100 Fun Facts About Bat

Bats are the only mammals capable of doing what?

True, sustained flight: flying squirrels, colugos and sugar gliders can only glide, while a bat flaps its wings to climb and stay airborne.

The bat order name Chiroptera comes from Ancient Greek words meaning what?

Hand wing: a bat's wing really is a hand, with four long fingers spread wide under a thin sheet of skin.

Which mammal group is the only one with more species than bats?

Rodents: about 40% of mammal species are rodents and roughly 20% are bats, so three in every five kinds of mammal belong to just these two groups.

Kitti's hog-nosed bat, the world's smallest bat, is nicknamed after which insect?

Bumblebee: at about 3 cm long, the bumblebee bat proved so unlike any other bat that scientists gave it a family of its own.

Kitti's hog-nosed bat lives in limestone caves in Myanmar and which other country?

Thailand: zoologist Kitti Thonglongya collected the bat in caves there in 1973 but died suddenly before he could describe it, so his British colleague John Hill named it in his honour.

Bats are the only native land mammals of which island country?

New Zealand: every other land mammal there, from rats and possums to the stoats and cats that now prey on its bats, arrived with people.

The giant golden-crowned flying fox, one of the world's largest bats, is found only in which country?

The Philippines: hunted for bushmeat and squeezed by the loss of the lowland forest it feeds in, this giant bat is now endangered.

The giant golden-crowned flying fox has a wingspan wider than five feet, yet it eats mostly what?

Figs: fig seeds are the commonest find in its droppings, and for all its size and fox-like face it is a shy fruit-eater that shuns farmland for wild forest.

Which species is the fastest bat, clocked at ground speeds of about 100 mph?

Mexican free-tailed bat: radio tags followed by plane clocked it at about 100 mph, faster than the swift, the quickest bird in level flight, though tailwinds may have helped.

Why can a roosting bat hang upside down for hours without tiring?

Tendons lock its toes shut: its own weight pulls the tendons into a ratchet-like catch, so hanging takes almost no muscle effort and it is letting go that takes work.

Besides their lungs, bats can take in oxygen through what?

The membrane of their wings: its skin is so thin, with blood vessels so near the surface, that some oxygen and carbon dioxide pass straight through it.

Tiny hairs dotted across a bat's wing membrane mainly help it do what?

Sense airflow and avoid stalls: when researchers removed the hairs, the bats became clumsier fliers, turning less nimbly around obstacles.

Why do bats rarely fly in rain, according to one explanation?

Raindrops interfere with their echolocation is one proposed reason; another is cost, since in one experiment wet bats burned about twice the energy of dry ones in flight.

Which insects can produce ultrasound that jams a bat's sonar?

Tiger moths: the species Bertholdia trigona fires bursts of ultrasonic clicks that blur a closing bat's sonar, while other tiger moths click simply to warn that they taste bad.

Most fruit bats cannot echolocate, but the Egyptian fruit bat manages it by making clicks with what?

Its tongue: nearly all other echolocating bats call from the voice box, but this one clicks its tongue in rapid pairs and speeds up as it nears an object.

The 52-million-year-old fossil bat Onychonycteris was found in which US state?

Wyoming: its inner ear lacked the enlarged cochlea of sonar-using bats yet its wings were built to fly, strong evidence that bats flew before they could echolocate.

Fossil pigment granules revealed that the 48-million-year-old bats of Germany's Messel Pit were what colour?

Brown: the fossil fur held tiny rounded pigment capsules of the kind that carry reddish-brown melanin, so these ancient bats looked much like many living ones.

Relative to body size, 19 mammal species outlive humans: 18 are bats, and the other is which African burrower?

Naked mole-rat: all the rest are bats, whose hibernating species live longest of all; one tiny bat in Siberia was recaptured 41 years after it was first banded.

Which US national park is known for bats pouring from its cave at dusk?

Carlsbad Caverns: by his own account, teenage cowboy Jim White found the cave when he went to inspect a plume he took for a volcano or a whirlwind, and it turned out to be bats.

Most bat mothers raise a single baby at a time, known by what name?

Pup: in crowded nursery caves the young are parked together by the million, yet a returning mother finds her own by its call and scent.

Blood-feeding vampire bats live in the wild in which part of the world?

