Bats: The Flying Mammal

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Many of us tend to go "Eeek!" or "Ahhh!!" when we think of or talk about bats, which is quite normal! Because they are quite scary looking, and some of those bats (Of course NOT every one of them, some are actually quite gentle and they rather eat fruits or insects.) are vampire bats, who actually do drink blood for their main course. But just think, just because of those vampire bats and some really sick people back in the old days, who just needed some blood transfusion, there came some of those great stories about Batman, the vampires stories like Dracula and the now very popular movie franchise, Twilight.

As I mentioned before that there are different bats around the world, except for really cold places, as the matter of fact, there are over 1,000 species of them flying around! And did you know that bats are the ONLY mammal who can fly? Their wings are made of a layer of skin, stretched between those long slender fingers, (yes, they do have hands and fingers and they do fly with them.)

In the traditional scary vampire movies, we are being taught that vampires sleep during the day and awake at night, right? Well, it's quite true, because it's the same thing goes with the real bats. Which means, they are nocturnal and they prefer to come out at night.

You might wonder if they got good eye sight if moving around at night without bumping each other. To tell you the truth, for those bats who eat fruit, yes, they do see very well because they have very large eyes, which help them to collect the dimmest light around them to see the environment. But for those who eat insects, they don't see quite as well, but they make up for a build-in sonar system, called the echolocation, to help them see and hunt.

So, the next time when you see or hear a bat, just think they are the inspiration of many great stories that we love today.