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It's Spooky Season, Let's Chat About Bats

Mummies, Ghosts, and Goblins – oh my! This spooky season, we're chatting about Florida’s bats! 

Thirteen species of bats call Florida home, year-round, and several more migrate in from the north or south at certain times of year. These amazing flying mammals, the only mammal with true flight, provide highly valuable pest management services for Floridians.  

So, while you may see some spooky vampire bats this month on TV or in the movies, remember - Florida bats eat insects … they don’t suck blood! 

Episode Transcript:

SHANNON:
On today's episode, you're going to learn all about Florida bats. We'll start off with some myth-busting, and we'll finish up with some calls to action on how you can help Florida bats.

LARA:
Welcome to “Naturally Florida,” a podcast about Florida's natural areas and the wild things that live here. I'm Lara Milligan.

SHANNON:
And I'm Shannon Carnevale.

LARA:
This podcast is brought to you by UF IFAS Extension in Polk and Pinellas Counties.

Okay, so Shannon, I have been getting a ton of email questions about bats lately. Have you?

SHANNON:
Really?

LARA:
Yeah. It's like all of a sudden, like a whole week. I'm just like “bat bat bat.”  They either want bat houses or bat i.d., which is great. It's been fun.

SHANNON:
I haven't really. At least not yet. But I feel like every time we get close to Halloween or people are in the spooky season vibes, I start to get more bat questions. I haven't had a lot yet for sure.

LARA:
Well, maybe they're coming your way. (LAUGHTER)

SHANNON:
I can hope.

LARA:
Speaking of bats, that's what we're going to do today is all about bats. And I think there's really no better way to start off a bat episode than let's just like bust some myths about bats. Because I'm sure you hear them all the time, Shannon—just all the misinformation there is out there about that.

SHANNON:
Yeah. And it really fits in with the spooky season.

LARA:
Right. And I think probably the first one that comes to mind is bats suck blood.

SHANNON:
Yeah, the vampire bats. Mmm mmm mmm mwah! (LAUGHTER) 

LARA:
And they do. Vampire bats do suck blood. But…

SHANNON:
But not here. So, thankfully, none of Florida's bats are…We call it “sanguivorous" or blood-feeding. There are only three bat species in the whole world that are known to be sanguivorous. And there's roughly 1200 species of bats in the world. So very, very few bats actually suck blood, and they tend to be in the Central America areas. So they're close by, but they're definitely not in Florida and not something we need to be concerned about.

LARA:
Yeah. Need to be more concerned about mosquitoes sucking your blood. (LAUGHTER) So what's another myth that you hear a lot?

SHANNON:
I would say by far the most common one I get is the rabies thing. Because while I haven't been getting a lot of calls about that, I feel like just a week or two ago we had our fourth or fifth bat of the year test positive for rabies.

LARA:
Oh, wow. Yeah. I mean, I know, like you said, it is rare, but it's one of the reasons that we always say, “If you ever see a bat on the ground, do not touch it.”

SHANNON:
Yeah, they act so much different than the other mammals when they get rabies. So bats just get kind of sleepy and they might be out during the day—makes them really easy for someone to pick them up. And that's exactly when you don't want to touch a bat.

LARA:
Right. It does make it easier for i.d., but we're not going to encourage that today.

SHANNON:
Right.

LARA:
So and one thing I always hear is that bats are just flying rodents. You know, some people tend not to like them for that reason or whatnot, but they aren't rodents at all.

SHANNON:
Right. We think they're more closely related to primates or dogs than rats. But that's a job for the taxonomists.

LARA:
Yes.

SHANNON:
Not me.

(LAUGHTER)

LARA:
It is crazy, though, to have a mammal that can fly.

SHANNON:
Yeah. And we'll talk about that in a minute for sure.

LARA:
Okay. That’s… Yeah. Okay. And another…I think maybe the last myth that we'll kind of talk about is that bat roosts—so where they tend to hang out—causes human diseases.

SHANNON:
Right. I get this one a lot. And it's usually tied into that rabies question like, “Oh, we should get rid of the bats that are roosting in this tree. They're dangerous. They're going to give us diseases. They have rabies.” We already talked about rabies, but technically speaking, bat colonies can have histoplasmosis, which is a fungus that's often found in the bat droppings of really, really large colonies of bats.

However, it's much more common in the Mississippi River Valleys, in the Ohio River Valleys, than it is in Florida. There's a very low risk of it in Florida, and most of our bats don't congregate in those millions numbers. So this is something I'd be concerned about if I was going into an abandoned house with a ton of bats in, like, Ohio.

