All About Bats:What You Need To Know

Species of bats all over the world has a very wide variety, though usually it is the colonizing types of bats that cause problems to many buildings. These animals are not like the rodents or even a flying mouse. Bats are linked more closely to primates or shrews, although animals like bats oftentimes get a bad reputation attached to their names. The truth is they are not really that aggressive, and they are very beneficial to humans as well as to the environmental balance by eliminating some pesky insects.

Bats are not really blind animals. They are able to see just fine, but they can also use an echolocation as their prey searching technique. Echolocation is used by bats as their means of navigation for complex flights and for finding possible preys like insects on their wings. The wings of bats are essentially similar to our hands and arms thus they are given the “Chiroptera” scientific name, which means hand wing. The bats' bones in their finger and hands are quite elongated, which serves to give support and for wing movement. The bats hind limbs are especially modified for landing purposes and for hanging upside- down.

Bats can only become a nuisance to human when they happen to roost in great numbers in manmade dwellings. The smelly and rapid accumulation of their droppings more commonly called as bat guano is undeniably unsanitary, and can become a very fertile breeding ground to “Histoplasmosis”, which is a fungal disease. This is a transferable disease and can be transmitted to humans if we breathe in their fungal spores. Furthermore, bats are known as carriers of rabies that is a viral disease which causes progressive paralysis or death in some mammals, including humans.

Most people are more likely to experience nuisance bats when a roosting bat colony takes up a building as their residence. Attics of houses invite many bats and often make an excellent habitat as well as barns. Once they get inside and if they find the habitat to be good, the colony multiplies and grows in numbers until the homeowner makes notice of the bats flying out from the building. He might also observe several bat droppings in the chimney, outside, attic or even in the basement if their droppings falls down on the walls. Sometimes there are cases when a bat gets lost, and it may find a way out of your attic and goes into your living area. A transient bay in some occasion may also fly and gets into the house.

Bats tend to invade manmade houses and infrastructures because for the past several decades, human activities, whether direct or indirect have caused the destruction of their natural habitats and subsequently have caused the decline in their numbers. The use of chemical pesticides has reduced the supply of insects to which bats feed on and when bats ingest these contaminated insects. It can poison them thus decreasing the populations of bats. Deforestation, vandalism to caves and disturbance of their natural occurring maternity habitats may also kill bats.