a bat to live this long.

In 2006, a tiny Brandt’s bat from Siberia set the world record at 41 years.

Cleanly Bats

People might think bats dirty because they excrete guano, a prized fertilizer.  Far from being dirty, bats spend a lot of time grooming themselves, like cats. Some, for example the Colonial bat, even groom each other. Besides having sleek fur, cleaning also helps control parasites.

Hibernation and Migration 

Even though bears and bats are the two most well-known hibernators, not all bats spend their winters in caves. Some bat species like the spotted bat survive by migrating in search of food to warmer areas. Bats that migrate usually travel less than 200 miles, often following the same routes as migratory birds.

Many bats do hibernate through the cold weather when insects are scarce. Bats prepare for hibernation by putting on fat to last through the cold weather. When a bat hibernates, its body temperature drops almost to air temperature, and respiration and heartbeat become very slow. Throughout the winter, bats eat nothing, surviving by slowly burning accumulated fat.

It is fairly easy to rouse bats from hibernation, and they may fly around for 15 minutes. However, disturbances that cause bats to awaken and use fat stores can be fatal. Hibernating bats should be left alone.

Unlike other hibernating bats, red bats may wake and feed, if temperatures rise above 55 degrees.

After females leave the hibernation sites, they gather in colonies varying in size from 10 to 100 or more, roosting in attics, barns, and other dark retreats. The males are solitary, roosting in hollow trees, under loose bark, and in other crevices. Bats may also move from nursery caves, suited for rapid growth of their young, to cooler caves with stable winter temperatures. Bats that hibernate use the same sites year after year.

Bat Habitats 

Habitats vary during bats’ life cycles. As discussed above, many bats dwell in caves or use caves for hibernation. Others, the Virginia big-eared bat, for example, live in caves year-round, but its winter home is typically different from its summer roost. These endangered bats live in only a few locations throughout Virginia and West Virginia.  

A group of small-footed Myotis made their home in an underground tunnel at an inactive nuclear reactor in the state of Washington. But more typically, bats live in abandoned mines, caves, on the underside of bridges, in trees, in crevices in old buildings and barns, in woodpecker holes in trees, occasionally in homes and attics, in bat houses constructed especially for them, or other protected places during the day.

Colonial bats cluster in caves and mine tunnels. Over 15 million Mexican free-tailed bats inhabit Texas’s Bracken Cave, making it the largest known bat colony (and largest concentration of mammals) on Earth. 

Forest dwelling bats roost in trees or on the forest floor and many raise their young in the exfoliating bark of large trees. Some bats, like endangered gray bats, feed on insects over water and roost near streams and rivers.

Bats can also take up residence in human structures like old buildings, culverts, bridges, and attics.

Bat Eyesight

Blind as a bat? Not so much… Bats’ eyes are adapted for nocturnal life, and they can see well. However, sight is just one sense a bat relies on. Some bats, like most fruit bats, also use their noses to sniff out nearby treats. 

Bat Voices 

Echolocation is using sound reflecting off objects to locate them.  Many people have heard of bats’ ability to use echolocation to navigate and hunt.

Echolocation works by bats’ emitting a series of high-pitched squeals through their mouths or noses (usually inaudible to humans). These sounds bounce back to the bats, enabling them to navigate in total darkness, not flying into obstacles but locating prey. Some bats use tongue clicks instead of vocal cords. Usually, they receive the echoes in their large, funnel-shaped ears. Bats’ ears are specialized for frequencies in the ultrasonic range.

In addition to the ultrasonic sounds used in echolocation, bats also emit other sounds—to communicate or indicate emotion? Purrs, clicks, and buzzing often precede mating of some species. Recognition of mothers and babies involves both audible and ultrasonic sound.

Certain North American insect-eating bats vibrate when at rest and content. This vibration does not occur when they are asleep. The bat’s ear is extremely mobile and sensitive to sound.

Do bats get tangled in women’s hair and need to be removed with scissors? No way! Their echolocation is so sensitive that bats can detect objects as thin as monofilament fishing line. Fishing bats have an echolocation system so sophisticated they can detect a minnow’s fin as fine as a human hair.

