We interrupt your regularly scheduled post titles taken from Zep songs to bring you this information about bats.

Since this is a weekend, I thought I’d take a break from the update things I’ve been doing to talk to you about one of my favorite mammals:

There are more species of Chiroptera than of any other order, barring Rodentia. That means that there are many, many bat species. Some of them, like the various species of flying fox (my favorite!), are unmistakeable. Others, particularly the microchiropterans, are only distinguishable from each other with careful measurements and examinations, which are difficult to undertake while the bat is alive. Bats are even harder to identify when they’re in flight, which is why it was so useful that we captured a few with nets in the lab. We’re pretty sure that they are both members of Myotis californica- the California myotis- but we can’t be 100% positive without seriously traumatizing these awesome little critters- and that’s no good.

Our little guy echolocating. All bats except for the Old World Fruit Bats (the flying foxes and their relatives) can echolocate.

Everybody knows that bats have wings, but their anatomy has a lot of other cool features, too! Most bats are insectivores. A few eat fruit, some eat fish, and one species, the greater noctule bat, is known to eat small birds. And of course, the famous vampire bat, of which there are three separate species, drinks blood. As a result, their mouths are highly specialized. It’s really easy to tell what a bat eats just by looking at its mouth. Most bats drink by taking in one drop of water at a time, gently skimming the surface of the water and coming back for another drop again and again until they’re full. Bigger bats, like the flying fox, get their chests and bellies wet and then lick the water out of their fur.

What we have here, though, are not fruit bats. These are species of the Myotis and Molosser genera.  Mostly we see the Myotis bats around; they live in the bat houses and in the walls of our lab. Molossers live out in our bat cave, though. More on that when we take our hike out there.

You can tell that he's not a Molosser because his uropatagium (the skin between legs and tail) runs the entire length of his tail; the Mexican Free-tailed Bats have, well, a free tail.

 Because bats are built for flight, every unnecessary body part is a hindrance to their survival. Their skeletal structure is greatly reduced, they rarely have any meaningful fur outside of their trunk region, and other structures, such as their reproductive parts, get absorbed into their bodies when not needed. Bats only have rudimentary genital structures when not in the breeding season; after they’ve mated, they absorb the external structures back into the body cavity, basically growing them again at the start of the next breeding season. We are about a month out of the local bat breeding season; as a result, our captured specimens were hard to sex accurately. We did class our bigger one as a male; the littler one was likely male, but we could not tell for sure.

As another adaptation to their aerial locomotion, bats have very little body fat. You know the standard upside-down bat with folded wings you see all the time? That’s actually how they keep warm. Even though their wings are paper-thin, as you can see in the picture below, they are able to keep themselves warm with them. They trap air under their wings and that keeps them warm all night. Bats are also one of the only species of terrestrial mammals that can’t carry lice. They can carry a whole host of other diseases, though, so don’t touch a bat and then rub your eye and don’t provoke one. Getting bitten is not a good idea.

Infant bats are born blind and hairless, much like most baby mammals. They hang onto the mothers’ stomachs all the time; the moms breastfeed in-flight.  This is an infant bat we found stuck on the wires of one of the bat houses at the field station. It is not uncommon for smaller bats to get caught in these wires; usually they can free themselves, but this one was far too small. The main swarm of bats had already left to feed, so we returned it to the bat house because we weren’t sure that the mother bat could get it loose. 

So yeah. Bats are awesome.