Central and South America: all three blood-feeding species live between Mexico and Argentina, and their usual victims are sleeping cattle and other animals, not people.

Vampire bats use which sense to find blood vessels near the skin of their prey?

Infrared heat sensing: nerve endings in pits on the nose carry a heat detector retuned to fire at about 30 °C, much as a pit viper senses warm prey.

How does a well-fed vampire bat help a roost-mate that missed a meal?

It regurgitates blood for it: a vampire bat can starve in two or three days without a meal, and bats that have shared before are the likeliest to be fed in turn.

Which kind of movement can vampire bats manage that most other bats have almost lost?

Running on the ground: they bound along on their strong folded wings rather than their legs, which lets them creep up on sleeping animals from below.

What keeps a vampire bat's upper incisors permanently razor-sharp?

They have no enamel: without that hard outer coat the incisors keep a razor edge, which slices a small flap of skin so the bat can lap the blood that wells up.

Desmoteplase, a drug modelled on a clot-dissolving protein from vampire bats, was trialled for which condition?

Stroke: doctors hoped the bat enzyme would work up to nine hours after symptoms began, but its large trials disappointed and development stopped in 2014.

The greater noctule bat is unusual among bats for hunting which prey on the wing?

Birds: feathers in thousands of its droppings gave the game away, showing that it catches small songbirds in mid-air as they migrate at night.

The spectral bat of the American tropics, once wrongly believed to drink blood, holds which record?

Largest carnivorous bat: up to a metre across the wings, it carries prey home to the roost to share with its mate and young.

What shelters the tiny Honduran white bat by day in the rainforest?

A leaf tent: it bites through the side veins of a big heliconia leaf so the sides droop, and the light filtering through the leaf helps hide its white fur.

The Honduran white bat's bright yellow ears and nose get their colour from which pigments, a mammalian first?

Carotenoids: the bat draws the yellow pigment lutein from its fruit diet and stores it in bare skin, which is why eye researchers study it for clues to macular degeneration.

White-nose syndrome, which has killed millions of North American bats, is caused by what?

A fungus: it thrives in cold caves and keeps rousing bats from their winter sleep, so they burn through their fat stores and starve before spring.

White-nose syndrome was first identified from a 2006 photograph taken in a cave in which US state?

New York: the photo, taken in a cave there in February 2006, shows the white fuzz on bats' muzzles; the disease probably arrived from Europe, where bats live with it unharmed.

Wisconsin scientists screened one common bat's droppings for which insect's DNA, finding it in most samples?

Mosquitoes: the famous claim that a bat eats 1,000 of them an hour stretches a lab test in a mosquito-filled room, but the DNA shows wild bats really do hunt them.

The pallid bat of the American Southwest can shrug off the venom of which favourite prey?

Scorpions: it can be stung several times while hunting Arizona bark scorpions without flinching, apparently because the venom fails to trigger its pain nerves.

Bracken Cave, summer home of the world's largest bat colony, lies just outside which city?

San Antonio: when housing threatened the land next door in 2014, the city and conservation groups struck a multimillion-dollar deal to buy it and keep the nights dark.

The world's largest urban bat colony lives under the Congress Avenue Bridge in which city?

Austin: a 1980 rebuild left narrow gaps under the deck that proved ideal roosts, and more than a million bats now pour out at dusk each summer.

Bat Conservation International was founded in 1982 by which conservationist?

Merlin Tuttle: when residents wanted the bats under a city bridge wiped out, he moved his young group there in 1986 and talked the public round.

Bat droppings, mined from caves for use as fertiliser, are known by what name?

Guano: so rich in nitrates that during the American Civil War the Confederacy mined Texas bat caves for it to make gunpowder.

Which Italian carmaker named its 2001 supercar the Murciélago, the Spanish word for 'bat'?

Lamborghini: the car honours not the animal but a fighting bull called Murciélago, said to have been spared after surviving a sword fight in Córdoba in 1879.

Bats are the main pollinators of which Southeast Asian fruit?

Durian: camera traps caught nectar bats and flying foxes at the blossoms, and flowers that bats could not reach set less fruit.

Lesser long-nosed bats, summer migrants to Arizona, feed mainly on which night-blooming plants' nectar?

Saguaro cactus and agaves: the bats follow the blooms north from Mexico each year, and by pollinating wild agaves they keep the plant behind tequila going.

