Your Daily Bat

Wingtober Day 14: “Fierce”

Chapin’s free-tailed bat is very fiercely fashion-forward. Males in particular have bright white extendable ‘mohawks’ that they presumably use to signal to potential mates. (Nobody has observed this, but since females have far more modest hairstyles, it’s a good guess.)

Not only do these crests extend out bright white, they also waft strong scents from a special gland located on the back of the bat’s head. They probably also sing complex songs, as other male free-tailed bats do. If these bats have lekking behavior (like the hammerhead bat does, for example) I think a gang of displaying males would be quite a multi-sensory experience to behold...

Wingtober Day 13: “Teeming”

Wingtober Day 12: “Shattered”

The Christmas Island pipistrelle, a thumb-sized bat endemic to the island it was named for, was last heard echolocating August 26, 2009. After that, the calls went silent. The last member of the species was dead.

Wingtober Day 11: “Run”

Wingtober Day 10: “Gigantic”

Which species of bat is the largest depends on who you ask (personally, I think several of them are tied) but google suggests that the official answer is the giant golden-crowned flying fox, which can have up to about a six-foot wingspan and weigh up to two pounds. Not bad, really.

Wingtober Day 9: “Screech”

Aaaaaah almost caught up- I accidentally did tomorrow’s drawing today so I’ll post it tomorrow along with the prompt for today! Anyway, here is the greater bulldog bat, the bat with the loudest recorded call (as of now) at 140 decibels. That is the equivalent of having a shotgun go off next to your ear. Luckily, their calls are too high-pitched for us to hear, otherwise they could actually damage our hearing.

Why so loud? Well, there’s a trade-off to echolocation: higher-pitched noises are able to bounce off and detect smaller objects (think of it as a sound ‘net’ with smaller holes), but they don’t travel as far. Bats with extremely high-pitched cries compensate by just being real dang loud. Just real loud. So loud that the bat’s ears auto-disable their own hearing when the bat is calling, because their screaming is a hazard to themselves.

Wingtober Day 8: “Crooked”

Wingtober Day 7: “Shy”

Wingtober Day 6: “Sword”

Wingtober Day 5: “Long”

A hard one to do, just like the little brown bat. Initially I thought I might pick a species with very exaggerated traits- there are a lot- but I couldn’t help thinking of the small, unspecialized Northern long-eared myotis. I caught many of these guys in 2012. They were classified as threatened due to white-nose syndrome in 2015. They’ve all but vanished from their northeastern roosts. It’s chilling, and I’m afraid they’ll be forgotten.

Wingtober Day 4: Underwater

Wingtober Day 3: Poison

Wingtober Day 2: “Divided”

For this prompt I picked a member of the bent-winged bat family, a group that was ‘divided’ from Vespertillionidae in 2007. (Some of these fills are gonna be a bit of a stretch, I can tell already...)

Wingtober Day 1: Swift

Hi! Remember this blog? I decided to dust it off for another month of practicing how to draw bats. Instead of inktober, it’s gonna be #Wingtober! ...I’m starting a day late, ok.

KNOW YOUR BATS: Yinpterochiroptera!

Bats, which are mammals of the order Chiroptera, were once divided into two main suborders: Megachiroptera (i.e. Pteropodidae, the Old World Fruit bat family) and the Microchiroptera (literally all other bats). But new genetic evidence shook up this traditional view, as well as debunking the commonly-held belief that bats were close relatives of primates. It turns out they’re an ancient sister group to the one that encompasses carnivores and hoofed mammals, with no close living relatives. Given the fact that their fossil record is scanty, with few transitional forms, the origin of bats is still very mysterious!

Since then, the bat families were organized into two new suborders: Yangochiroptera and Yinpterochiroptera. Above is a visual representation of the six bat families that make up Yinpterochiroptera, and below is a phylogeny of how all these families are related:

What do all these families have in common, besides their DNA? Well, all the families except one emit their echolocation sounds through their noses, which is why they often have fantastic skin extensions- or noseleaves- around their nostrils. The single family that does not do this is of course Pteropodidae, the Old World fruit bat group that includes the flying foxes. It’s believed that Pteropodidae lost their ability to echolocate sometime after they split from the rest of Yinpterochiroptera some 60 million years ago. A single genus within Pteropodidae, Rousettus, regained the ability to echolocate through tongue-clicking.

As for what else they all have in common, the answer is... not much, which was why it was such a surprise to scientists when DNA evidence put them all together. But this evidence has a good deal of support, so we must conclude that these families were exceptionally good at finding different niches.

Mauritian Flying Fox (Pteropus niger)

The Mauritian flying fox is an absolutely gorgeous pteropodid from the island of Mauritius off the coast of Africa. Along with a few other bat species, it represents one of the only mammal species native to the islands. As with the closely related Rodruiges fruit bat, it is threatened by the frequent cyclones that batter the islands, as well as deforestation.

Unfortunately, being a frugivore, it also represents a threat to the mango and lychee farms that now cover most of the islands. This, coupled with the bat population allegedly increasing to about 100,000 individuals by 2013, prompted the Mauritian government to initiate a mass cull of 20,000 bats, in spite of protests by conservationists. (And studies that suggest that bat damage to fruit crops is fairly minimal.)