Latest Bats Stories
They are tiny, ugly, disease-carrying little blood-suckers that most people have never seen or heard of, but a new discovery in a one-of-a-kind fossil shows that “bat flies” have been doing their noxious business with bats for at least 20 million years. For bats, that’s a long time to deal with a parasite doing its best vampire impression. Maybe it is nature’s revenge on the vampire bat, an aggressive blood consumer in its own right that will feed on anything from sheep to dogs and...
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said on Tuesday that the death toll for bats in North America that have suffered from White-nose Syndrome has exceeded 5.5 million. Biologists and partners of the service estimated that at least 5.7 million to 6.7 million bats have died from white-nose syndrome (WNS). The syndrome was first documented in New York in 2006, and the disease quickly spread into 16 states and four Canadian provinces. Bats with WNS have symptoms like flying around outside...
KANSAS CITY, Mo. and ST. LOUIS, Jan. 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- BATS Global Markets (BATS), a global operator of stock and options markets, and Savvis, a CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) company and an outsourcing provider of managed computing and network infrastructure for IT applications, today announced that BATS will use Savvis' Chicago CH4 data center as its secondary data center facility for all three of its U.S. markets. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20100701/CG29735LOGO)...
WASHINGTON, Jan. 17, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- At the urging of Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), a federal agency Tuesday updated and greatly increased its estimate of bat mortality from white-nose syndrome (WNS), the devastating disease decimating bat populations in Vermont and across the United States. Leahy has long led efforts in the Senate Appropriations Committee for research funding to counter WNS, a wildlife crisis of unprecedented scale. In December Leahy wrote to U.S....
By placing real and virtual objects in the flight paths of bats, scientists at the Universities of Bristol and Munich have shed new light on how echolocation works. Their research is published today in Behavioral Processes. The researchers found that it is not the intensity of the echoes that tells the bats the size of an object but the 'sonar aperture', that is the spread of angles from which echoes impinge on their ears. Echolocating bats emit calls for orientation. These calls bounce...
'This study conducted during the International Year of the Bat offers a clear example of how the evolution of new traits, in this case a skull with a new shape, allowed animals to use new resources and eventually, to rapidly evolve into many new species' A new study involving bat skulls, bite force measurements and scat samples collected by an international team of evolutionary biologists is helping to solve a nagging question of evolution: Why some groups of animals develop scores of...
Bats derive their ability to use echolocation, the bouncing of sound waves off objects to produce an accurate representation of the environment in total darkness, from so-called “superfast” muscles, researchers reported in latest issue of the journal Science. These superfast muscles, which are located in the bats’ larynx, are a physical trait never before seen in mammals, and allow the bate to make a rapid series of calls as they home in on their prey. They are the fastest...
BIRMINGHAM, England, Sept. 16, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- UK National Bat Conference -- Wildlife Acoustics, the leading supplier of acoustic monitoring systems for endangered and threatened wildlife species around the world, announces a new handheld bat detector and recorder, the Echo Meter EM3. "Wildlife Acoustics has leveraged its vast experience in ultrasonic and acoustic monitoring to bring unparalleled functionality to bat researchers," said Ian Agranat, President and CEO of Wildlife...
If bats have invaded your home, August and Early Fall is the ideal time to take care of business. This is when bats leave their roost so this is the window of opportunity to "bat proof" a home and exclude them from returning during their winter absence. Bats are extremely roost-faithful, returning year after year to the same building sites. If exclusionary measures are not implemented, the bats will likely return. But before bats are excluded, they need to be evicted just like a bad...
A migrant farm worker from Mexico became the first person in the United States to ever die from a vampire bat bite, according to US health authorities.The unidentified 19-year-old was bitten July 15, 2010 while sleeping in his family's home in Michoacán, Mexico, AFP is reporting. He failed to seek out medical treatment for the bat bite and instead crossed the border into the United States en route to work in a sugarcane plantation in Louisiana. After one day working in the fields, he...
Latest Bats Reference Libraries
Image Caption: A stuffed Epomophorus labiatus at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Credit: David Starner/Wikipedia (CC BY 3.0) The Ethiopian epauletted fruit bat (Epomophorus labiatus) is a megabat that can be found in Kenya, Ethiopia, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Sudan, Rwanda, and Uganda, among many other areas. It prefers a habitat within arid and moist savannahs, at elevations of up to 6,561 feet above sea level. It can also be found in woodland or bushland areas....
The Indiana bat (Myotis sodalist) is a mouse-eared bat that can be found in North America. Its range primarily includes eastern and Midwestern states, but it can be found in some southern areas of the United States. During the winter, its range becomes much smaller, with most populations occurring in large clusters in only a few caves. One study conducted in 1985 suggested that an estimated 244,000 individuals of this species reside in Indiana. Its range overlaps that of the endangered gray...
The greater horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus ferrumequinum) can be found in Japan, Africa, Europe, China, South Asia, Korea, and Australia. It prefers a habitat in warm regions, with open scrub and trees, human settlements, and bodies of water like ponds. It will also inhabit older orchards, glades within woodlands, and permanent pastures, among other areas. Many of its roosts occur in houses in the northern areas of its range and in caves in the southern areas of its range. These bats travel to...
The large flying fox (Pteropus vampyrus) is a megabat that is can be found from the Malay Peninsula, to the Philippines in the east, with a southern range that included Timor, Java, Sumatra, and Borneo. Its other common names include the Malaysian flying fox, the greater flying fox, the Kalong, or the Kalang. This Old World bat prefers a habitat within many areas including mangrove and primary forests, as well as fruit orchards with a variety of fruits. Depending on the location in which it...
The big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) is a vesper bat that can be found in many areas including Canada, Colombia, Guatemala, Jamaica, Panama, and the United States. It can be found roosting in many areas including tree hollows, caves, barns, abandoned buildings, and window shutters. It is thought that these bats prefer to roost in natural structures like caves for the winter. During this time, the bats will hibernate, but if the weather is warm, flying about and even breeding can occur. There...
