Monday, August 18, 2014

Pest Control with Bats

Some bats need to consume more than their own bodyweight in insects during a night of hunting. For example, the Little Brown Bat (M. Lucifugus) weighs on average 7,4 grams and during a night of hunting biologists calculate it eats around 9.4 grams of insects. That's a hang of a lot of insects and it begins to become clear that bats are a massively important aspect of nature's.
The average mosquito weighs around 2.5 micro grams. So that's thousands of mosquitoes that could be eaten by a bat in a single night.
Interesting...ever counted the number of bugs killed by those awful 'bug zapper' electronic devices? You know the ones, they make a big bang every time a hapless little insect flies into the wires...

Well bats do about a hundred times better, each bat, than a bugzapper. So if you are still using crazy outdated technology to control insects think about those numbers.

I love it when nature is so clearly the winner. I mean, those numbers of mosquitoes potentially killed by bats mean that all of those crazy insect killing ideas on sale since the fifties like coils and sprays pale into insignificance next to the raw mosquitoe killing power of bats.
So what do we do? Well, we stop destroying viable habitat and we avoid poisons that might harm the bats AND (if we are smart) we release new populations of bats, even accommodating them in bat boxes ( special houses you can buy for bats to live in)
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We're not bats... we just know what we are doing when it comes to pest control.