In celebration of Halloween, let’s talk about bats.
What do bats have to do with Halloween? No idea. They arent scary or anything. But I see lots of bats decorations around Halloween time so bat facts are in vogue.
There are a lot of bats out there. In fact there are over 1,300 recognized bat species, making up one out of five species of mammals. Only rodents are more numerous.
Bats are obviously known for their ability to fly. But the common vampire bat is the only bat that is capable of ground movement. The reason? After feeding, they are too heavy to fly away. So they drop to the ground, hop over to the nearest bush, and take a massive leak. With that liquid removed they are then able to fly away.
Using machine learning, scientists were able to decode the “language” a group of Egyptian fruit bats used to communicate. And it was a sophisticated language! They are communicating specific problems to specific bats. So what were they talking about? Generally they were arguing about food, complaints about other bats being too close, their positions in the sleeping cluster, and male bats requesting sex from unwilling females. In other words bats are basically high school humans.
Bats are the only non human animal where it has been documented that males perform oral sex on females. The researchers were confused as to the reason behind this, initially thinking that maybe they were trying to remove the sperm of competitors. Except they also do it *after* having intercourse. So it seems to serve no purpose at all. It will surprise no one that these researchers were men.
Serotonin bats in the UK have large penises. Like really large. Like even if you were a size queen you would think, “no, that’s too big”. If scaled to the height of a human it would be over a foot long. Scaled to the relative vagina length of humans they would be nearly three feet long. So they are too big for penetrative sex, making how they reproduce a mystery until recently. Turns out they use them as extra arms to embrace the female and just press against the vulva.
Why do scientists spend so much time watching bats have sex? I have no idea. That’s a question about humans. I’m providing bat facts, not human facts.
It’s well known that bats use echolocation instead of sight to “see” in the dark. Except not all bats do that. Old world fruit bats used vision just like the rest of us. That’s why instead of the weird nose ear structures that insectivorous bats have, they have giant eyes. Which, when combined with human tendencies to find large eyes cute, makes them absolutely adorable sky puppies.
Unfortunately, especially in recent years, bats have been associated with diseases, such as covid. There is a reason for this. Due to their habit of flying, bats have a tendency to raise their body temperatures to crazy high levels. So any virus that can spread amoung bats needs to be able to survive high temperatures. Which means fevers, a major defense mechanism we have against infections, is largely ineffective against any pathogen that transfers to use from bats.
But in fact bats are remarkably healthy. Adjusted for their body size (in general small animals live short lives and large animals live long lives) bats are very long lived. Some of that is due to the fact they sleep a lot. Some is due to flying being great exercise. So if you want to live a long life take lots of naps and learn to fly.
Happy Halloween everyone! Hope you enjoyed this year’s edition of bat facts!