LARA:
Right. (LAUGHTER) That’s good. So low risk of rabies, low risk of other diseases, as long as we keep our nice, safe, respectable distance anyway.

SHANNON:
Exactly.

LARA:
So there's a ton more to explore about bats. Shannon mentioned there's 1200 species in the world, but let's focus in here on Florida and just tell us a little bit more about bats in general.

SHANNON:
Sure. So we have 13 resident species of bats. We covered what “resident” means in our last episode about owls. So these are 13 species that don't migrate in and out of the state. We have three additional species that are migratory, that are sometimes found in north Florida. And then we have four other migratory species that are sometimes found in south Florida. But we have 13 that are here year round.

LARA:
Now, of those 13 species, we have two that are classified as endangered.

SHANNON:
That’s right.

LARA:
Yeah. And I know there's been a lot of research on the Florida bonneted bat, and I think you're a little bit more familiar with that than I am. But that particular bat species is endemic to south Florida, so not going to find them outside of south Florida.

SHANNON:
Maybe. So…No, that's perfect because, yes, they are totally endemic to south and central Florida. We thought that this bat, the Florida bonneted bat, had one of the most limited geographical ranges of any bat in North America. It was really thought only to exist in small areas in and around Naples, Florida—so a very small area of south Florida historically.

However, we have a lot of really exciting new research showing that we have colonies here in Polk County, which is why I'm so excited about them. And I give talks about bonneted bats a few times a year, usually in October. But bonneted bats are one of the only species that make their echolocation noise, the little chittering that the bats make when they're trying to hunt—theirs is in a frequency that you can hear just with your like naked ear just out in the wild. 

So we’re…we, I say “we.” It's not me, it's bat researchers. (LAUGHTER) But the bat researchers—especially we've had some with Florida Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife and University of Florida—they’re putting out listening devices to listen for the bonneted bats in different areas of south and central Florida. And that's where they found some of these roosts in Polk and Highlands, and I think Osceola Counties as well.

LARA:
That's awesome. It's exciting. And I think it's a good point to emphasize. I feel like a lot of people in the environmental field feel like all the research has been done, like we're done. We know everything about all the thing, all the field.

SHANNON:
Right!

LARA:
And we are so far from that! (LAUGHTER) So if there's any young ears out there, like whatever you're passionate about in terms of wildlife, I can guarantee you there's still more research to be done.

SHANNON:
Especially on our native species, just in general.

LARA:
Yes. And that's a total aside. Okay. (LAUGHTER) I’ll bring it back to that. So and then I mentioned the gray bat is the other endangered species, and that's just found in a small area of the Panhandle.

SHANNON:
Yeah. To be clear, though, that small area does extend north into, I think, Georgia. I think that's the part of the Panhandle it’s in. Might be Alabama. It does extend north, but the range of the gray bat only, you know, barely touches Florida.

LARA:
Right. I often get asked…Somebody will send me a picture of a bat for identification, or they'll call me on the phone and try and, you know, describe what it looks like and ask for i.d.— much easier said than done. But there are some things that we can kind of look for.

SHANNON:
Yeah, I absolutely agree. And with 13 species in the state, plus the three or four migratory species—depending on if you're in north or south Florida—you might be thinking, “Oh, it should be easy to identify these bats.” But it's simply not the case.

LARA:
No.

SHANNON: 
We have some very general things that we can look for. But, honestly, what I have found is the best thing’s to give you a short list, which is really… That's the best I can do most of the time, give someone a list of, say, three or four bats it might be.

LARA:
Right.

SHANNON:
Is that what you do, Lara?

LARA:
Yeah. I think you and I are on the same page with that. It’s like we also try and emphasize that, in terms of bats, it's not really critical that we know exactly what species it is, depending obviously like what your goals are. But typically for the questions we get, that's not critical. So we just more educate on the bigger picture.

SHANNON:
Right. And so really what's helpful is knowing where you saw the bat. Did you see it come out of a roost? Did it come out of a tree cavity? Was it in your roof? Was it sleeping under a palm frond? These types of things are super important to trying to figure out what type of bat you have. Did 500 of them come out, or were there four?

LARA:
Right.

SHANNON:
Their colony habits are another way that we can really tailor that list down to what you probably saw. But honestly, individual species level identification is just extremely, extremely challenging, if not impossible, if you don't have that individual bat in your hand, which, thankfully—and I'd like to emphasize this to anyone listening—nobody has brought me a bat.

Please don't bring me a bat. Don't bring Lara a bat. Nobody should be picking bats up. Just trying to emphasize that as many times as we can. But just to emphasize how challenging it can be, the things you need to look for, for species-level identification of some of these bats, I mean it is, it is so specific.

