I’ll be honest: I filed bats under “spooky Halloween decoration” and moved on with my life. Big mistake. The more I dug, the more these little guys kept one-upping themselves. They’re not blind, they’re not flying mice, and one American colony is so enormous it shows up on weather radar like an incoming storm. Oh, and during World War II the United States strapped tiny firebombs to them, which went about as well as you’d expect. Here are five true things about bats that I still can’t quite believe.
Did you know a single little brown bat can eat about 1,000 mosquito-sized insects in one hour?
Forget citronella candles and bug zappers. The most effective mosquito control on the planet weighs less than three nickels. A single little brown bat can snatch roughly 1,000 mosquito-sized insects out of the air in a single hour of hunting, catching many of them in its wing and tail membranes like a baseball glove before flipping them into its mouth mid-flight. Multiply that across a colony feeding all night, every night, and bats are quietly running the biggest pest-control operation in America, unpaid and largely unthanked. Scientists estimate bats save U.S. farmers billions of dollars a year in pest damage and pesticide costs. The next time one flutters past your porch light, that’s not a spooky omen. That’s the night shift clocking in.
Did you know Austin’s Congress Avenue Bridge is home to 1.5 million bats?
When engineers renovated the Congress Avenue Bridge in downtown Austin in 1980, they accidentally created the perfect bat condo: the new expansion joints underneath were exactly the right width and temperature for Mexican free-tailed bats to roost in. The bats noticed immediately. Today about 1.5 million of them live under the bridge, the largest urban bat colony in North America, smack in the middle of the Texas state capital. At first, alarmed residents petitioned to have them removed. Now the nightly summer emergence, a ribbon of bats pouring out at dusk like smoke, draws over 100,000 tourists a year, and Austin has fully embraced its role as Bat City. Not bad for squatters who never signed a lease.
Did you know the U.S. actually built a WWII bomb filled with live bats?
This is not a tall tale. After Pearl Harbor, a Pennsylvania dentist named Lytle Adams pitched the White House on a wild idea: attach tiny incendiary devices to bats, drop them over Japanese cities in special canisters, and let the bats roost in the wooden and paper buildings, where their timed firebombs would ignite thousands of fires at once. The military said yes. It became Project X-Ray, and here’s the kicker: it worked. During testing in 1943, some armed bats got loose at Carlsbad Army Airfield in New Mexico, roosted under a fuel tank and in the barracks, and burned a chunk of the test base to the ground. The program showed genuine promise, but it was ultimately shelved because a bigger project was moving faster: the atomic bomb. The bats, presumably, did not complain about the layoff.
Did you know bats aren’t blind, and some see better than you do?
“Blind as a bat” might be the most wrong idiom in the English language. Every single bat species has functioning eyes, and every one of them can see. Yes, many small insect-hunting bats rely on echolocation to nab prey in total darkness, but that’s a bonus sense on top of vision, not a replacement for it. And the big fruit-eating bats known as flying foxes don’t echolocate at all. They navigate by sight and smell, with large, sharp eyes tuned for low light that outperform human vision after sunset. So a flying fox cruising at dusk is seeing the world more clearly than you are. Next time someone calls you blind as a bat, take it as a compliment to your excellent night vision.
Did you know one Texas cave holds so many bats they show up on weather radar?
Bracken Cave, just outside San Antonio, is the summer home of an estimated 15 to 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats, the largest colony of bats on Earth. When they pour out of the cave mouth at dusk to hunt, the emergence takes hours, and the swarm is so dense that National Weather Service radar picks it up as a big blob, the same way it registers a rainstorm. Meteorologists in Texas routinely have to distinguish between actual weather and what is essentially a bat commute. In one cave, at one time, there are more mammals than there are people in the entire state of New York. And every night they head out and eat more than a hundred tons of insects before breakfast. Try putting that on a resume.
Send this to the friend who’s scared of bats… they’ll never look at a “blind as a bat” joke, or a weather map over Texas, the same way again.
