Ever thought about buying or building a bat box to help bats? Think carefully about the design and where you put it, University of Illinois researchers say.
Plants & Animals
Mar 29, 2021
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186
The fungus behind white-nose syndrome, a disease that has ravaged bat populations in North America, may have an Achilles' heel: UV light. White-nose syndrome has spread steadily for the past decade and is caused by the fungus ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 2, 2018
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6008
A new Tel Aviv University study rejects assertions that the origin of the COVID-19 outbreak lies in bats. According to the study, bats have a highly effective immune system that enables them to deal relatively easily with ...
Ecology
Sep 5, 2022
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241
Scientists have figured out why vampire bats are the only mammals that can survive on a diet of just blood.
Plants & Animals
Mar 25, 2022
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659
A new paper titled "Long-read sequencing reveals rapid evolution of immunity and cancer-related genes in bats" in Genome Biology and Evolution shows that rapid evolution in bats may account for the animals' extraordinary ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 20, 2023
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519
It's no coincidence that some of the worst viral disease outbreaks in recent years—SARS, MERS, Ebola, Marburg and likely the newly arrived 2019-nCoV virus—originated in bats.
Cell & Microbiology
Feb 10, 2020
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1760
(AP) -- Biologist Susi von Oettingen walked into the dark World War II-era military bunker and took out her flashlight. Among the old pipes, wires and machinery parts, she saw some bats hanging from cracks in the cement ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 26, 2010
1
0
A scientific explanation for those battles over the air conditioning remote control: Researchers at Tel Aviv University's School of Zoology offer a new, evolutionary explanation for the familiar scenario in which women bring ...
Evolution
Oct 7, 2021
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319
The fossilized remains of a giant burrowing bat that lived in New Zealand millions of years ago have been found by a UNSW Sydney-led international team of scientists.
Archaeology
Jan 10, 2018
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1111
The researchers discovered that a rainforest vine, pollinated by bats, has evolved dish-shaped leaves with such conspicuous echoes that nectar-feeding bats can find its flowers twice as fast by echolocation. The study is ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 28, 2011
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See article
Bats are mammals in the order Chiroptera (pronounced /kaɪˈrɒptərə/). The forelimbs of bats are developed as wings, making them the only mammals naturally capable of flight (opposed to other mammals, such as flying squirrels, gliding possums and colugos, that glide only for a distance). Bats do not flap arms like birds, instead they flap spread out hands where their fingers are very long and covered with a thin membrane or patagium. Chiroptera comes from two Greek words cheir (χειρ) "hand" and pteron (πτερον) "wing."
There is an estimated total of about 1,100 species worldwide, which is about 20 percent of all classified mammal species. About 70 percent of bats are insectivores. Most of the rest are frugivores, with a few species being carnivorous. Bats are present throughout most of the world and perform a vital ecological role by pollinating flowers, and eat various plants to dispere their seeds. Many tropical plants depend for their seeds to be distributed entirely by bats.
Bats range in size from Kitti's Hog-nosed Bat measuring 29–33 mm (1.14–1.30 in) in length and 2 g (0.07 oz) in mass, to the Giant golden-crowned flying fox which has a wing span of 1.5 m (4 ft 11 in) and weighs approximately 1.2 kg (3 lb).
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
