Created Jan 2010
Last Updated March 2020

 

 

“Life is a beautiful and strange creature that appears at a window, flies swiftly through the banquet and is gone.”  The Venerable Bede

and there can be few more strange and wonderful creatures than a bat.So this section is dedicated to the strange and wonderful things which make bat group members laugh, agree with or wonder at. If you have something you’d like to post here, quotations, facts, trivia or whatever email us

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Looking for something else I found this beautiful mosaic by Martin Cheek

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and of course one thing lead to another Rebecca Colins mosaic

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Flying fox mosaic at Cairns public library
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Carved wooden alebrije from Oaxaca Mexico
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Not for the first time a bat worker left his remote detector under a bridge in France. In a munitions case to keep it dry. The obvious happened and the police were called

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Most mammals can trace their origins to a single ancestral species. But in the Caribbean islands of the Lesser Antilles, there is a fruit bat with a far more complex family tree. Artibeus schwartzi’genome is a hybrid mish-mash of DNA inherited from no less than three separate ancestors. One of these is probably extinct and the other two of which still live on the same island chain More _________________________________________________________________

Studying bats’ echolocation may help robots decontaminate nuclear reactors . More on the BBC website ________________________________________________________________

Bulldog bats have social calls
More on the New Scientist site

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Venetians are buying bat boxes in an attempt to limit mosquitoes numbers rather using insecticides

More

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A bat joke from Bat group member Benjamin Ellis
Q.What do bats learn at school ?
A. Their alphabat

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One of the squadrons in Battlestar Galactica is the vampire squadron

For an amazing collection of bat stamps, trademarks and other wonders head off to Bathead

You will need to wait a while for the images to download

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Only six species of bat out of in the region of 1200 to roost head up. . One of these is the sucker footer bat. Myzopoda aurita, Researchers have found that this is essential to avoid falling off the slick leaves they live on . They have also realised that the bats use wet adhesion not suction to hang on

Read more at Science Daily

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Researchers have found that echolocating bats and sonar using whales share an almost identical gene which codes for a protein which allows the hairs of the cochlea to respond to high frequency sounds. This gene is lacking in whales and bats that don’t use sound to find their food.
Read more at New Scientist

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Researchers in Ontario have used 3D CAT scans to show differences in how bats produced echolocation signals The research team discovered that the connection between the larynx and the ear via the stylohyal bone in the hyoid chain was unique to bats that used laryngeal echolocation
Read more of the article from Science Daily_

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The surreal (and quite frankly bizarre) artist Salvador Dali was given an injured bat when he was six years old. It was placed in a bucket overnight, but died of its injuries.  Dali was fascinated by the ants which he found crawling over the body, and anticipating Ozzie Osbourne by a fair few years,  To quote no less an authority than George Orwell ”When Dali returned to it was being devoured by a mass of ants. He impulsively bit into the seething mass delirious with pleasure”
Ants became a symbol for death and decay in his paintings and bats also made their appearances. More on creatures who bite the heads off bats  2010-1-salvidor dali and bats

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A partial albino bat was discovered during mistnetting in France. It was one of 250 bats caught in a single evening – 90% of which were barbastelles

Click here for more ( Website is in French)

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