2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
Creatures with a nocturnal lifestyle have always brought fear to people. Terrible tales were made up about them, abilities that they did not possess at all were attributed to them. Bats, feeding on beetles and moths, also got into the ranks of such monsters
Fear has big eyes
In people, apparently, at the genetic level, there is a fear of the dark, and at the same time of living creatures leading a nocturnal lifestyle. After all, the person himself is sleeping sweetly at this time, and therefore cannot control the actions of night residents. Therefore, he is worried whether you never know what they can do during this time.
Fears are not always unfounded. After all, such hunters as wolves, foxes really do damage to homey owners. But toads and bats were blacklisted in vain, because their excellent appetite helps gardeners to get rid of gluttonous insects that encroach on part of the harvest of berries, fruits and vegetables.
Mice or birds
Bats are called mice just for their external resemblance to rodents. But on a small size and a brownish or grayish fleecy surface of the body, their similarities end.
Mice are real pests that attack vegetables stored in cellars, grain in granaries, and food left unattended. It is not for nothing that they were nicknamed the “rodent squad”. And bats, for the most part, are content with caterpillars, mosquitoes, butterflies, moths.
But people did not rank them as birds either. Although they can fly, they cannot keep up with the birds either in speed or in flight range. True, some species, like migratory birds, are removed from their homes in autumn and fly to warmer regions. But most simply look for a cozy place in the attics of uninhabited houses, in mountain caves, in the hollows of thick trees and hibernate until warm times.
And the wings of bats are more like the membranous wings of extinct pterodactyls than the feathery wings of birds. And they are not arranged like those of birds. Therefore, they and their closest relatives, fruit bats (flying dogs), received an independent name - “
bats ».
Bats lifestyle
If a person does not interfere with bats with his barbaric behavior, then their life expectancy is estimated at 20-30 years.
The female has to carry her naked and blind cubs born in early summer for a couple of months, going on a night hunt. First, newborns tenaciously hold on to the mother's nipple, and later on to her hair. Only having learned to hang upside down on their own, clinging to the support with their paws, the cubs remain in the shelter, making it easier for the mother to hunt. How can a woman not sympathize with a bat here.
How much can you see while hunting in the dark of the night? Therefore, for a long life on Earth, bats have adapted to navigate the terrain not with the help of sight, but with the help of ultrasonic signals that are not subject to the human ear. That is why bats for a long time led curious naturalists by the nose, who could not understand in any way what helps the animals find their prey in the dark. Particularly meticulous people carried out experiments on the animals, either blindfolding them, or covering their ears, eventually realizing what was what.
It is interesting for the mother to communicate with the grown mouse, which is already able to fly after her on the hunt. She sends an ultrasonic signal to the cub to keep him on track. If, nevertheless, he loses sight of his mother, then he begins to scream, and the mother has to return for the foolish child.
Bats appetite
If a frog eats 7 mosquitoes in a day, then a bat manages to swallow 500 mosquitoes in an evening, or 50 flies, as the same curious scientists calculated. One person, specially watched by people, managed in 30 minutes with 115 mealworms, forcing the housewives to empty the food supplies into the trash can.
Vampires
After all, the passion for bats was not born out of nowhere. Vampire bats exist in nature, but they are small in size and live exclusively on the American continent. So, Russians can sleep peacefully:).
