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America's Bats: Friends, Not Enemies
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15790 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1989 |
1,861 Words |
| Author
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Gerald S. Wilkinson
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AMERICA'S NEIGHBORHOOD BATS
Dr. Merlin Tuttle
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988
104 pp., $19.95
Many people find the image of a bat horrible and terrifying. When confronted with a live bat in a home, a common response is to smash the creature with a broom. In America's Neighborhood Bats, Merlin Tuttle, science director of Bat Conservation International and well-known bat researcher and photographer, provides over one hundred pages of facts about the problems bats can cause and the benefits they provide. In a highly readable and engaging work highlighted by spectacular photographs, he argues convincingly that they should be treated with respect and admiration, not fear and disgust. This message is presented not just because Tuttle loves bats, but because unless public opinion about bats improves, the dramatic decline of several North American species may culminate in tragic extinction in the near future.
Pest Or Benefactor?
Bats are frequently considered aerial kin to pesty rodents like mice and rats. For example, the German word for bat is Fledermaus, or "flying mouse." However, recent comparative studies of neuroanatomy reinforce the view that bats are, in an evolutionary sense, close relatives to primates--that group of mammals containing monkeys, apes, and humans. Herein lies the problem in maintaining reasonable bat population levels. The common house mouse can reach reproductive maturity in two months, and females can then proceed to have four to eight young every month for the rest of their lives. Consequently, the potential for expansion of the house mouse population is enormous. In sharp contrast, all bats, like primates, reproduce very slowly. The typical North American bat produces one or occasionally two young after reaching at least one year of age. Reproduction occurs only once each year.
Although many bats can live longer than ten years, their slow reproductive rate makes it extremely difficult for a population rebuild after suffering a substantial loss of individuals. Tuttle provides an account of what was perhaps the most dramatic population reduction of an American species since the extermination of the passenger pigeon. In 1963, close to thirty million Mexican free-tailed bats inhabited Eagle Creek Cave, Arizona, each summer to give birth to and rear their young. Just six years later, only thirty thousand bats could be found at Eagle Creek. Unfortunately, no cause is clearly known, but shotgun and rifle shells suggest a hunting spree that may not only have killed vast numbers of free-tails but may have deafened thousands more, thereby dooming those injured to slow death by starvation. Although this example is certainly dramatic, it is difficult to place in perspective because so little information is available regarding the size of current or past populations of most bat species. This information is unavailable partly because of their secretive habits and partly because of a lack of long-term population studies.
The reason for the willful destruction of these animals is unclear, but the widespread notion that bats will fly into human hair, as the accompanying cartoon attests, perpetuates the pest image. Tuttle suggests that this myth may have been propagated because bats frequently catch small insects, like mosquitoes and gnats, that
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