Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Insect-Devouring Bats Now Welcomed in New York (nytimes.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the Gotham-City dept.

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.

9 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Don't like bats? by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Don't like bats? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

    2. Re:Don't like bats? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 3, Funny

      Why people don't like bats is bejond me.

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

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:Don't like bats? by EmeraldBot · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      "Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
    4. Re:Don't like bats? by Feral+Nerd · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  2. Do bats really control mosquitoes? by pem · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

    1. Re:Do bats really control mosquitoes? by hankwang · · Score: 3, Interesting

      "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.

      --
      Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
  3. Re:last link is crap by mfh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I blame CmdrTaco for going AWOL.

    --
    The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
  4. Re:What about rabies? by legRoom · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.