It could really be like whether or not the change of the fur takes place at like the base of the individual strand of hair or fur on the bat, or literally the length of the hair on the bat’s toes.

LARA:
That's hilarious.

SHANNON:
I'm gonna let that sink in. You have to measure those teeny, tiny little bat toes, the hair that grows in between or on their toes. And that's how you can, like, differentiate these species. (LAUGHTER)

LARA:
Yeah. I was actually, recently I sent a picture to one of our specialists, and she was like, “Um. Yeah, I'm going to need closeups of the toe hairs and the muzzle and the ears to even get you anywhere closer than, you know…” Again, we've narrowed it down a little bit, but it's just hard.


SHANNON:
Yeah, yeah. And Lara mentioned the ear and the “muzzle,” or the snout. I will say for some bats they, you know, you can identify them, like whether or not their tail has a membrane or a piece of skin connecting it to like the rest of the body. And then we've got some bats that we affectionately call “leaf-nosed bats,” and they've got this precious little leaf-shaped skin on their nose. That sounds really gross now that I put it out there.

(LAUGHTER) 

LARA:
I was going to say, I don't know that everyone might use that adjective to describe the nose, but that's okay. (LAUGHTER) We can roll with it.

SHANNON:
Yeah. We'll put a picture or a link to a picture in the show notes.  So let’s move on to the next question.

LARA:
Yeah. (LAUGHTER) So I mean, yes. And I think the next question is probably another very frequently asked question, which is “If I install that house, will all the mosquitoes in my yard just disappear?”

SHANNON:
For sure. I get that one all the time. And I really want to say, please install that bat house.  (LAUGHTER) Or preserve the natural habitat in your yard or in your local parks. But they're just not going to be eating all the mosquitoes. Bats eat so many insects. All of our resident bats are nocturnal insectivores, and they eat so many flying insects.

I cannot properly describe, like, the quantity of insects we're talking about. So if you imagine sitting out in your back porch, you know, multiply the number of bugs out there by like a thousand, and that's what it might be like if we didn't have bats. So even though they might not be eating all the mosquitoes, they're still eating a ton of nighttime flying pests, and that's really important. 

Specifically, the southeastern bat—the southeastern myotis—is the one that's most likely to eat mosquitoes. They're found in the northern two-thirds of Florida, and they roost in all sorts of different types of roosts, both manmade and natural. They are one of our cave-dwelling bats, which we'll touch on later. But I only brought that one up because this is one of the ones that you have to measure the toe hairs on, so…

(LAUGHTER)

LARA:
Get out your measuring tape. Yeah. (LAUGHTER) And even in the agricultural world, right… We all eat food. We all need ag. They play a huge role there as well. There's some cool studies. There's one looking at an orchard in south Georgia, and they were having issues with a particular it's called a “shuck worm.”

Anyway, they installed several bat houses. It attracted thousands of bats. And within three years of that, of installing the bat houses, they were operating pesticide-free because the bats were providing that service. And so, of course, that resulted in huge financial savings as well. And I just think that's such a cool example of the ecosystem services that they can provide. That go, you know, it's like an exponential… It's a “win win win” for everybody.

SHANNON:
Yeah, ‘cause we hear all the time about how people want our ag producers to use less and less pesticides. Well, something has to get rid of the pests. And in this case, the bats were able to do that. So I would say another question I get, Lara, is “What about white-nose syndrome?”

LARA:
Yes. I know for sure that was like a big thing kind of when it just seemed to be making the news nationally several years ago. But I haven't honestly followed up with much of the recent research, and I don't think it's made its way here to Florida. Is that correct?

SHANNON:
That is correct. It hasn't. It has been found, the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome, has been found as far south as southern Mississippi. So it's not in Florida. Neither the syndrome nor the fungus are known to be in the state of Florida. And it's thought that our climate may not be hospitable to the white-nose syndrome fungus. But knowing that it can occur in south central Texas and in southern Mississippi, we definitely can't rule it out.

We do have the southeastern bat, the one I mentioned earlier, he is at risk for white-nose syndrome because he's one of our three species that does use caves to overwinter or hibernate.

LARA:
Yeah. And I guess real quick, we should probably, like, explain what white-nose syndrome is briefly. We kind of just jumped into that, assuming you'll know, but in case you don't know…

SHANNON:
Fair point. So white-nose fungus is a disease that affects hibernating bats. It makes like a white fuzz on their nose, hence the name “white-nose syndrome.” It looks almost like they're growing mildew or mold on their nose, a white one. And it likes dark, cold, damp places. And it attacks that bare skin on the bare skin (LAUGHTER). I know it means “bare,” but like it sounds like “bear.”

