Nature Conservancy Magazine: Spring 2009 - In the Dark: Bat Benefits

See more photos in this audio slideshow with the bat biologists talking about their work!

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A little brown bat weighs about 7 grams, or as much as three pennies, and lives as long as 20 to 30 year.

Go Deeper

The Bat Diaries
Reports from the Field

Conservation Science
Bat Deaths Mystify Scientists

Video
Something Is Killing Our Bats
(U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)

The Nature Conservancy in Vermont
The Vermont program has assisted in the protection of well over 170,000 acres of the state's most ecologically significant natural areas.

Sidebar: Bat Benefits

Without bats, there would be no margaritas.

Making up one-quarter of all mammal species, the 1,116 species of bats worldwide provide a lot of services: They pollinate flowers, gobble insects and fertilize plants. Even blood-sucking vampire bats benefit humans at least some of the time.

Around the world, bats pollinate or disburse the seeds of more than 300 important species, including wild bananas, wild avocados and durian, a fruit coveted in southeast Asia. In Mexico bats pollinate saguaro cactus and agave plants, from which tequila is distilled. Bats are an important pollinator of agave and have helped make commercial tequila production possible (although the agave seedlings used for tequila production are increasingly being grown in labs). Still, no bats, no tequila. And no tequila, no margaritas.

These bats follow cactus and agave blooms north out of Mexico and into the southwestern United States, says Barbara French, science officer for Bat Conservation International in Austin, Texas.

But of the 47 species of bats in the United States, French says, most are insect eaters.

In fact, a single little brown bat can eat up to 1,200 insects an hour. And one study showed that 150 big brown bats eat enough adult cucumber beetles in one summer to prevent them from laying the eggs that would produce 33 million crop-damaging larvae the following year.

Even bat guano, or excrement, has important benefits to humans. Guano recently renewed its popularity as a plant fertilizer because it is all natural and totally organic. Two hundred years ago it was also used to make gunpowder. Today, enzymes first discovered in bacteria that grow in bat guano are used in laundry detergents.

There are probably no bats more reviled than vampire bats, which are found only in Latin America. Their blood-sucking strategies, however, are more akin to those of mosquitoes than Count Dracula’s. They bite, but don’t kill. Even these bats benefit humans. The substance in vampire bat saliva that stops blood from clotting has been used in medical research to develop drugs that researchers hope will help treat stroke victims.

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