It’s tough being a bat.
Movies show bats turning into Dracula. Bats swarming you to get to your neck, get in a bite, and suck your blood.
Then there’s the one where bats get caught in the locks of people with long hair. The bats freak out, squeal, scratch, and — oh no! — turn the person into a vampire while trying to break free.
Truth is that bats, the only mammal capable of flight, are a blessing.
“If you see a bat, be happy. They do way more good for us than what they usually get perceived as.”Mike Mills, a bat expert at the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation.
Where mosquitos are thick, which is pretty much everywhere in Southwest Florida, bats can eat their body weight in the pesky insects. That’s several thousand Asian tiger mosquito and fungus gnats, per bat, every day.
More than 500 plant species depend on bats as their main or only pollinators.
Bats that feed primarily on fruit are essential in spreading the seeds of many fruit plants including mangos, figs, and papayas, which get spread around via their guano.
The seeds they excrete help reforest entire areas flattened by wildfires, floods, or previous development.
“If you see a bat, be happy,” said Mike Mills, a bat expert at the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation. “Besides bats being very cool, they play an extremely important role in our ecosystem. They do way more good for us than what they usually get perceived as.”
'Bat houses'
Hurricane Ian in 2022 left a slew of trees on Sanibel and Captiva islands decimated: foliage stripped, trunks toppled, swaths of forested areas flattened.
Hurricanes Helene and Milton last year ruined even more of the island's forested areas, even stripping new foliage from some of the trees that were recovering from Ian.
The demise of so many trees, and the dark nooks and crannies within them, meant roosting habitat for the islands' bat colonies disappeared.
Bats are a key species. The health of an area's colonies, or lack thereof, is an indicator of the overall ecological health of a region.
Without anywhere to roost bats will go elsewhere, upsetting the balance of nature in the area they left behind.
The SCCF has installed more than a dozen "bat houses" to restore some of the lost bat roosting habitat, giving the animals somewhere to hang out all day.
Previously
- Hundreds of baby bats grounded due to storm rescued and re-nested by von Arx Wildlife Hospital
- Got bats? Now is the time to shut them out -- temporarily
- Bat maternity season over, it's OK to kick them out
“With the building and installing of bat houses, SCCF is providing an alternative to these lost trees,” Mills said.
The foundation is offering free plans on how to build and install a bat house in hopes of encouraging residents to build one or more and put them on their properties. For blueprints, click here .
“Ian was a huge wake-up call,” Mills said. “With the building and installing of bat houses, SCCF is providing an alternative to these lost trees.”
The SCCF also sends its wildlife biologists to local schools and community groups to spread the word on how vital bats are within their ecosystems.
'Harmful myths'
Bats have been tied to such misinformation — that they are blood-sucking supernatural agents of darkness — for centuries.
Bats picked up a nasty reputation when European explorers encountered the species in Central and South America in the 1500s and quickly associated them with vampire folklore.
Smithsonian Magazine reported only three of the roughly 1,000 bat species worldwide drink blood, and its most often a tiny nip from a cow that so small the animal doesn't notice.
Bat Conservation International lists "the proliferation of harmful myths" as one of the top four reasons why bat populations are declining worldwide today.
Another reason is far more timely: Tiny bats are hit and killed daily by energy-creating wind turbines, which reach speeds of over 100 miles per hour. Because of their sheer size they often appear to be traveling slower.
The U.S. Department of Energy found as many as 853,685 bats killed per year by a wind turbine blade.
The bat conservation group said the question as to why bats end up at wind farms is still up for debate.
"They might just be curious, they might be hunting for bugs near the turbines, and it might be love. Male bats can be attracted to large trees as landmarks in otherwise open space as sites to sing to attract females."
In some places bats are hunted for sport or meat.
Other causes of the worldwide decline in bats are inherent in bats: They have a very long gestation period, and diseases like white-nose syndrome have become endemic.
In a twist, the actual deadliest animal in the world is one of bats' main food sources: mosquitos.
Spreading diseases like malaria, dengue fever, West Nile, Zika, and lymphatic filariasis, the tiny, near-weightless mosquito kills more people than any other creature in the world.
Sentinel species
Bats aren’t just helpful because they keep down Florida’s mosquito population.
A 2011 study in the journal Science estimated that insect‑eating bats provide U.S. agriculture with pest‑control services worth up to $20 billion a year.
As a true sentinel species, a bat population's health signals environmental strength or weakness.
In other words, their health and population trends provide an early warning system for broader environmental threats. Bats live long lives, and are very sensitive to changes that eventually affect other species, including humans.
They are very sensitive to temperature changes, and climate change and warming waters are already chasing them to higher latitudes or elevations.
That's because heat stress can kill bats en masse. And because they are pollinators, seed dispersers, and pest controllers, their disappearance is a sign of a collapsing ecosystem.
If nectar-feeding bats decline, the plants that depend on them fail to reproduce. Mosquito-eating bats dying off can lead to an explosion in agricultural pests.
Bats also support the entire predator chain above them. Fewer bats, more problems with owls, hawks, snakes, raccoons, and weasels.
And less healthy bats, or ones in a dysfunctional environment, are susceptible to rabies and public warnings go out, as happened last week in Charlotte County.
Vampires bad; vampire bats good
Bats picked up the bad rap when European explorers encountered the species in Central and South America in the 1500s and quickly associated them with vampire folklore.
But even a vampire bat isn't all that scary.
In fact, the species is saving human lives. And not by biting them and making them live forever.
Vampire bats have an enzyme in their saliva — somebody had to name it Draculin, of course — that can dissolve a clot to allow a jammed-up blood supply to flow freely. Stroke victims may benefit from the drugs being develop from the enzyme.
A healthy bat population means the environment around them is functional.
In Florida, that means lots of healthy wetlands, a strong forest, and a robust food web.
And fewer mosquitos.
“Bats are out friends,” Mills, the bat expert from SCCF, said.
Environmental reporting for WGCU is funded in part by VoLo Foundation, a non-profit with a mission to accelerate change and global impact by supporting science-based climate solutions, enhancing education, and improving health.
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