LARA:
(LAUGHTER) If only you could see what Shannon was doing on my webcam (LAUGHTER), imitating a bear!

SHANNON:
Oh man. Well, anyway, the short version is white-nose syndrome causes all kinds of crazy behavioral challenges for the bats.They can be seen outside during the day. They waste a lot of the little energy they have in the winter, and ultimately it causes a lot of the colony to starve to death.

LARA:
Yeah, and I know I've seen different statistics out there, but, you know, it's like nationwide, as much as 80% of the natural bat population has perished simply as a result of white-nose syndrome. Like it’s not… This is a big issue.  Like ot something to be taken lightly. So we'll definitely be keeping our eye out and ears out for. It's hopefully not going to make it to Florida. But if it does, we should definitely be on alert.

SHANNON:
Yes, knock on wood. So I think this is probably a good time to move on to our call to action. We've got three for you today. And the first one is simply, you know, it is spooky season. You're going to see vampire bats in cartoons and stuff. You're not going to see them in person, hopefully, but you are going to see bats used as a villain this time of year.

They're spooky, they're scary. They're gonna hurt people. But we know that's not true, especially here in Florida. So the first call to action is very simple. Just talk about how cool bats are, how they're amazing. They make our evenings so much better in Florida by providing all of those pesticide-like effects, their environmental services that they offer. And then they also help our ag producers out as well.

LARA:
Yes, bats are awesome. Seeing bats are awesome. If you haven't seen them, head outside your house at like dusk time and  see if you see them. If you have palm trees in your yard, one thing you'll always hear from an extension agent is to leave the dead palm fronds on your tree.

SHANNON:
Yes.

LARA:
It provides amazing habitat and shelter, not only for bats, but for many other species, but especially some of our bat species. Or if you don't have palm trees, you could consider installing a bat house as well. Now, with a bat house, there's a lot you need to consider and think about before you just go and install it. So we will definitely include some links in our show notes for more information on that.

I don’t know Shannon—Do you want to mention anything more on bat houses?

SHANNON:
It should not look like a bird house. They're flat, they're massive, and they have lots of chambers in them. So if it looks like a bird house that just doesn't have a bottom, that's not the bat house you want for Florida. I’m going to leave it at that.

LARA:
Perfect. And again, we'll link some information so you know more about what Shannon's referring to, but do your homework. And then something we always stress and emphasize is anything we can do to reduce our use of broadcast insecticides… Again, we had an episode on rodenticides. But if we're impacting our insects that our insectivore bats— insectivorous bats—are feeding on, that’s definitely not beneficial for our bats.

SHANNON:
Yeah. So if you have to use insecticides for your garden for whatever reason, just make sure you're choosing one that you can use for targeted application. Do spot spraying, things like that. You don't need to just, you know, fog your backyard for instance. And then I just wanted to follow up a little bit, Lara, on what you said about go outside and look at a bat. In case you're listening and you have no idea what a bat looks like. Even from afar, they are much faster. Their wings are moving much, much faster than like a normal bird's wings would move. They're also very small. They're rarely bigger than your fist. So bats are really little. They move really quickly and they aren't very good at gliding. So if you see a bird swooping and gliding, that's a bird. Bats can't do that.

LARA:
It's a very erratic flight. And once you see it and recognize it, you'll know that it's a bat. 

And lastly, as Shannon and I have mentioned in our past couple episodes, we do have a survey out that we will link in our show notes. And the survey just helps Shannon and I to assess the impact of this podcast and see if you guys have made any changes in anything you're doing in your yard or your daily routine as a result of listening to our podcast. So please check that out in our show notes. We really, really appreciate your support by responding to that.

SHANNON:
It'll take less than 3 minutes. I promise it’ll be super, super quick, and it really helps Lara and I. I cannot emphasize that enough. So with that, I just want to thank everyone for their attention and their interest in learning about bats today. Happy, spooky season, whatever it might mean to you. And go out there and look for some bats at night.

Thanks for listening to “Naturally Florida,” a podcast about Florida's natural areas and the wild things that live here. Stay updated on new episodes by subscribing on your favorite podcast platform. If you enjoyed today's episode, consider sharing it with a friend. “Naturally Florida” is produced by your hosts Shannon Carnevale

LARA:
and Lara Milligan.

SHANNON:
If you have questions or suggestions, submit them online at naturallyfloridapodcast.com. This podcast is brought to you by the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Extension, an equal opportunity institution. Thank you for listening.

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