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60 free Bat trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
53 free bat trivia questions with answers, covering the only mammals that truly fly. The quiz starts with the biology: the 2-gram bumblebee bat, the flying foxes with five-foot wingspans, the tendons that let a bat hang upside down for free, the fossil that showed flight came before echolocation, and the vampire bats that sense heat, run on the ground and share blood with hungry roost-mates. From there it moves to bats and people. There are questions on Bracken Cave and the Congress Avenue Bridge, the fungus behind white-nose syndrome, the moths that jam bat sonar, guano and the fertiliser trade, the dentist who talked the White House into a bat bomb, Ozzy Osbourne's worst night in Des Moines, the Bacardi logo, Stellaluna, Camazotz, Macbeth and the 1966 Batman. Every answer is checked against a cited encyclopaedia page, and the mix of difficulty means it works for a Halloween party, a classroom nature unit or a pub quiz round.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Bats are the only mammals capable of doing what?
True, sustained flight
Flying squirrels, colugos and sugar gliders only glide; bats flap and stay up.
Q 02The bat order name Chiroptera comes from Ancient Greek words meaning what?
Hand wing
A bat's wing really is a hand: long, spread fingers stretched with a thin membrane called the patagium.
Q 03Roughly what share of all classified mammal species are bats?
20%
Only rodents outnumber them, with at least 1,500 bat species described so far.
Q 04Kitti's hog-nosed bat, the world's smallest bat, is nicknamed after which insect?
Bumblebee
It is arguably the smallest mammal on Earth by body length, at just 29 to 33 millimetres.
Q 05About how much does Kitti's hog-nosed bat weigh?
2 grams
It lives in limestone caves along rivers in western Thailand and southeast Myanmar and was unknown to science before 1974.
Q 06Kitti's hog-nosed bat leaves its roost for only about how long each evening?
30 minutes
It comes out for a brief evening feed and another 20 minutes at dawn, then spends the rest of the day in its cave.
Q 07The giant golden-crowned flying fox, one of the world's largest bats, is found only in which country?
The Philippines
It eats mostly figs and is endangered by deforestation and hunting for bushmeat.
Q 08Roughly how wide is the wingspan of the giant golden-crowned flying fox?
Just over 5 feet
At around 1.6 metres it is wider than many adults are tall, on a body weighing about 1.5 kilograms.
Q 09Which species is the fastest bat, clocked at ground speeds of about 100 mph?
Mexican free-tailed bat
That makes it a contender for the fastest horizontal flier of any animal, bird or bat.
Q 10Why can a roosting bat hang upside down for hours without getting tired?
Tendons lock its toes shut with no effort
The grip is passive, so the bat has to work to let go rather than to hold on.
Q 11Besides their lungs, bats can take in oxygen through what?
The membrane of their wings
Blood vessels lie so close to the surface of the wing skin that gases diffuse straight through it.
Q 12Tiny hairs dotted across a bat's wing membrane mainly help it do what?
Sense airflow and avoid stalls
Each hair sits in a small bump and works like a set of built-in airspeed sensors.
Q 13Why do bats rarely fly in the rain, according to one explanation?
Raindrops interfere with their echolocation
Q 21Blood-feeding vampire bats live in the wild in which part of the world?
Central and South America
Just three species feed only on blood, and two extinct relatives have been found as far north as the United States.
Q 22Vampire bats are the only mammals known to use which sense to find blood vessels near the skin?
Infrared heat sensing
Heat sensors around the nose do the job; the only other vertebrates with the trick are pit vipers, boas and pythons.
Q 23How does a well-fed common vampire bat help a roost-mate that failed to find a meal?
It regurgitates blood for it
Being wet also costs them extra energy, so most sit out downpours.
Q 14Which insects can produce ultrasound that jams a bat's sonar?
Some tiger moths
Other tiger moths use ultrasound as a warning that they taste bad, an acoustic version of bright warning colours.
Q 15Most fruit bats cannot echolocate, but the Egyptian fruit bat manages it by making clicks with what?
Its tongue
The clicks come slow and steady, then speed up sharply as the bat closes in on an object.
Q 16The 52-million-year-old fossil bat Onychonycteris, showing flight predated echolocation, was found in which state?
Wyoming
Unlike modern bats it had claws on all five fingers and probably alternated flapping with gliding.
Q 17What colour were the Messel Pit fossil bats, the first fossil mammals to have their colour determined?
Reddish-brown
Palaeochiropteryx and Hassianycteris lived about 48 million years ago.
Q 18The oldest known wild bat, a Siberian bat, was recaptured how many years after it was first tagged?
41
Bats live around three and a half times longer than other mammals of their size, and hibernators live longest of all.
Q 19A newborn bat pup can weigh up to what share of its mother's body weight?
40%
To manage it, the two halves of the mother's pelvis are joined by a flexible ligament that can spread during birth.
Q 20In most bat species, how many pups does a female give birth to per litter?
One
The pup usually emerges rear-first, possibly so its wings do not tangle on the way out.
The favour tends to be returned later, a textbook case of reciprocal altruism in animals.
Q 24Which kind of movement can vampire bats manage that most other bats have almost lost?
Running on the ground
They use a bounding gait powered by the forelimbs, useful for stalking sleeping livestock.
Q 25What keeps a vampire bat's upper incisors permanently razor-sharp?
They have no enamel
They are sharp enough that museum staff have cut themselves handling the skulls.
Q 26Desmoteplase, based on an anticoagulant in vampire bat saliva, was trialled for which condition?
Stroke
The same saliva compounds keep a bite wound bleeding while the bat laps up its meal.
Q 27The greater noctule bat is unusual among bats for hunting which prey on the wing?
Birds
It intercepts small migrating songbirds at night, high above the ground.
Q 28The spectral bat of the American tropics, with a wingspan approaching one metre, holds which record?
Largest carnivorous bat
It is also the biggest bat in the Americas and can carry off a dove that weighs almost as much as it does.
Q 29The Honduran white bat roosts under 'tents' it makes by biting through the leaf veins of which plant?
Heliconia
A leaf folded into a tent lives only about seven and a half weeks, so the bats keep building new ones.
Q 30The Honduran white bat's bright yellow ears and nose get their colour from which pigments, a mammalian first?
Carotenoids
Researchers study how the bat handles lutein in hopes of understanding macular degeneration in people.