Hundreds of animals eat fruit, from toucans to fruit bats to maned wolves to humans. But most fruit-bearing plants evolved relatively recently in Earth's history, showing up for the first time in the Cretaceous, the final ...
Ecology
Aug 16, 2022
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263
Frog-eating bats trained by researchers to associate a phone ringtone with a tasty treat were able to remember what they learned for up to four years in the wild, new research has found.
Plants & Animals
Jun 20, 2022
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740
Social bonding between randomly assigned college roommates is not only a human phenomenon, a new study on vampire bats suggests.
Plants & Animals
Apr 5, 2022
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259
Whether chatting with friends at a dinner party or managing a high-stakes meeting at work, communicating with others in a group requires a complex set of mental tasks. Our brains must track who is speaking and what is being ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 21, 2021
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190
Forager ants do it, vampire bats do it, guppies do it, and mandrills do it. Long before humans learned about and started "social distancing due to COVID-19," animals in nature intuitively practiced social distancing when ...
Ecology
Mar 4, 2021
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348
They can't tell fortunes and they're useless with the stock market but bats are quite skilled at predicting one thing: where to find dinner.
Plants & Animals
Nov 2, 2020
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We humans can explain how our relationships with college roommates and co-workers have formed over the years, but scientists haven't had a good grip on how friendly connections among strangers are made between animals—until ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 19, 2020
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186
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
On moonless nights in a tropical forest, bats slice through the inky darkness, snatching up insects resting silently on leaves—a seemingly impossible feat. New experiments at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 1, 2019
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843
Some 18 million years ago, an ancestor of mouse-eared bats "stole" genetic material from an ancient virus related to Ebola.
Cell & Microbiology
Jul 24, 2018
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188
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
