Thread by @weatherindia

#InternationalBatNight: 4 Ways These ‘Dark Knights’ Silently Help Our World

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(📸: A. Prathap/BCCL Chennai)

Saturday, August 29, marks the celebration of the International #BatNight—an annual observance held on the final weekend of #August to celebrate bats, create awareness around them, and promote their conservation.

Owing to their unusual appearance, nocturnal nature, and association with blood-sucking vampires, bats are among the most misunderstood creatures on planet #Earth.

#InternationalBatNight

And the fact that the #COVID19-causing SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses were present among these flying mammals for decades has put bats at an increased risk of being seen as an enemy species.

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But misconceptions and misjudgments aside, bats are extremely crucial to the environment and provide some invaluable ecosystem services that aid plants, animals, and even us human beings to a great extent.

#InternationalBatNight

They are long-distance pollinators and seed dispersers

Bats play a vital role in helping plants reproduce by functioning as seed dispersers and pollinators.

(Pic: A. Prathap/BCCL Chennai)

Fruit-eating bats are known to play an extremely important role in forest regeneration. And unlike other birds, they tend to defecate or spit out seeds during flight, effectively facilitating seed dispersal in clear-cut strips.

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They also cover long distances during their nightly flights—frugivorous bats can disperse seeds up to 1-2 km away—and scatter far more seeds across cleared areas.

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While bat pollination is relatively less common when compared to bird or insect pollination, it involves an impressive number of economically and ecologically important plants such as bananas, mangoes, and guavas.

Plant-visiting bats also help pollinate some crucial plant species in terms of biomass in their habitats, which include columnar cacti and agaves—the dominant vegetation elements in arid and semi-arid habitats.

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They devour pests and insects

Over two-thirds of all bat species are insectivorous mammals that consume insect species during twilight and night hours from different habitats such as forests, grasslands, agricultural landscapes, aquatic, and wetland habitats.

They also belong to the limited groups of animals that naturally prey upon mosquitoes; the northern long-eared bats are especially famous for suppressing mosquito populations through direct predation.

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Earthworms may be farmers’ best friends, but bats closely follow with their natural pest-controlling abilities, which keep farms pest-free while simultaneously reducing the need to use harmful pesticides.

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On a typical night, a bat consumes the equivalent of its own body weight.

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But the species also consists of some stand-outs such as the Mexican free-tailed bats, who are known to consume an estimated one million kilogram of corn earworm moths—the most costly agricultural pest insects—each night!

In the USA alone, bats help reduce the cost of pesticide applications by a figure in the range of $3.7–$53 billion per year, and that’s excluding the costs associated with the ill-effects of pesticides’ impacts on ecosystems.

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They nourish and fertilise the soil

Bat excrement, also known as guano, is considered among the world’s finest natural fertilisers. It contains high concentrations of limiting nutrients like nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium.

Guano also functions as a soil conditioner and enricher, while improving the soil’s drainage and texture. It controls nematodes (plant-parasitic worms) in the soil and can be used as a natural fungicide too.

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They function as valuable bioindicators

Bats are excellent ecological indicators of habitat quality, and their size, mobility, longevity, taxonomic stability, population trends, and distribution grants them enormous potential as bioindicators to the existence of contaminants.

Increased environmental stress can also suppress bats’ immune systems, and therefore, a higher prevalence of diseases in these mammals could directly point at alterations in their environments.

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Therefore, apart from helping the environment directly, bats also provide an indirect service by functioning as proxies that help scientists diagnose the health of an ecosystem.

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All in all, these wonderful creatures are of immense value to nature and a lot of its inhabitants—including us human beings—and hence, they must be protected, studied, and valued at all costs. They are the heroes nature needs, and also deserves, at any point in time.