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| 13 colorful donuts from AI |
I recently read The Genius Bat (The Secret Life of the Only Flying Mammal) by Yossi Yovel and gave it four stars. While the bat facts were fascinating, the book got bogged down in boring background information on the researchers and the tedious process of how they set up experiments. Now, I am sure that stuff would be of great interest to fellow scientists, but I am not one, so I just wanted to hear about the bats! Anyway, four stars is a great rating in my system (most books get two or three), which means that overall I enjoyed the book and learned from it. I'm going to share some random tidbits from TGB for my Thursday 13, and I hope you will find them intriguing.
1. Bats are considered the most diverse of mammals with over 1,500 species (20 percent of the world's mammals), and they are found everywhere on earth, except for the North and South Pole. Most bats are tiny, many are social and live in colonies, and most are insectivores. If you don't like bugs and/ or want to avoid insecticides, then you should definitely appreciate bats!
2. Contrary to the saying, bats aren't blind, but most use echolocation (creating various sounds and then processing their echoes) to find food and avoid crashing into things. The sounds bats emit can vary greatly in frequency, depending on the particular bat species, their hunting patterns, and the environment. For example, low-frequency calls are better for finding large insects in open spaces, while sounds of a higher frequency work well in dense forests. Bats also communicate with each other by using sound, not necessarily exchanging political memes, but more like saying "move!" when another one is hogging a spot.
3. When bats use echolocation to find moving food, aka bugs, they are calculating time rather than distance. It isn't going to do a hungry bat any good to know that a flying insect is in a certain spot. Since the insect is moving, the bat needs to know exactly when their paths are going to cross, which is the moment the bat will pounce and chomp. Echolocation thus allows the bat to "see" the world as a series of events in time rather than space.
4. Bat wings are actually a pair of hands with a flexible skin membrane stretched between five very long fingers.
5. Nectar bats are important pollinators. As they drink nectar from flowers, they get covered in pollen, which they transmit to other flowers. Some flowers have evolved to be pollinated by specific bat types ~ the flower will open only when a bat of a certain weight lands on it. This is called coevolution.
6. In ancient mammals, the ear bones (ossicles) were connected to the jawbone, but later the two sets of bones separated. This is helpful for bats, so they can snack in flight while still performing echolocation and not smash into trees. We can too. Well, some of us.
7. Scientists are still debating whether bat flight evolved before echolocation or afterwards. Some assert that the two features must have evolved together because both require such a high energy output. Think about screaming while running ~ you'd soon run out of energy. Also, echolocation itself is synchronized with bat wing movement. When foraging, a bat emits one call per wing flutter, thus reducing the energy cost.
8. Fruit bats do not use echolocation. They're also generally much larger than insectivore bats. There's a huge fruit bat native to the Philippines called the giant golden-crowned flying fox, which can weigh up to 3.3 pounds. Remember, fruit flies like a banana, probably for the same reason bats do: bananas have not evolved to fly. Scientists argue over whether some bats lost the ability to echolocate or the echo-locators and non-ELs evolved in tandem.
9. Fossil records indicate that bats first appeared in the Eocene epoch (56 to 34 million years ago), and these were insectivores. Fruit bat fossils appeared much later, in the Oligocene epoch (about 35 million years ago). Or perhaps a supernatural entity created insect-eating bats on Tuesday and then thought oh no who is going to eat all this silly fruit I made, so it created fruit-eating bats on Wednesday. Take your pick.
10. Bats often travel huge distances, sometimes commuting over 50 miles in one day. Migration in fruit/ nectar bats follows the blooming patterns of various flowers. For example, one of the blossoms chased by Mexican bats is the agave plant, which they thoughtfully pollinate so humans can turn it into tequila.
11. Northern bats do not seek warm caves to hibernate in, as keeping body temp higher requires more calories; instead, they search for a cool cave where they can chill out at a lower temperature and thus stay alive with a slower metabolism. (This assumes that predators don't come in and nom them up.)
12. Short-nosed fruit bats have been observed performing oral sex on each other (female to male). Feel free to make jokes in the comments.
13. Yovel hinted a few times that the reason bat research has received so much funding is due to its role in military technology.
