![]() There are three different species of them. Some bats eat fish, so they will catch fish with enlarged hind feet and so they will fly over the surface of the water and scoop up small fish and eat them.ĮRIC: Okay, that's crazy. So we have the carnivorous bats like that, that eat vertebrate terrestrial forms. It has a skull that's an inch and a half long, and wit will take other pretty good-sized prey, mice, rats, birds, things like that. And it's the largest carnivorous bat in the in the new world.ĮRIC: Yeah, that sounds like an enormous bat, much bigger than you'd think bats could get. There's a bat in South America and Central America that has a wingspan of about three and a half feet. And they're meat-eating, and so they will eat lizards, frogs, birds, other bats. But there are other bats which are carnivorous. Some bats eat spiders, but those are all preying on things in the insect arthropod world. There are bats that live in the desert that eat scorpions and great big centipedes. NANCY: Some bats eat other insect-related things, but some that might surprise you, like scorpions. And so it just depends on the species and where they are and how many other species are doing similar things in their environment.ĮRIC: And based on what you said at first, it sounds like not all bats eat flying insects? So the moth eater will also sometimes take beetles, and the the one that eats little gnats will also eat somewhat larger things. Larger animals may specialize in really big moths that fly in certain places. So one species may eat little tiny gnats and other species may specialize in hard beetles. And the way that they separate out this niche space of being a flying nocturnal insect-eating animal is that they specialize on different kinds of insects. NANCY: That is what the majority of species do. And they're all anatomically different so that they're good at these various different lifestyles, so that they can survive and not compete too much with each other.ĮRIC: Most people imagine that sweeping through the air to grab bugs, is that mostly the case? There's little teeny bats, great big bats, bats that fly close to the ground, bats that prefer flying up high in the forest canopy, bats that want to fly mostly in open space. In some parts of the world, there can be as many as 150 species, all living in the same piece of forest, all doing slightly different things. The most recent number of for living species of bats is 1,456. Can you talk a little bit about how many species of bats there are and how diverse they are? And you can tell that's true because they are everywhere. So flying has worked out really well for bats. ![]() And yes, we'll find out if vampire bats really do drink blood. And today we're going to see how flight has resulted in an amazing variety of bat species living across nearly all of the Earth's skies. Last episode, we heard about why bats evolved the ability to fly. Nancy Simmons, the curator-in-charge of the Department of Mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. And it's time for part two of my conversation with Dr. ERIC: From the Museum of Science in Boston, this is Pulsar, a podcast where we buzz for answers to the best questions we get from our visitors. ![]()
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