Hoary bats, long-distance migrants, are the bats most often found dead beneath which structures in North America?

Wind turbines: most deaths come in late summer and autumn, as the bats migrate, perhaps because they take the turbines for tall trees to roost in.

What was the profession of Lytle Adams, who proposed the WWII 'bat bomb' in January 1942?

Dental surgeon: he sent his idea to the White House weeks after Pearl Harbor, and it was passed on with a presidential note saying 'This man is not a nut'.

What code name did the US military give its World War II plan to firebomb Japan with bats?

Project X-Ray: in a 1943 test, armed bats escaped and burned down a hangar and a general's car; the plan was later dropped, reportedly as the atomic bomb took priority.

In January 1982, Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat thrown on stage in which city?

Des Moines: he took the bat a fan had thrown for a rubber toy, and after the show he was rushed to hospital because of the risk of rabies.

Which rum brand's bat logo was inspired by fruit bats in the rafters of its first distillery in Santiago de Cuba?

Bacardi: the founder's wife, Doña Amalia, suggested the bat as a sign of good fortune, and locals who could not read simply asked for 'the rum of the bat'.

In the 1993 picture book Stellaluna, a young fruit bat separated from her mother is raised by what?

A family of birds: knocked from her mother by an owl, she lands in their nest and must eat insects and stop hanging by her feet until she finds other bats.

In which country's traditional culture do bats symbolise happiness and the 'Five Blessings'?

China: the word for bat, fu, sounds the same as the word for good fortune, so five bats circling a longevity symbol make a wish for all five blessings.

Camazotz, the bat spirit serving the underworld lords in the Popol Vuh, belongs to which civilisation's mythology?

Maya: his name means 'death bat', and in the Popol Vuh he swoops down and takes off the head of the Hero Twin Hunahpu, which ends up in the underworld ball court.

In Macbeth, the witches' cauldron recipe calls for which part of a bat?

Wool: the Second Witch adds 'wool of bat, and tongue of dog' straight after 'eye of newt, and toe of frog', all boiled with a slice of marsh snake.

Who played Batman in the campy 1966–68 ABC television series?

Adam West: he won the part over Lyle Waggoner after screen tests, and the show went out twice a week so that each story could break on a cliffhanger.

Legend says a bat helped King James I of Aragon capture which Spanish city in 1238, earning a place atop its arms?

Valencia: in one version a bat landed on the king's banner, in another its noise woke his camp before a night attack, and the bat still tops the city arms and Valencia CF's badge.

Which football club's earliest badge, used from 1899 to 1910, was crowned by a small bat?

FC Barcelona: the club began by borrowing the city's own coat of arms, bat and all, until a members' contest in 1910 produced the crest it still wears.

Despite the saying 'blind as a bat', how many bat species are actually blind?

None: even the smallest echolocating bats can see, and many fruit bats have big eyes and sharp night vision, steering by sight rather than sonar.

What do bats spread over their fur and wings to cool down in extreme heat?

Saliva: in a heatwave, flying foxes fan their wings, seek shade, pant and finally lick themselves so that evaporation carries the heat away.

Which of these is a real English dialect word for a bat?

Flittermouse: to flitter is to flutter, and the 16th-century word mirrors the German Fledermaus, literally 'flutter-mouse'.

Who wrote Dracula, the 1897 novel whose count can turn into a bat?

Bram Stoker: real vampire bats were named after the vampire of folklore, not the reverse, when naturalists borrowed the word in the 1700s.

What colour do the wings of at least six North American bat species glow under ultraviolet light?

Green: under UV lamps the wings and hind legs of all 60 museum specimens lit up, males and females alike, and nobody yet knows what the glow is for.

Greater mouse-eared bats reset their internal magnetic compass each evening using which cue?

The glow of sunset: bats shown a shifted magnetic field at dusk flew off in the wrong direction, while those exposed to it after dark were not fooled.

In 1758, which naturalist grouped bats with humans and monkeys in the order Primates?

Carl Linnaeus: he knew of only seven bat species and filed them beside humans, monkeys and lemurs; about twenty years later Blumenbach gave bats an order of their own.

Bats have spread across almost all of the globe, yet are entirely absent from which of these places?

Antarctica is the lone holdout: bats have reached almost everywhere else on land, short of the polar regions, a few remote islands and the highest mountaintops.

