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.

Comments

Re:Who would have guessed

[__aaclcg7560]

Websites are people too.

Don't like bats?

[angel'o'sphere]

Why people don't like bats is bejond me.
They are cute, it looks nice when they fly around and they harm no one.

Re:Don't like bats?

[EmeraldBot]

Why people don't like bats is bejond me. They are cute, it looks nice when they fly around and they harm no one.

They can spread rabies through their bites, and although they rarely attack people, they sometimes do if they feel threatened (as in old buildings). I think it's fantastic that people are finally starting to realize that nature provides its own balancing mechanisms, but I think that if the bat population becomes large enough, rabies vaccines might be a good idea.

Re:Don't like bats?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why people don't like bats is bejond me.

Leathery. Hardly any meat on them. Get bits stuck between your teeth. Honestly don't think I've ever met anyone who likes them who's tried them.

Re:Don't like bats?

[__aaclcg7560]

Leathery. Hardly any meat on them. Get bits stuck between your teeth. Honestly don't think I've ever met anyone who likes them who's tried them.

If a black chicken flies into your apartment when you're poor and unable feed your family, you're going to pass up a free meal?

Re:Don't like bats?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Why people don't like bats is bejond me.

This is New York we're talking about. They prefer spiders, not bats.

Re:Don't like bats?

[boudie2]

#batlivesmatter

Re:Don't like bats?

[EmeraldBot]

You don't need to be bitten by a bat in order to get rabies. any type of saliva exposure is adequate. rabies vaccines are inadequate. No vaccine has 100% effectiveness and rabies is close to 100% fatal. Given the bat vector, herd immunity does not apply. I think keeping the bats away is far preferable.

If saliva doesn't penetrate the skin, it's very unlikely to make you sick unless you decide it's a smart idea to rub your finger right over the spot and then put it in your mouth, and rabies vaccines are pretty effective, something like a 97% success rate even after 10+ years later, and bats are pretty unlikely to attack people, even the rabid ones, because we run on different circadian rhythms. The problem is applying the vaccines - I don't think rabies is a standard vaccine for people, and if we're going to encourage large scale residency of bats in a city, then I think at least recommending the vaccine might not be the worst of ideas. Honestly, I think the risk of rabies from a bat is significantly smaller than something taking hold in the excessive mosquito population, so it's definitely a decision I support, but I think we need to consider everything, and that includes the risk of a rabies outbreak.

Re:Don't like bats?

[Solandri]

Just to reiterate this, here are the U.S. rabies cases in people from 2003-2013. Although human rabies has nearly been eliminated in the U.S., you can see that more than half the cases were transmitted by bats, more than 2/3 if you only look at cases where the exposure happened within the U.S.

I think bats are much-maligned too, but rabies is something you just do not screw around with (nearly 100% fatality rate - even our best treatment only has a 8% success rate).

Re:Don't like bats?

[Applehu Akbar]

What has people spooked about bats and rabies is while you definitely know if you in danger from a dog bite, bat bites are often not easy to detect.

Re:Don't like bats?

[Rei]

Bats are common rabies carriers, although contracting rabies is indeed rare. Rabies vaccines work, but they have to be used before symptoms set in. If you don't realize that you've been put at risk, you're not going to get the vaccine.

One of those rare people to die of rabies was an acquaintance of my younger sister, who lives in the Houston area (this was something like 10 years ago). A bat got into his room while he was sleeping and they shooed it out when it was discovered; he never knew he had been exposed. They tried to save him after the symptoms set in - it has succeeded in the past, although only very rarely. It was too little, too late.

But again... humans dying of rabies is very rare.

Re:Don't like bats?

[Feral Nerd]

Why people don't like bats is bejond me. They are cute, it looks nice when they fly around and they harm no one.

I have never understood that either. I remember reading an article in a science magazine years and years ago about bats. The article was about a biologist who studied the bats and the guy told this story about how he'd been talking to a farmer about being allowed to look for bat roosts on his land. The farmer just grinned and replied that if the biologist found any he should be sure to tell him so he could rot them out. Instead of blowing his stack this guy just asked the farmer if potato Beatles were a problem for him? ...to which the farmer replied that, yes, the were. The biologist then went on to give him a short lecture on bats and do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many potato beetles the average bat colony the size of the ones he had been finding in the region consumed in one night which turned out to be something like a metric ton of bugs. When the guy came back a while later to check on the bats he found that the farmer had put up a bunch no-trespassing signs around the bat roost. I read somewhere that the free-tailed bats from Bracken Cave in Texas eat 250 tons, thats TONS of bugs in a single night!! ...but that's a pretty big colony. Nevertheless, if I was a farmer I'd build bat roost in my fields and get advice from biologists about how best to persuade the critters to move in.

Re:Don't like bats?

[Solandri]

Well, if lightning or bathtub drownings compounded as they became more common, then yeah you'd be right. Diseases are different from those causes of death in that animals transmit it to each other, so a small increase in transmission rate translates into a large increase in number of cases. Rabies is rare in the U.S. because we've worked extensively to control it. Dog vaccinations are mandatory, and we set up baits with vaccines to vaccinate wild raccoons, foxes, and skunks. That's why most of the transmission in the U.S. is via bats - the baits don't work on them. In Asia and Africa which don't have these extensive rabies control programs, it kills about 25,000 people per year. (Most of the transmission there is via dogs, but the dogs are getting it from other animals.)

It's like immunization programs for children - where a successful vaccination program can almost complete eliminate the disease. But if the vaccination rate drops below a certain threshold (or in this case, you increase the number of un-vaccinated organisms causing a drop in the percentage which are vaccinated), you start to get outbreaks of the disease again.

