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Insect-Devouring Bats Now Welcomed in New York (nytimes.com)
Slashdot reader HughPickens.com shares an article from the New York Times: The town of North Hempstead on Long Island has approved the construction of bat houses in several parks to attract more bats to the area because despite their less-than-desirable reputation, bats possess a remarkable ability to control insects, especially disease-carrying mosquitoes. "Bats can eat up to 1,000 mosquitoes per hour," says Judi Bosworth. "That's extraordinary. A pesticide couldn't do that." As mosquito season heats up, bringing with it the threat of the West Nile and Zika viruses, the bats make very welcome neighbors.
[T]he Asian tiger mosquito is found on Long Island and is capable of transmitting Zika in a laboratory setting, and as of October, 490 cases of West Nile and 37 deaths resulting from it have been recorded in New York since 2000. "If you minimize the mosquito population you minimize the possible incidence of the Zika virus," says Larry Schultz. "If you reduce the mosquito population, you make parks more accessible."
"Bats really have been very maligned," says Bosworth -- noting they don't really swoop down on your head and get tangled in your hair.
[T]he Asian tiger mosquito is found on Long Island and is capable of transmitting Zika in a laboratory setting, and as of October, 490 cases of West Nile and 37 deaths resulting from it have been recorded in New York since 2000. "If you minimize the mosquito population you minimize the possible incidence of the Zika virus," says Larry Schultz. "If you reduce the mosquito population, you make parks more accessible."
"Bats really have been very maligned," says Bosworth -- noting they don't really swoop down on your head and get tangled in your hair.
Slashdot reader HughPickens.com shares an article...
Wow, who would have guessed that?
Why people don't like bats is bejond me.
They are cute, it looks nice when they fly around and they harm no one.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Bats "don't really swoop down on your head and get tangled in your hair." They also don't eat 1,000 mosquitoes an hour (PDF).
Relocate the Senate to New York...
Worst case scenario if the bats get out of control we just release birds of prey to devour them.
The last link is crap, once again making me wonder what EditorDavid does at Slashdot, as it sure isn't editing.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
robins during the day....
I live in Silicon Valley. Most people say you have to go to San Francisco to see an interesting night life. Not true. We got bats, possums and skunks that come out to play at night. Nothing like leaving work and finding a family of skunks crossing your path.
Any rodent population can get rabies and they often transmit them to your animals (cats/dogs) This is why rabies vaccines are so common for pets. And that in turn reduces the risk of people needing the vaccine unless they've been bitten by an animal that might have had rabies if the animal isn't captured and the rabies confirmed/denied.
Surprised more people don't know about that.
They talk about other opinions, but most of those seem to be either anecdotal or from data taken in laboratories.
I also read that, not only do bats (and purple martins) not eat that many mosquitoes, they also eat other insects that would themselves eat mosquitoes, such as dragonflies.
Bats are one of the more common vectors for rabies transmission. Would that be a concern for this species as well?
I stole this Sig
Yeaaah. Batman will save you all. From mosquitos.
aaaaaaa
That's some mighty fine editing work there, /.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
... hello guano.
No Mosquito in Lompoc California because we love the bats.
And for the record ALL cases of Rabies here are from Raccoons not bats.
Go get a rabies check. For reals, no jokes. The risk is non-trivial.
End of PSA
We are so scared of Zika, that we are willing to get rabies over it. Have you heard how rabies kills? Do you know what rabies is like?
How about controlling there Aedes Aegypti mosquito instead? How about spending some money on making a vaccine? How about increasing NIH funding to the level at which they can fund some research?
Chiroptera family. Surprised more people don't know about that.
Gently reply
I've been out fishing many times at night where they bump and hit my line. Dosent seem to matter if it's monofilament or stranded or the test weight. I've never had one get in my hair but have been suprised how easy it was to net them when some got in my house. I was able to release both and they seemed unharmed.
I lived in a part of the world that was essentially reclaimed swampland and there were mangrove islands not too far away with swamps, sorry, I mean "pristine wetland environments". Every summer, the mozzie population would boom. Occasionally the council would fog the place with something that smelled like passionfruit. It wiped out all the mozzies for miles around. Wiped out everything else insectoid, too. Piles of dead recently-flying things could be seen under the streetlights.
Bats can eat 100 mozzies per hour? Pfft. People are so much better at this game.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Only incident of "bat tangled in hair" was my sisters.
At the time she had long flowing hair - and a bat had gotten into her room.
She saw it... and ducked - which flipped her long hair over her head.
And that just happened to be in the line of flight of the bat.
The bat got out almost immediately (as soon as the hair stopped flying around).
They'll eat the larvae
If not, I vote to bring back DDT for a year.
A bat once got loose in the computer science lounge at my undergrad, and flew around in big circles for an hour as the staff and faculty hid in their offices. I ignored it and went about my day, so after a while one of the professors recruited me to help capture it. Because random undergrads and computer science professors are totally who you want in charge of capturing bats.
