How important are bats to the natural ecosystem?
“We don’t pretend to be fortune tellers, but we’re very worried,’’ said Winifred F. Frick, a postdoctoral researcher at BU and the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was the lead author of the paper in the journal Science. “The loss of so many bats is basically a terrible experiment in how much these animals matter for insect control.’’ Most species of bats eat volumes of insects. A single mouse-eared bat can eat as much as 600 mosquitoes in one hour. In Texas, one huge colony of Mexican free-tailed bats reportedly can eat a quarter million pounds of insects each night—the weight equivalent of 125 cars. Many of the crop-pest insects that bats eat can cause enormous agricultural damage. Bats eat corn borer moths, cucumber beetles, and other adult insects. If bats didn’t eat the adults, there would be more young born to infest the farmer’s crops. Nectar drinking bats are important pollinators and fruit eating bats disperse seeds across their habitat at night in their droppings. In
