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What are a bats behavioral adaptations?

Updated: 4/14/2022
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8y ago

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Bats are capable of some very interesting behaviors, so your question is really quite a broad one! There are several books written just on the behavior of bats, but I will attempt to give you a few short examples:

Feeding behavior and predator avoidance - nearly all bats (except vampire bats) catch their food by flying. Bats that eat insects want to be able to go out hunting when their food is most easily available (which is usually from midday onwards until dusk) but if they go out too early, while it's still light, they are easy targets for predators. So, they have to wait until the ambient light is low enough that they can hunt in peace.

Hibernation - bats, like a lot of small mammals that live outside the tropics, are capable of entering a state of suspended animation when food is scarce, to save energy they lowering their heartrate, breathing rate and body temperature and can remain motionless in caves and other undisturbed spots for months on end.

"flocking" behaviour - when bats leave their roost to go hunting at night they are very vulnerable, and many predators have learnt to wait outside the exit of these roosts and wait for them to fly out. If bats left one by one, then they would be easily picked off, so instead many bats leave in massive groups or "flocks", and much like zebra in the Serengeti find safety in numbers, so do bats!

[Note that behavioral adaptations are very different to physical adaptations (if we were talking about physical adaptations of bats we would talk about echolocation, their small eyes, their wings etc etc...) ]

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Kasandra Hegmann

Lvl 13
2y ago
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