Bats are not the world’s most beloved creatures. Mostly night animals, they’ve become a symbol of Halloween—associated with vampires, death and general ghoulishness. Sure, a few bat species do, in fact, feed on animal blood. Some bats have a face only a biologist could love. And yes, bats can be reservoirs of disease. But in their more than 50 million years on Earth, these maligned creatures have developed some admirable qualities, too.
For one, they’re everywhere: bats live on every continent except Antarctica. They echolocate, using sound to navigate their world—and they are the only mammal to evolve true flight. They also eat insects such as mosquitoes—contributing billions of dollars in value annually for the world’s farmers—and are critical pollinators of tropical plants.
“We need them,” says Emma Teeling, a professor and founding director of the Center for Irish Bat Research at University College Dublin.
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So, in honor of spooky season, here are seven bat facts you may not know:
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Bats are “super agers.”
In nature, larger animals, such as elephants and whales, tend to live longer than smaller animals, such as mice and shrews, Teeling says. Bats are an exception.
“Bats are some of the smallest mammals in the entire world and can live for this extraordinary long time,” she says. Some of the oldest bats have been known to live for decades.
Teeling and other bat researchers are studying aspects of the animals’ longevity, including bats’ ability to repair their DNA and harbor viruses without getting sick, for clues in order to enhance our own lives.
Vampire bats could help us treat stroke victims.
When vampire bats such as Desmodus rotundus, also known as the common vampire bat, feed on birds and other mammals, they bite their prey and lick the wounds, Teeling says. An anticoagulant in their saliva prevents the blood from clotting up.
Researchers have studied this protein in the hope that it may offer a way to treat blood clots in stroke victims—while lowering the risk of causing brain bleeds. Although drug development stalled a decade ago after lackluster results, the treatment may still have potential, according to a recent review.
A wild lesser short-nosed fruit bat (Cynopterus brachyotis).
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There are about 1,500 bat species—and counting.
Bats are incredibly diverse—across all mammals, bats include more species than all but one other group, rodents, says Rachel Page, a scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. In fact, there are about 1,500 known bat species worldwide.
Some, such as the vampire bats, drink blood. Others eat nectar, while others still eat insects, fish and even frogs.
Some bats “eavesdrop” on their prey’s mating calls.
For the frog-eating bats, meals can be treacherous. Some frogs are poisonous. Others are so big they could pose a danger. To meet this challenge, the fringe-lipped bat, Trachops cirrhosus, “eavesdrops:” the bats listen for the loud, “conspicuous” nighttime mating calls of their prey and then attack, Page says.
“They exploit those calls. They use them to detect, to locate, and then also to assess those prey” for size and toxicity, she says.
The common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) is a small, leaf-nosed bat native to the Americas.
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Bats likely evolved in Europe.
In September, Teeling and more than 130 other scientists across the world published a paper in Nature in which they sequenced genomes across all 21 bat families.
By pairing these genetic data with fossil records, they made a breakthrough—bats likely evolved in Europe and then spread to Africa and around the world, they found. Until then, it was thought bats might’ve emerged somewhere in North America, among other theories. “We rewrote evolutionary history,” Teeling says.
The golden crust of a fringe-lipped bat (Trachops cirrhosus).
Photo by Barrett Klein
Many bats have a signature scent.
Across bat species, 9 percent are known so far to have odor-producing glands and other structures, but research on this is sparse, according to a 2021 paper in Mammal Review co-authored by Page. T. cirrhosus males employ a “pungent” golden crust with a “musky” scent on their forearms, likely to attract females, Page says.
Vampire bats will throw up to feed a friend.
If a vampire bat doesn’t feed for about two nights in a row, it will die, Page explains. “It doesn’t have the energetic reserves to make it beyond that,” she says. But research shows that if a vampire bat comes back to its colony hungry, other bats will step in and regurgitate blood to share—a costly but lifesaving sacrifice.
