Chiroptrivia 2012

Created January 2012
Last Updated October 2012

Chiroptrivia 2012

“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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Soprano pipistrelles have a yellow penis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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This brilliant piece of artwork is one of a series by Vasil Woodland. Do check his facebook page out

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Film has been released by the BBC showing that bats on Patagonia feed on sea lions

 

 

 

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Bat workers are never far from a bat, even on holiday, Keith Cohen took this picture while at the Cropready festival.

 

 

 

 

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In this country it is unusual, though not unheard of, for bats to give birth to twins. The red bat which is found in Trinidad often produce two babies at a time. It gets a bit crowded on mum as this photo by Josh Henderson posted on the Trinibats facebook page  shows.

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Did it ever occur to you just how researchers get saliva from vampire bats. They needed to do so in order to extract the anticoagulant draculin which is used to treat people who have had strokes. The answer is give them a drug used to treat humans with glaucoma. This has the side effect of making people slobber. It took Mexican researcher Rodrigo A. Medellin to decide that this might have other applications  2012-7 Roderigo Medellin

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Rogerido Medellin has a talent for lateral thinking. Trying to radiotrack bats through dense forest is almost impossible. So this year he is going to sprinkle bats with a harmless fluorescent ” glitter” and his researchers will look for sparkling bats in their torch beams. Read more about him here 2012-10 Roderigo Medellin

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There are some very talented people about . OK so it only has four fingers but who is counting? http://ellis-animals.deviantart.com/art/Common-Pipistrelle-273006021
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And talking of talent I was much taken by these stoneware bats made by Geckoman. He also does a mean line in geckos and frogs….

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… and then there is this amazing steampunk bat

 

 

 

 

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Bear nibbles have a bat family in a set of cards they have produced

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Bats usually give birth to a single pup, but this Eastern Red bat recently gave birth to triplets

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Bats have moved into bunkers abandoned by the Israeli army on the Jordan border. Bat workers have worked to make the bunkers even more bat friendly http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16768989

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Albino bats are rare in the wild. We were sent a photograph of this one one way back in 2005. The consensus of opinion was that it was a Daubenton’s

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The photograph below is all the more remarkable as the photographer managed to get this shot while the bat was flying in his back garden ”

“We’ve had a white bat visiting our neighbours’ garden for 3 years now. It always appears late in the year (August); It never stays long – maybe a week or two, for ten minutes each night; Its been here for three years.”

White bat photographed by Doug Mackenzie Dodds

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Dr A R Campbell was nominated the Nobel Prize for medicine in 19  for his work on eradicating  malaria. He built bat houses which dramatically decreased the incidence of malaria in Texas

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His other great passion was researching the cause of smallpox, which he funded through the sale of the bat guano he collected from his bat houses

Source  http://www.reformation.org/campbell.html

Thanks to Steve Parker for this

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In many parts of the world it is still possible to buy bat guano

“All-purpose organic fertilizer bat guano is collected locally and is composed of 10% nitrogen, 3% phosphorus, and 1% potassium. It is effective against rootknot nematodes and is ideal for houseplants, vegetables, fruit trees, flowers, lawns, and ornamentals

Large scale removal of bat guano from caves has a detrimental effect on biodiversity.http://www.jamaicancaves.org/jamaican_bat_guano.htm

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The Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower, or “Perky’s Folly” as some call it, stands solemnly at Marker 17 of Lower Sugarloaf Key, in the midst of what was to be a thriving holiday resort built by south Florida businessman Richter Clyde Perky. The wooden tower was intended to house bats Perky imported from Cuba and Texas, with the intent that the bats gobble up the multitude of malaria-spreading mosquitoes that plagued the marshy Lower Keys.

The 30-ft tall tower was completed in 1929… not a great year for any kind of investment, let alone a resort for free-spending pre-jet-setters. In any case, Perky soon learned that you can lead bats to a bat house but you can’t make them live there: once released, the foreign bats flew off to the four winds, the bat house remained bat-less, and the budding resort was soon guest-less.

Source

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If you need proof of the high levels of nitrogen in bat guano, you have only to breather the ammonia rich air in a guano cave. Many of you will know the famous clip of David Attenborough almost passing out as he does a piece to camera from the top of a pile of guano. Sadists may enjoy seeing how the film makers  got their shots of a huge pile of guano in a recent planet earth programme http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00ms0cz
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Extremely fast muscles in the bat’s larynx can contract 200 times a second, emitting a sound every time. These muscles are the fastest ever found in mammals.  The bat’s super-quick muscles are 100 times faster than the muscles humans use when blinking

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20111125210738685#.TtTf7cHp8j4.facebook
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The women of Paniya tribe are characterized by their large ear plugs and broad noses. Some Indian women  used to rub the blood of the small garden bat with well developed ears into their artificially dilated lobes of their ears to strengthen them http://joshidaniel.com/tag/paniya/

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Argentina’s Blind Sport Federation have come together to celebrate the Year of the Bat through bat conservation efforts. The members for the indoor football B1 National team, known worldwide as “The Bats”, have been designated by PCMA as Argentina’s bat “Ambassadors”
The Bats are due to travel to Guadalajara, Mexico to play in the Parapan American Games with the view to secure their rankings for the 2012 London Paralympic Games. They will start in their new job as Ambassadors by handing out to their opponents, brochures and posters about bat conservation.
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Are your children going through a stage of eating soil, Do you want to discourage them?

John Lawon “ History of Northern Carolina 1714 wrote

“The Indian children are much addicted to eating dirt, as are some of the Christian children. But roast a  Rearmouse (bat) on a skewer then pull the skin off and make the child that eats dirt eat the  roasted rearmouse and it will never eat dirt again. This is an infallible recipe!” Please don’t try this at home apart from anything else it is illegal
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One of the months of Mayan calendar is called  Zotz and is named after a Mayan bat god. The bat is representative of the guardian of the Underworld. Also a dubious symbol, rich in dualities, worshipped for its rule over the darkness, and a powerful sign to mark against enemies. Mayans drew a very faint line between our concept of good and evil. Meaning, good and evil was seen in totality rather than marked separation. As such, the bat was worshipped for both its dark and light qualities
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