Okay, so I recently listened to an episode of Ologies featuring Merlin Tuttle, a chiropterologist – and if you’re like me and had never heard that word in your life, it’s someone who studies bats!

Now, I’ll be honest, I didn’t really think much of bats until listening to this podcast, but Merlin’s passion for bat conservation, the remarkable role these adorable furry creatures play in our ecosystems, and their incredible intelligence made me immediately go searching through my back catalogues for any bat shots I could find. I’ll admit, they’re not my best photos, but I’ll make up for it with bat facts, I promise – and I’ll be on the lookout for any opportunity to photograph more bats in future.

I already wrote a post last year about the bats at Mataranka Hot Springs in the NT’s Elsey National Park. These bats perform a nightly death-defying mission just to get a drink of water. If, like me, you can’t get enough of these flying fuzz-balls, be sure to check it out as well. A warning though: Things don’t always end well for the bats, on account of the large chompy reptiles that live in the water…

Alright, I’ve put together a collection of my favourite bat facts. I hope you’re ready to hang from the ceiling and have your perception of bats completely flipped on its head!

1. Bats are the only mammals that can truly fly. While there’s a handful that are known to glide, only bats are able to use wings to propel themselves. The vast majority of bats require being able to drop from height in order to fly, but a handful of species (such as Vampire Bats) can even take off from the ground!

2. The study of bats is called chiropterology. Chiro = hand. Ptero = wing. In other words, the study of ‘hand-wings’. This name isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Over millions of years, bat hands slowly evolved into wings. I think Alie Ward from Ologies puts it best: “Imagine if you had a stubby, clawed thumb, and then your fingers got longer and longer, until your pinky was as long as your whole body – and webbed! And then you were like, ‘later losers’, and flew away.” That’s how bats evolved.

3. Bats are split into two groups – microbats and megabats. Microbats can be as small as 3cm and have a highly varied diet. They’re also typically the only ones that use echolocation. Megabats are also called flying foxes or fruit bats (because they only eat fruit and nectar), and have wingspans of up to 1.7 metres! Some species of megabat have been known to live for more than 40 years, making them the longest-living mammal on the planet for their size.

4. Baby bats are called pups, and due to the fact that bats typically give birth while hanging from cave rooftops, a newborn pup will remain attached to its umbilical cord for more than an hour after being born, to stop it from falling to the ground. Naturally, when the umbilical cord does eventually detach, the bat is left with a teeny tiny belly button!

5. The world’s largest bat colony can be found at Bracken Cave in Texas, and it contains an estimated 20 million bats. This colony can eat up to 200 tonnes of insects in a single night, and individual bats have been recorded eating more than a thousand mosquitoes in an hour.

6. The inhabitants of Bracken Cave are Mexican Free-Tailed Bats, which have been recorded flying at speeds up to 160km/h. This makes them the fastest mammal on the planet (sorry cheetahs, you’re not even close).

Bats are incredible creatures, known for their impressive intelligence and remarkable social structures. In fact, some scientists have argued that they may be more closely related to humans than we give them credit for.

The 18th century scientist Carl Linnaeus – regarded as the father of modern taxonomy – was the first to recognise bats as mammals. But he went even further, suggesting that they may in fact be primates! This was due to them having pectoral teats for feeding their young, unlike most other mammals.

This became known as the ‘flying primate hypothesis’, and the idea gained further traction in the 1980s, when neuroscientists discovered that flying foxes (megabats) have advanced neuronal connections between the eyes and the brain – a type of connection not found in any mammals apart from primates.

In fact, scientists conducting this research found that the brains of megabats and lemurs (a famously adorable primate) were virtually indistinguishable from each other. In 1986, Australian neuroscientist John Pettigrew concluded, “The only way to deny that the megabats are flying primates is to claim that primates, by definition, do not fly!”

In more recent years, DNA evidence has put serious doubt on the hypothesis, and the idea hinges upon microbats and megabats being ‘diphyletic’ – meaning that they evolved convergently, and that flight in mammals would have had to evolve twice! Given that no other mammals have developed the ability to fly, this seems unlikely. However, the brains of megabats and microbats do have very significant differences.

Essentially, neurology indicates that megabats are primates, but biology and genetics indicate that they probably aren’t! Either megabats and primates evolved remarkably similar brains completely independent of each other, or megabats and microbats evolved remarkably similar bodies completely independent of each other.

Pettigrew, for the record, stood by his claim that megabats will one day be considered primates, right up until his death in 2019.

Merlin Tuttle is arguably the world’s most passionate bat enthusiast, and he runs a bat conservation organisation aimed at demystifying the fears around bats, and emphasising the important role they play, not just in the global ecosystem, but also in the global economy.

Bats have a thoroughly unjustified reputation as spreaders of disease, so let’s start with the elephant in the room – covid.

A quick google will readily provide a thousand different theories on the origins of the coronavirus – from bats, to pangolins, to secret government labs. I couldn’t care less about where it actually came from. The simple fact is that, regardless of whether the virus originated in bats or not, if humans hadn’t been storing them in unhygienic conditions and then EATING THEM, it wouldn’t have been an issue. It boggles the mind that this still has to be articulated.

However, bats can pose a very real threat as carriers of other disease – most notably, rabies. The thing is though… Bats. Don’t. Attack. Humans.*

The very, very small number of deaths caused by rabies-infected bats are overwhelmingly the result of people deliberately handling and interacting with bats. Bats will only ever bite in self-defence when feeling threatened. On top of that, rabies is a completely preventable disease, and can be treated with both pre-exposure and post-exposure vaccines.

Conversely, it is impossible to overstate the value that bats provide as both pollinators and pest-controllers. More than 500 species of plant rely on bats as pollinators – and global supplies of banana, mango, and agave (the key ingredient in tequila) would likely be thrown into chaos without bats.

A 2011 study estimated that, in the United States alone, the value of bats in the agricultural industry is roughly $23 billion per year. That’s billion. With a B. Roughly the GDP of Iceland.

Bats, like all pollinators, face numerous threats – from habitat destruction, to disease and climate change. But one of the biggest challenges facing bats today is simply the stigma attached to them. Bats are not dangerous, disease-carrying animals to be feared. Rather, they are adorable, fuzzy flying puppies that benefit humans enormously, and deserve to be protected.

You can find more information about Merlin Tuttle’s conservation work at www.merlintuttle.org and I’d highly recommend listening to his episode of Ologies to learn even more about our furry, flying friends.

–

*Disclaimer: Out of more than 1,400 species of bat worldwide, just three are known to bite humans. These three species are collectively known as Vampire Bats, and are found only in Latin America. Human bites are extremely rare and cases of rabies are even rarer (and preventable). Given that bats can eat more than 1,000 mosquitoes per hour, they’re doing far more to prevent your blood being sucked than they are facilitating it.

–

Little Red Flying Foxes/Fruit Bats (Pteropus scapulatus), Mataranka Hot Springs, Australia