The only mammal that can truly fly, and it hunts with sound
This is the only mammal that can truly fly, and it hunts using sound.
Which one is REALLY true about the Bat?
The short version
Bats are the only mammals capable of true flight, their wings being skin stretched between long finger bones. Most hunt in the dark with echolocation, screaming sounds too high for us to hear and reading the echoes. A little brown bat can eat ~1,000 mosquitoes an hour, some live 30+ years, and they hang upside down using no energy.
Why it's so weird
- ✓The Bat is the only mammal on Earth that can truly fly.
- ✓The Bat has wings made of skin stretched between long, thin finger bones.
- ✓The Bat hunts in total darkness using echolocation, a kind of sound-vision.
- ✓The Bat screams out sounds too high for humans to hear, then listens to the echoes.
- ✓The Bat can eat up to a thousand mosquitoes in a single hour, and some live over thirty years.
You could line up about 5 of them along a 7-year-old!
The full story
This is the only mammal on Earth that can truly fly. Meet the bat, a creature so strange it seems to break the rules of both mammals and birds. Instead of feathers, its wings are actually stretched skin between long, thin finger bones, basically a webbed hand turned into a wing. Most bats hunt in total darkness using echolocation. They scream out sounds too high for us to hear, then listen to the echoes to build a sound-picture of everything around them, right down to a single mosquito. A tiny brown bat can devour up to a thousand mosquitoes in a single hour. And despite being so small, some bats live over thirty years. They even hang upside down completely effortlessly, because their feet lock into place using no energy at all. Follow for more weird animal facts.
To "see with sound," a bat squeezes its voice box to shout out very fast, very high-pitched clicks that are too high for people to hear. Each click bounces off things like insects or walls and comes back as an echo, which the bat's big ears catch. Its brain measures how long the echo takes to return—a quick echo means something is close, a slow one means it is far—so the bat builds a sound-map of the pitch-dark. Its wings, meanwhile, are really webbed hands: skin stretched over long, thin finger bones that it flaps to fly.
📚 Source: Echolocation is nature's built-in sonar. Here's how it works. — National Geographic ↗Scientists know this because they use ultrasonic "bat detectors"—special microphones that capture sounds too high for human ears—to record a hunting bat's rapid-fire clicks and echoes and measure each call's exact pitch, loudness, and length as the bat zeroes in on an insect.
📚 Source: How do bats echolocate and how are they adapted to this activity? — Scientific American ↗Watch the 45-second version
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“The Bat is the only mammal on Earth that can truly fly.”
“The Bat lives on a diet that is around ninety percent bone, which almost no other animal can manage.”
“The Bat has wings made of skin stretched between long, thin finger bones.”