Bat Trivia
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100 free Bat trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 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 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Bats are the only mammals capable of doing what?
True, sustained flight
True, sustained flight: flying squirrels, colugos and sugar gliders can only glide, while a bat flaps its wings to climb and stay airborne.
Q 02The bat order name Chiroptera comes from Ancient Greek words meaning what?
Hand wing
Hand wing: a bat's wing really is a hand, with four long fingers spread wide under a thin sheet of skin.
Q 03Which mammal group is the only one with more species than bats?
Rodents
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.
Q 04Kitti's hog-nosed bat, the world's smallest bat, is nicknamed after which insect?
Bumblebee
Bumblebee: at about 3 cm long, the bumblebee bat proved so unlike any other bat that scientists gave it a family of its own.
Q 05Kitti's hog-nosed bat lives in limestone caves in Myanmar and which other country?
Thailand
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.
Q 06Bats are the only native land mammals of which island country?
New Zealand
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.
Q 07The giant golden-crowned flying fox, one of the world's largest bats, is found only in which country?
The Philippines
The Philippines: hunted for bushmeat and squeezed by the loss of the lowland forest it feeds in, this giant bat is now endangered.
Q 08The giant golden-crowned flying fox has a wingspan wider than five feet, yet it eats mostly what?
Figs
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.
Q 09Which species is the fastest bat, clocked at ground speeds of about 100 mph?
Mexican free-tailed bat
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.
Q 10Why can a roosting bat hang upside down for hours without tiring?
Tendons lock its toes shut
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.
Q 11Besides their lungs, bats can take in oxygen through what?
The membrane of their wings
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.
Q 12Tiny hairs dotted across a bat's wing membrane mainly help it do what?
Sense airflow and avoid stalls
Sense airflow and avoid stalls: when researchers removed the hairs, the bats became clumsier fliers, turning less nimbly around obstacles.
Q 13Why do bats rarely fly in rain, according to one explanation?
Q 21Blood-feeding vampire bats live in the wild in which part of the world?
Central and South America
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.
Q 22Vampire bats use which sense to find blood vessels near the skin of their prey?
Infrared heat sensing
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.
Q 23How does a well-fed vampire bat help a roost-mate that missed a meal?
It regurgitates blood for it
Raindrops interfere with their echolocation
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.
Q 14Which insects can produce ultrasound that jams a bat's sonar?
Tiger moths
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.
Q 15Most fruit bats cannot echolocate, but the Egyptian fruit bat manages it by making clicks with what?
Its tongue
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.
Q 16The 52-million-year-old fossil bat Onychonycteris was found in which US state?
Wyoming
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.
Q 17Fossil pigment granules revealed that the 48-million-year-old bats of Germany's Messel Pit were what colour?
Brown
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.
Q 18Relative to body size, 19 mammal species outlive humans: 18 are bats, and the other is which African burrower?
Naked mole-rat
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.
Q 19Which US national park is known for bats pouring from its cave at dusk?
Carlsbad Caverns
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.
Q 20Most bat mothers raise a single baby at a time, known by what name?
Pup
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.
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.
Q 24Which kind of movement can vampire bats manage that most other bats have almost lost?
Running on the ground
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.
Q 25What keeps a vampire bat's upper incisors permanently razor-sharp?
They have no enamel
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.
Q 26Desmoteplase, a drug modelled on a clot-dissolving protein from vampire bats, was trialled for which condition?
Stroke
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.
Q 27The greater noctule bat is unusual among bats for hunting which prey on the wing?
Birds
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.
Q 28The spectral bat of the American tropics, once wrongly believed to drink blood, holds which record?
Largest carnivorous bat
Largest carnivorous bat: up to a metre across the wings, it carries prey home to the roost to share with its mate and young.
Q 29What shelters the tiny Honduran white bat by day in the rainforest?
A leaf tent
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.
Q 30The Honduran white bat's bright yellow ears and nose get their colour from which pigments, a mammalian first?
Carotenoids
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.