Real lawyers write in C++
Just mandate that all bats must report for a rabies vaccination before their first hunting day.
This happened here in Australia, now we have a huge bat (and bat guano) problem. The bats a bigger problem than the insects ever were.
80 years ago bats were common in New York. back then, if you (or your loved ones) were victims of crime, you could rely on a bat to inspire you to go out and fix things. But as bats declined, so did the quality of crime fighter. Today you can't turn on the TV without seeing crime and injustice everywhere. Hopefully as bats become more common more children can grow up seeing bats at their window in their formative years and the world will be a safer place.
I realize there are alternative ways to control insects. Spiders for example, but studies have shown that these tend to inspire neurotic crime fighters with a tendency to lose as often as they win,
As for the default solution, to manufacture more chemicals, this has the undesirable side effects: viz, the presence of large vats of chemicals that people tend to fall into or have splashed on their faces. Studies have shown that chemical vats tend to create more criminals than crime fighters so should be discouraged. Other proposes solutions to the insect problem (shrinking scientists to insect size, surrounding the city with extremely high voltage electrocution devices, etc) have similarly mixed results. But bats are the way to go.
Finally, bats have the further advantage of inspiring the creation of underground homes and penthouse suites, thus relieving New York's chronic housing shortage. They also tend to correlate with a boom in construction, the more advanced sciences, and many other economic advantages. An increase in New York's bat population is long overdue.
"The Asian tiger mosquito particularly bites in forests during the day and has been known as the forest day mosquito for this very reason. Depending upon region and biotype, there are differing active peaks, but for the most part they rest during the morning and night hours."
So guess how effective nocturnal feeding bats would be in controlling the Asian tiger mosquito?
from mosquito.org Do bats serve as an effective mosquito control? Recently the public has shown increased interest in the value of insectivorous species of bats in controlling mosquitoes. Although untested lately, this is not a new idea. During the 1920's several bat towers were constructed near San Antonio, Texas, in order to help control malarial mosquitoes. Mosquito populations were not affected and the project was discontinued. Bats in temperate areas of the world are almost exclusively insectivorous. Food items identified in their diet are primarily beetles, wasps, and moths. Mosquitoes have comprised less than 1% of gut contents of wild caught bats in all studies to date. Bats tend to be opportunistic feeders. They do not appear to specialize on particular types of insects, but will feed on whatever food source presents itself. Large, concentrated populations of mosquitoes could provide adequate nutrition in the absence of alternative food. However, a moth provides much more nutritional value per capture than a mosquito. M.D. Tuttle, a world authority on bats, is often quoted for his anecdotal report that bats effectively controlled mosquito populations at a popular resort in New York State. While there is no doubt that bats have probably played a visible, if not prominent, role in reducing the mosquito problems in many areas, the natural abatement of mosquito populations is an extremely complex process to study, comprising poorly known ecological relationships. Tuttle attempts to underscore the bats role by citing an experiment in which bats released into a laboratory room filled with mosquitoes caught up to 10 mosquitoes per minute. He extrapolated this value to 600 mosquitoes per hour. Thus, a colony of 500 bats could consume over a quarter of a million mosquitoes per hour. Impressive numbers indeed, but singularly unrealistic when based upon a study where bats were confined in a room with mosquitoes as their only food source. There is no question that bats eat mosquitoes, but to utilize them as the sole measure of control would be folly indeed, particularly considering the capacity of both mosquitoes and bats to transmit diseases.
This type of talk is very similar to the geniuses that thought cane toads introduction to Australia would rid the country of cane beetles. But we all know what happened there.
As a teenager at the start of a tour of a cave the guide reiterated some bat myths because the cave had many bats. He said, no, they do not get tangled in your hair. While our large group was making its way down a very long flight of stairs at the beginning of a cave I watched as a bat flew low the heads of the people in the group and right into the hair of a woman with a rather large hairdo with the resulting expected screams and arm waving. So, yes, it happens...
All one is doing, is swapping one disease-carrying pest for another. Does this program include some sort of rabies vaccination? In Germany, they air-drop bait containing the oral vaccine into the forest, for wild animals to eat.
Rabies is perhaps the most well known disease associated with bats. Along with animals such as dogs, foxes, raccoons, and skunks, bats are one of the primary animals that transmit rabies.
The Bat
by Ogden Nash
Myself, I rather like the bat,
It's not a mouse, it's not a rat.
It has no feathers, yet has wings,
It's quite inaudible when it sings.
It zigzags through the evening air
And never lands on ladies' hair,
A fact of which men spend their lives
Attempting to convince their wives.
"less-than-desirable reputation".
I think you mean "reputation of being less than desirable".
There was an old woman, who swallowed a fly.
Like the title says.
There's already enough zubat's around
Welcome our insect devouring, bat-resembling Overlor...
Wait, what?