28 Amazing Facts about bats!

• A collection of bats is a colony, a cloud or a cauldron. (That last one is perfect for Halloween!)
• They've been around since the time of the dinosaurs.
• Their metabolism is super charged. They can digest a banana in 20 minutes, so no Fat Bats!
• There are Mega bats (big ones like fruit bats) and Micro Bats (small ones that eat insects)
• Texas is home to the world's biggest bat colony in Bracken Cave. (20 million of them!)
• There is a bridge in Austin city, and 1.5 million bats live under it. (Now it's a tourist attraction)
• When some Bats hibernate their heartbeats drop to 10 a minute and they can go for a few minutes without taking a breath.
• The heart rate of a flying bat can get to more than 1000 times a minute.
• The brown bat like to sleep for 20 hours a day, like a Koala!
• The Bumblebee bat is the smallest bat in the world. It's 30mm long and lives in Thailand.
• Bats have a special tendon in their toes that locks onto wherever they roost so they can hang using zero energy.
• Most bats can't take off from the ground, they let go from their roost and start flying.
• They have one way valves in their arteries to stop the blood rushing to their head.
• Mexican Free Tailed bats are the fastest flyer in the world at 160 KPH.
• There can be 4,000 bats in every square metre of the roof or walls in a bat cave.
• Guano beetles eat the guano turning it into a sand like consistency.
• Dermestid beetles make short work of any bat that doesn't make it. They turn it into a clean skeleton within 20 minutes. Museums use these beetles to clean their skeletons for display.
• Waste products from Dermestid beetles creates an ammonia rich atmosphere in the cave that is toxic to humans. They also bite!
• Bats are better long distance pollinators than birds or bees.
• The Austin bats eat up to 14,000 kilo's of crop destroying insects every night.
• Insect eating Micro bats save American farmers $23 billion every year by saving their crops.
• Bats are in the Chiroptera family. Chiro means hands and their hands are their wings, not their whole arm like a bird.
• Having hands for wings makes them incredibly maneuverable in the air.
• Micro bats use echolocation to catch flying bugs.
• The echolocation calls are so high in pitch, people can't hear them, but they are as loud as a rock concert!
• They can process echoes that are 2 millionths of a second apart.
• Their echolocation skills are so advanced, the navy is studying them looking for ways to improve their sonar.
• Bats change their ear shape to detect echoes 3 times faster than you can blink.

Inside Bracken Cave in Texas, check out what the researchers are wearing!

Visiting the largest bat colony on earth!

An excellent Bat documentary.