Bats form the second-largest order of mammals by number of species, behind only which group?

Rodents alone outnumber bats, which come second with more than 1,400 known species.

In the Americas, bat bites rather than dog bites are the commonest source of which deadly human disease?

Rabies deaths in the United States are mostly traced to bats, whose bites can be small enough to go unnoticed and so untreated.

Of the more than 1,400 known bat species, how many live entirely on a diet of blood?

Only 3 species drink blood, and each is distinct enough to sit in a genus of its own. No other mammal lives on blood alone.

Which author's 1897 novel Dracula let its vampire turn into a bat, cementing the animal's spooky reputation?

Bram Stoker deepened a link that already existed: Varney the Vampire, a penny dreadful of the 1840s, had put a bat on its cover half a century earlier.

Which American singer's 1977 debut album Bat Out of Hell became one of the best-selling records ever made?

Meat Loaf sang it, but composer Jim Steinman built the album out of Neverland, a futuristic rock musical he had written about Peter Pan.

Which Italian carmaker's 2001 supercar, the Murciélago, bears the Spanish word for bat as its name?

Lamborghini was really honouring a fighting bull called Murciélago, which went on to sire a famous line after surviving a bullfight in Córdoba in 1879.

Hardwicke's woolly bat of Borneo roosts inside which insect-trapping host, paying rent in droppings?

Pitcher plant is the answer: Nepenthes hemsleyana shelters the bat right above its pool of digestive fluid and takes its nitrogen from what the lodger leaves behind.

Which spiky-skinned Southeast Asian fruit grows from flowers pollinated by cave nectar bats?

Durian flowers are large and feathery with copious nectar, the classic design of a bloom built for bats, though giant honey bees visit one species as well.

The pallid bat, found from western Canada down to Mexico, shrugs off the venom of which dangerous prey?

Scorpions are regular prey, including the Arizona bark scorpion whose sting can kill a person. Mutations in the bat's sodium channels appear to blunt the venom.

Bat Week, an annual international celebration of bat conservation, ends each year on which holiday?

Halloween closes Bat Week, which runs from October 24 to 31 and was designed to raise awareness of why the animals need protecting.

The only claw on a microbat's wing grows from which digit, which points forward at the wing's leading edge?

Thumb is right: it juts forward to brace the front of the wing, while the big fruit-eating megabats usually carry a second claw on the next finger along.

The greater bulldog bat of the American tropics uses echolocation to detect ripples made by which prey?

Fish are gaffed with long, sharp claws and scooped into a pouch between the legs, a technique that earned the species its other name, the fisherman bat.

Which comedian voiced Batty Koda, a bat frazzled by lab experiments, in the 1992 animation FernGully?

Robin Williams made Batty his first animated role and improvised fourteen hours of lines for a part first conceived as an eight-minute role.

In which 1997 animated film is the undead sorcerer Rasputin accompanied by a talking albino bat named Bartok?

Anastasia made a favourite of Bartok, voiced by Hank Azaria as the comic relief, and the film's success led to a direct-to-video spin-off in 1999.

Which Pokémon of the Bat category lives in sunless caves and evolves first into Golbat and then Crobat?

Zubat, a Poison and Flying type, is so tied to the dark that the Pokédex places it in caves down where the sun's light never reaches.

From the 1780s, Americans dug bat droppings out of caves as a raw material for manufacturing what?

Gunpowder needs saltpetre, and when the Union blockade cut off supplies in the Civil War, the Confederacy fell back on cave deposits to make its own.

At which US national park do summer visitors gather in an amphitheatre at dusk to watch bats pour out?

Carlsbad Caverns stages a ranger talk before each exodus, and the passage where most of its bats roost was mined for their droppings in the early 20th century.

Before humans arrived, which island nation's only land mammals were bats, known there as pekapeka?

New Zealand had no other land mammals until settlers brought dogs and rats around 1250, and its lesser short-tailed bat is unusual in foraging on the forest floor as well as in the air.

The fringe-lipped bat of tropical forests finds prey by eavesdropping on the mating calls of which animals?

Frogs pay a price for romance: the more complex a male túngara's call, the better it works on a mate and the easier the bat finds him.

Until one turned up in Myanmar in 2001, Kitti's hog-nosed bat was known only from caves in which country?