How Bats Live

When they are at rest, bats hang with their heads down. During the day, red bats hang by one foot, wrapped in their big furry tails.

Swimming isn’t typical of bats. Although there is little scientific data, observations by naturalists in the field seem to support that some bats swim in stressful situations, although swimming isn’t part of their ordinary behavior.

Flying foxes, often island inhabitants, may have to fly long distances to obtain food. A forced landing or a foray over water to collect fruit which has dropped and floated there may involve an unexpected swim. Photographs of the flying fox, Pteropus giganteus, show the animal actually swimming, using its wings and feet to reach land rather than floating or paddling.

Bat Diets 

Most bats eat insects, such as mosquitoes, moths, beetles, crickets, leafhoppers, and chinch bugs. Bats use echolocation to find and track insects in flight, and they can eat up to 600 insects in an hour. 

Many tropical bats eat fruit exclusively, and fruit-eating bats can disperse up to 95% of seeds in recently cleared rainforests. Epaulette fruitbats can eat up to three times their body weight in figs each night. 

Some bats feed on nectar and pollinate plants like peaches, cloves, bananas, and agaves.

A few bats are carnivorous and hunt small vertebrates, such as fish, frogs, mice, and birds.

Vampire bats feed on the blood of mammals and birds. 

Bats and Rabies

All mammals, including bats, can get rabies. However, it is estimated that less than 1% of bats have rabies. The best way to avoid getting rabies from bats is never to pick up a bat, especially if you see it fluttering on the ground during the day.

Actually, a higher incidence of rabies is found in skunks and foxes than in bats. In the United States the rate of occurrence is so small, barely a fraction of a percent, that there is very little danger to humans.

Bats Need Help 

There are over 1,200 bat species worldwide. However, bats are basically tropical animals and only about 45 species are native to the U.S. and Canada. Twelve of them are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

American bats species are considered endangered due to disturbance of roosting bats in caves, loss of habitat including forested areas due to large scale logging and development, and inappropriate use of pesticides.

Owls, hawks, and snakes eat bats, but that’s nothing compared to the millions of bats dying from white-nose syndrome. The disease — named for a white fungus on the muzzle and wings of bats — affects hibernating bats and has been detected in 37 states and seven Canadian provinces.

This deadly syndrome has decimated certain species. At least 10 bat species in the U.S. and Canada are threatened, plus the endangered Virginia big-eared bats. It has killed over 90% of northern long-eared, little brown and tri-colored bat populations in fewer than 10 years. This fatal disease, has killed more than 5.7 million bats since it was discovered in 2006. 

The implications are enormous.  Loss of bats destabilizes ecosystems and can cause people to increase their use of chemicals to control insects.

You can help by  avoiding places where bats are hibernating. If you do go underground, decontaminate your clothing, footwear and gear to help with not spreading this disease to other areas.

Servants of Evil?

Oh, yes. I nearly forgot witchcraft. Bats are associated with witchcraft in many cultures because of their nocturnal nature and their visibility during the transition from day to night. 

It is believed that witches worshipped horned figures with wings—possibly bats?

In Dante’s Inferno, the poet used bats as an allegory for the devil and his domain.

Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel describes Dracula as a vampire who can transform into a bat.

In some cultures, people believe a bat must be a witch’s familiar or an evil omen. For example, in the Ibibio people of Nigeria, a bat flying into a house is said to be a sign that the person is bewitched and will soon die. 

Some believe that the witches’ hour is when bats fly upwards and then come down again quickly. 

It is said that witches used bat blood in their flying concoctions. 

Both bats and witches are often featured together in Halloween decorations. 

Although in the West, bats are popularly associated with darkness, malevolence, witchcraft, vampires, and death, bats are actually an important part of the ecosystem, as as described above. 

If this blog has truly inspired you, Bat Week  — held the last week in October — celebrates the role of bats in nature and all that these amazing creatures do for us, so party down. 

Bottom Line: There’s more than Halloween to love about bats. They’re the heroes of the night!