Flash
17/4/25
International Bat Appreciation Day
On the 17th April every year it is International Bat Appreciation Day! Although you often don’t see them, bats live almost everywhere in the world, apart from where it is really cold! They are an important part of many ecosystems and are pollinators like bees and butterflies. But what do you know about bats?
Giant Golden Crowned Flying Fox
Common Pipistrelle
Top 10 Bat Facts
1. There are over 1,300 species of bats in the world. 18 species of bat live in the UK. The most common bat living here is the Common Pipistrelle, a tiny bat that can be found living all over the UK.
2. The largest species of bat is the Giant Golden Crowned Flying Fox. This bat has a wing span of up to 1.8 metres! It is one species of megabats, named because of their size. Megabats are found in tropical places such as Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Despite their size, and sounding a bit scary they are fruit bats, living off a diet of fruit!
3. Most bats are microbats though, which are much smaller. Microbats are carnivores, but generally they like to eat insects.
4. Then there are vampire bats! There are only 3 species of vampire bats and they live in Central and South America. These bats feed off animals blood!
5. Bats are mammals but very unusually they can fly. There are no other mammals that can fly at all! If you look closely a a bats wings you can see its arm and hand bones inside. Their wings are stretched skin over their super long fingers!
6. Bats like to hide somewhere safe, hidden and enclosed. They like dark quiet caves, old buildings, tree hollows and crevices. They’ll find places like this to sleep and to hibernate through the winter months when it is too tricky to find food.
7. Bats sleep hanging upside down, holding on with their feet. This lets them quickly fly off if they are ever in danger and need to get away quick.
8. Bats have excellent hearing which helps them explore the world around them and find insects to eat. They use echolocation making sounds which bounce off their surroundings and then echo back to them.
9. Bats are very sociable and live together in groups called colonies. These can contain about 20 bats or can be absolutely huge with thousands and thousands of bats living together.
10. Bat babies are called pups. They are born one at a time. When they are born they are blind and completely dependent on their mother, clinging on to her fur. Pups grow very fast however and learn to fly and feed itself in about 4 or 5 weeks. Bats can live for quite a long time, with some species living to be 30 years old.
A dolphin needs to come up the surface to breathe.
A bat hanging upside down.
All photos and illustrations in this blog post are Whizzbots and Public Domain Images.