Land Mammals, features and articles | Educational Science

Oct 26, 2011

Fungus Alone Is Killing Off Bats, Study Proves

The disease decimating bat populations in the northeastern United States is caused solely by a fungus, without the help of other agents or pre-existing health conditions, experiments have confirmed. White nose syndrome, first reported in 2006 in New York state, has spread to Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee, and scientists still...

Nov 23, 2011

Short Snouts Gave Fruit Bats a Forceful Bite

What would you do for a bite of a tasty fig? Some fruit bats rearranged their whole face to get a morsel. Their unique head shape gave them the strong bite that allows them to gnaw hard fruits, and eventually grow into a diverse array of species. There is this...

Nov 30, 2011

New Picture of Bats' Acoustic Sense Emerges

By sending out high-frequency calls and analyzing the echoes that come back, bats can essentially see the world around them. Scientists have long thought that bats judge the size of a nearby object based on the strength of this echo, but a new study shows that echo intensity alone does...

Jan 12, 2012

Science Shields Bats from Wind-Turbine Accidents

Researchers have developed an interactive tool that uses bat calls and local environmental conditions to help wind farms reduce bat fatalities while still running efficiently. Bat activity depends on the time of year and a number of environmental factors, such as wind direction and speed, moon phase and air temperature,...

May 18, 2012

Rabies Snoozes While Bats Hibernate

How quickly deadly viruses evolve depends on many factors, new research suggests. For instance, rabies evolves slower while bats are hibernating. This means it also varies by location, since bats in the tropics don't hibernate. Rabies viruses in tropical and sub-tropical bat species evolved nearly four times faster than those...

May 21, 2012

Bats 'Taste' Prey Before Eating

How do bats know what they sense with echolocation is edible? They are able to 'taste' the chemical makeup of their prey before eating, to check that it isn't toxic, a new study indicates. Bats use a combination of cues in their hunting sequence — capture, handling and consumption —...

May 29, 2012

Devastating Disease Found in Endangered Gray Bats

The deadly disease white-nose syndrome has been confirmed in endangered gray bats in Tennessee, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced today (May 29). The disease, caused by the fungus Geomyces destructans, has decimated some bat populations in eastern North America after first being documented in a New York cave...

Jun 8, 2012

Bat's Freaky Tongue Caught on Video

A team of explorers for the National Geographic Channel has captured never-before-seen footage of the tube-lipped nectar bat, a peculiar species discovered in 2005 in the cloud forests of Ecuador. The bat is camera-worthy thanks to one attribute in particular: its incredibly long, wormlike tongue. The 2.5-inch bat sports a...

Oct 3, 2012

Bats Think About Sex -- A Lot

Bats may have more in common with the fictional Batman than previously believed, since both successfully combine work with courting sexy potential mates -- a lot of them. A new study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, reveals that bat echolocation calls, primarily used for orientation...

Oct 29, 2012

Do Bats Hibernate?

Besides being nocturnal, some bat species are known to pack it in during the winter as well. Not all bats hibernate, but those that do usually live at high latitudes where insect prey becomes scarce during cold months. During this dormant period, they can often be found clustered on cave...

Dec 27, 2012

Bats May Hold Key to Longevity

For centuries, bats have been vilified as little more than disease-carrying, blood-sucking creatures of the night. Researchers in Australia, however, have found that bats may someday help people unlock the secrets of immunity and longevity. The Bat Pack is a group of Aussie scientists who have spent years collaborating with...

Jan 25, 2013

Bats Have Surprisingly Complex Family Life

Group living has many benefits, but it also comes at a cost. A study of insect-eating bats in England finds that females and males often live at different altitudes, but can have surprisingly diverse mating behaviors. Researchers observed the Daubenton's bat (Myotis daubentonii) along a 25-mile (40-kilometer) stretch of the...

Feb 6, 2013

Bats Host More Than 60 Human-Infecting Viruses

When it comes to carrying viruses that can jump to other species — so-called zoonotic viruses — bats may be in a class of their own. The flying mammals are reservoirs for more than 60 viruses that can infect humans, and host more viruses per species than even rodents do,...

Apr 1, 2013

Male Bats Caught Performing Oral Sex on Females

Male bats perform oral sex on females, apparently to make sex last longer, researchers say. These findings, the first discovery of male-to-female oral sex in bats, match prior studies revealing that female bats perform fellatio, or oral sex, on male bats. Scientists analyzed a colony of about 420 Indian flying...

Apr 9, 2013

Badger-Like Striped Bat Discovered in South Sudan

With a badger's creamy yellow stripes and a pug's smushed muzzle, the striped bat certainly catches the eye. One of the most boldly patterned bats in the world, according to scientists who recently captured a rare specimen in South Sudan, the striped bat now has its own genus. One step...