Re:Don't like bats?

[Your.Master]

Although nobody is talking about building enclosures to attract lightning to your bathroom...

There is a degree to which rabies in humans is rare because people are afraid of it. And fatal shark attacks are rare because humans don't like to swim where the dangerous shark varieties are. Etc..

That doesn't mean this isn't a good idea -- mosquitoes are a disease reservoir that is typically much more infectious, and choosing bats because they suppress mosquito populations* seems likely to be a good choice. It's just an explanation for why people don't love bats. I didn't care about bats much but my parents would tell me to avoid them due to the rabies risk.

* This of course assumes it's true. I've read that there's little evidence that bats eat enough mosquitoes to make up for the fake that they eat the things that already eat mosquitoes.

Re:Don't like bats?

[aevan]

Corpses in the walls, and histoplasma from guano in attics.

I've no issue with bats being bats in the wild, but when they decide they want to winter in your attic and it takes three visits by removal companies (coupled with a 'no, they have young, we have to wait until they are grown' - while hearing them in the walls and finding some hanging off curtains)... you tend to not like them in a more intimate environment =P

Re:Don't like bats?

[bruce_the_moose]

The Bat
By Frank Jacobs

Bats are creepy; bats are scary;
Bats do not seem sanitary;
Bats in dismal caves keep cozy;
Bats remind us of Lugosi;
Bats have webby wings that fold up;
Bats from ceilings hang down rolled up;
Bats when flying undismayed are;
Bats are careful; bats use radar;
Bats at nighttime at their best are;
Bats by Batman unimpressed are!

I first read this poem in an ancient (c1972) Mad Magazine anthology, and have loved it ever since. At last! An opportunity to share it!

Re:Don't like bats?

[rgbatduke]

As several people pointed out, bats are one of the most common vectors of rabies in the US. And sadly, you do not have to be bitten by a bat to get rabies. There is evidence that just being in the same room with a rabid bat can lead to exposure, probably from aerosolized saliva. Three men (out of the 19 total) who died of rabies over the last ten years had no reported history of contact with bats at all, but had bat-associated rabies viruses. It isn't probable that you will get rabies just being outdoors with bats flying overhead (you have to be super-unlucky, as the bats have to have rabies AND you have to inhale or otherwise introduce aerosolized bat saliva into your system) but it is possible. My wife is a physician who used to work with bats before she went to medical school (and went to Jamaica to collect them because they don't have rabies in Jamaica) and once the evidence that rabies could be transmitted by bats without any bite at all came out, she has actively discouraged even building outdoor bat houses to attract them to our yard.

Yes, one is balancing risks. Mosquitoes carry many diseases (and bats carry a few besides rabies, e.g. histoplasmosis) and some of them can be fatal. Killing mosquitoes with e.g. chemical agents carries risks that have to be balanced against the costs and risks of the diseases they carry. Increasing the bat population will likely enough reduce the mosquito population and chance of mosquito borne infection, but at the risk of increasing the number of deaths due to bat-borne disease instead. I'd guess that the bet is a good one, but (naturally) not for the losers.

There are other efficient mosquito eaters. Purple martins, for example, dragonflies for another. These are not rabies or disease vectors AFAIK. But rabies is an especially scary disease because if you get it, you are basically dead, and 17 out of the 19 deaths reported to the CDC from 1997 to 2006 were from bat-related variants of the rabies virus (so even if the bite was e.g. from a fox or racoon, the fox got it from a bat). It is like mad cow disease -- scary because you may not even know you were exposed and then at some later point -- possibly years later for vCJD -- you develop the incurable disease and die. Because vCJD is so difficult to detect or diagnose, you might even die without anyone ever knowing why. If you remember the panic over mad cow disease in the US, try to also remember that more people die of bat borne rabies in three years that have ever -- to the best of our current knowledge -- died of vCJD in the US, and of the four that HAVE died, all of them are believed to have contracted the disease overseas.

The flu, on the other hand, kills well over 100 children every year, and many times that many adults. Yet people don't fear it enough to even get vaccinated, all too often, because MOST people who get it don't die (but a lot of people get it!). It's not rational. Go figure.

rgb

Do bats really control mosquitoes?

[pem]

According to mosquito.org:

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.

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.

Re:Do bats really control mosquitoes?

[hankwang]

"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."

Dragonflies hunt by sight, during daytime. Bats and mosquitoes are active at dusk and night, so this doesn't sound very likely as far as bats are concerned.

Re:last link is crap

[mfh]

I blame CmdrTaco for going AWOL.

Bats aren't good at Echo locating on thin lines

[burtosis]

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.

Re:What about rabies?

[legRoom]

According to the National Geographic link at the end of the summary, only 5% of bats are infected. So there's really nothing to worry about: in a typical large colony with many thousands of individuals, only thousands of them carry rabies. /s

Seriously though - I am not anti-bat, or anti-wildlife in general, but it's pretty obvious that some of the more rabid Greens are willing to say whatever it takes to portray all wild animals as good neighbours, no matter how dangerous their deception is to fellow humans. (Another disturbing example of this being the way that many people insist that large predators - lions, bears, wolves, etc. - never attack humans, except by accident, or in defence of their young - despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary.)

There are often (although certainly not always) good reasons that our ancestors wiped out the local populations of various pests and predators. A rational society should thoughtfully weigh the pros and cons of reintroducing them into populated areas, rather than committing the game management equivalent of alternative medicine's "natural = good" fallacy.

Re:last link is crap

[bheerssen]

It's nice to see that blaming CmdrTaco is still a thing.

Screw bat, use dragonflies

[Jzanu]

They'll eat the larvae

Good luck with that

[Smiddi]

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.