Thailand's population is confined to one province, Kanchanaburi, so disturbing a handful of roosting caves could put it at risk of extinction.

Which small bat has been called the most abundant species in both the United Kingdom and continental Europe?

Pipistrelle is the name, and the species is trusted enough as pest control that a colony hunts inside Coimbra's Biblioteca Joanina, sparing old manuscripts from paper-eating insects.

What do biologists call a cave, mine or cellar where bats gather in large groups to sit out the winter?

Hibernaculum covers any animal's winter refuge, from a snake's rock pile to a bear's den, but bats favour big underground sites where large groups can roost together.

Which bat family, the most diverse of all, takes its common name from the Latin word for evening?

Vesper bats owe the name to vespertilio, the Romans' own word for a bat, which was built on vesper and later became the scientific name of the family's founding genus.

Some female bats mate in autumn yet delay fertilisation until spring by storing what through the winter?

Sperm is held in the female's reproductive tract through the cold months, so no egg is fertilised until late winter or early spring.

Males of the Dayak fruit bat of Southeast Asia are among the very few wild male mammals known to do what?

Produce milk is right: the males have working mammary glands, and a lactating father may even help to nurse his own young.

Spix's disk-winged bat roosts inside smooth, furled leaves, gripping them with what on its limbs?

Suction cups let it cling head-up, the reverse of most bats, and its numbers may be limited by how many plants with rolled leaves it can find.

Horseshoe bats are named for the shape of which facial structure?

Noseleaf is the term for the fleshy horseshoe, part of an echolocation system refined enough to pick out prey among cluttered vegetation.

In March 2009 a bat clung to the external fuel tank of which NASA space shuttle as it lifted off?

Discovery's stowaway had been spotted during the countdown, and NASA observers expected it to fly away once the engines lit. It held on as the shuttle climbed.

Which composer wrote Die Fledermaus, the 1874 Viennese operetta whose German title means The Bat?

Johann Strauss II wrote it for Vienna's Theater an der Wien, where it opened in April 1874. The plot is one man's playful revenge for an old practical joke.

What is the anatomical name for the thin, stretchy skin that forms the surface of a bat's wing?

Patagium is also the word for the gliding skin of other mammals and the wings of pterosaurs. A bat's runs from its belly out to the tip of every finger.

In Ovid's version of the Greek myth, the daughters of Minyas became bats after refusing to worship which god?

Dionysus was the god they snubbed by staying home at their weaving while the other women revelled, and in one telling their work turned into vines as they changed.

Some ten million straw-coloured fruit bats migrate each year to Kasanka National Park in which country?

Zambia hosts what is billed as the largest mammal migration on Earth, as the bats crowd into one patch of swamp forest from October to December.

Fruit bats are the natural reservoir of which virus, first identified on Malaysian pig farms in 1998?

Nipah takes its name from Sungai Nipah, the Malaysian village behind the first isolated human case, and a million pigs were culled to end that outbreak.

In which Pacific island nation are bats held sacred and considered the property of the monarch?

Tonga's village of Kolovai is home to a large colony of Pacific flying foxes, a fruit-eating species found on islands from Papua New Guinea to the Cook Islands.

Which Spanish artist pictured bats and owls swarming a sleeping man in The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters?

Francisco Goya made it number 43 of the 80 prints in Los Caprichos, his 1799 satire on Spanish society, and the swarming bats may stand for ignorance.

Males of which large African megabat gather along rivers in 'leks' and honk loudly to attract females?

Hammer-headed bat males are built for noise: a voice box roughly triple the size of a female's, plus resonating chambers in the face, turns each call into a blare.

Which 18th-century Italian scientist showed that bats could navigate in the dark without using their eyes?

Lazzaro Spallanzani blinded bats and found they still dodged obstacles. A Swiss naturalist, Louis Jurine, then showed that plugging their ears left them disoriented.

Most flying foxes are gregarious and roost in large colonies, sometimes 100,000 strong, known by what name?

Camps of the little red flying fox can hold up to 100,000 animals, dwarfing those of the large flying fox, which top out around 15,000.

Batman made his 1939 debut in issue 27 of which comic book series, later the source of its publisher's name?

Detective Comics lent its initials to DC Comics and went on to become the longest-running comic book series in the United States.