Chattanooga's Best Bat Removal

How Many Bugs per Night Do Bats Eat? Do They Drink Water?

Somehow, superstitions and fear have painted bats in a bad light. They can seem intimidating flying around in the darkness when we cannot see but they can. Their little fuzzy bodies seem to contradict the skin-like webbing that makes up their wings. The noises bats make for echolocation are clicks and squeaks, most of which are just out of our hearing range. All of these factors cause confusion about bats. In reality, only three species out of the more than 1,300 that exist around the world drink blood.

Insect Eaters

Most of the bat species in North America eat insects. The most common bat in the US can eat up to 1,000 insects in one hour. That means up to 6,000 to 8,000 small bugs become food for one bat in a single night. These guys are opportunistic hunters, flying around in what appear to be erratic ways to eat things like moths, flies, and gnats. Colonies can be made up of several million bats. Feeding that many bats requires a lot of insects.

Bats Drink Water

Most mammals cannot survive without water. One method that bats use to drink is to swoop by a pool of water. If it is about the size of a birdbath or larger, they will fly by catching drinks of water many times until their thirst is sated. The reason they do this agile fly-by tactic is to avoid potential predators in the water. Bats do not differentiate ponds and rivers with predators from your swimming pool.

These little guys can swim, too. If one were to fall in, they would swim to the nearest edge or beach, crawl up a tree, and then fly away from there. Most often, bats drink right after they wake up from sleeping and just before they go to sleep. Humans cannot keep track of bats when they fly so it is rare to see a bat drinking water.

Understanding Pest Insects

Of all the insects on the planet, less than 1 in 100 species of insect is a pest. The rest are usually beneficial to plants and the ecosystem. Pests generally reproduce the most rapidly. One female can lay thousands of eggs in a matter of hours or a whole day, depending on the type of insect. Without predators like birds and bats, they would overpopulate and cause catastrophe.

The offspring of these pest insects turn into grubs and caterpillars. They eat plants and cause issues with crops from farms and gardens. Mosquitos can lay 200 eggs that take about a week to hatch and become adults. Of those 200, half of them are female and can do the same thing. Without predators, over 100 million mosquitos would populate the area in a matter of one month. Despite their significant impact, studies show that mosquitos only make up roughly 3.8 percent of the diet of a bat.

Bats as Pest Control

For the longest time, it was difficult to study bats. They are nocturnal and we are not. It was not until the last 20 years when researchers were able to shed some light on bats, metaphorically. They discovered that bats are important for the ecosystem around them. They can keep the population of insects in check. Many nocturnal insects are pest creatures. Those pests can affect agriculture and forests. Pest insects are the most common to spread diseases to livestock and humans.

Bats help farmers save money by eating insects every night. The value of their pest control is worth approximately $3.7 to 22.9 billion each year in North America. One single colony of 150 bats can eat nearly 1.3 million insects per year.

Bats Are Also Pollinators

In addition to helping control the pest population, fruit-eating bats called frugivores help plants spread and grow. The ones that eat fruits pick ripe ones but cannot digest the seeds. As they fly, they drop guano with those seeds, and it acts as a natural starter fertilizer. Those plants grow into flowering fruits for the next generations of fruit bats. The ones that drink nectar from flowers get pollen on their fur. When they move from flower to flower, much like bees, they pollinate them. There are specific cacti that can only be pollinated by bats with long tongues. They flower at night and the configuration of the flower makes it impossible for any other creature to access the nectar.