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Bat Facts
• Bats are the only flying mammals. Their wings are made of leathery skin.
• Most types of bat sleep during the day, hanging upside down in caves, attics acid other dark places. They come out at night to hunt.
• Bats find things in the dark by giving out a series of high-pitched clicks — the bats tell where they are and locate (find) prey from the echoes (sounds that bounce back to them). This is called echo location.
• Bats are not blind — their eyesight is as good as that of most humans.
• There are 900 species of bat, living on all continents except Antarctica.
• Most bats feed on insects, but fruit bats reed on fruit.
• Many tropical flowers rely on fruit bats to spread their pollen.
• Frog-eating bats can tell edible frogs from poisonous ones by the frogs' 0iating calls.
• The vampire bats of tropical Latin America feed on blood, sucking it from animals such as cattle and horses. A colony of 100 vampire bats can feed from the blood of 25 cows or 14,000 chickens in one night.
• False vampire bats are bats that do not suck on blood, but feed on other sm,i I I creatures such as bats and rats. The greater false vampire bat of Southeast Asia is one of the biggest of all bats.
• There are about 130 species of fruit bat known as flying foxes. They fly on leathery wings, which can span as much as 1.8 m, to feed on fruits such as bananas and figs.