Bats from brown to bumblebee star at Discovery Museum

BANGOR – Kids at the Maine Discovery Museum went “batty” Saturday, but the reaction could be expected. About 50 children and parents took in a special presentation on bats, those furry, weird-looking nocturnal creatures that conjure up scary images for some but actually work to the benefit of people.

Did you know that:

. Bats can eat up to 600 insects in an hour?

. Bat excrement is highly valued as fertilizer?

. Bats’ skeletons resemble those of humans in many ways?

William Abbott, a worker at the Chewonki Foundation of Wiscasset, gave a high-spirited slide show and talk on bats, pointing out their physical features and many skills.

Bats are not to be feared. They will avoid humans if possible, all the while cleaning up insect-infested gardens. About 1 in 200 bats contracts a form of rabies, but these animals do not attack humans like a dog infected with rabies will. If a bat is on the ground, an adult should remove it with gloves because it is probably is infected with bat rabies, according to Abbott.

At the end of the talk, he displayed a live female brown bat in a glass container.

There are 1,000 breeds of bats worldwide, eight of them living in Maine. The Chewonki Foundation, which sponsors hundreds of environmental education programs, houses only two bats and only by special permit. Abbot also displayed a stuffed, mounted bat whose body was found in the car grill of a Chewonki worker, he said.

Maine bats are insect eaters and have long, pointy noses and big ears to help their radarlike senses, called echolocators, track mosquitoes and the like. Insect eaters comprise 70 percent of the bat population. Fruit-eating bats, mostly found in the South, make up the remaining 30 percent.

More exotic-looking than the local brown bat, the fruit-eating bats displayed in the slide show included a male free-tail bat that sports a bright white mohawklike mane to attract females; an Angolan fruit bat with a long nose, big eyes and little ears; the bumblebee bat, the world’s smallest, weighing less than a penny; and the flying fox, the world’s largest type of bat, which can have a wing span up to 6 feet. Both the bumblebee bat and the flying fox live in or near the Indonesian rain forest.

A bat’s skeletal structure includes five fingers, an arm bone in each wing, legs and structures that look like feet. A thumb hook on the top of its wing helps the creature hook into fruits or other objects.

There are frog-eating bats and fish-eating bats. Insect-eating bats’ echolocators bounce sound off objects to locate prey. Fruit eaters rely more on a superior sense of smell.

Vampire bats, small black creatures that lap blood, have heat sensors that help them locate warm-blooded animals. They have an anticoagulant that helps blood flow, and they also, quite courteously, inject a painkiller into the blood source so the animal doesn’t know it’s being bitten.

“That is the ugliest thing,” gasped one young spectator when Abbott showed a slide of a vampire bat.

“Oh, come on, it’s cool,” Abbott replied.

Bats in the northern part of the country hibernate in the winter, slowing their heart rate to 25 beats per minute and lowering their body temperature to 34 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the fall, they store a type of brown fat in their bodies. If bats are awakened more than three times during the winter, they most likely will die from consuming their stored fat too quickly, according to Abbott.

A descendant of Camp Chewonki, which was founded in 1911, the Chewonki Foundation conducts residential programs on the environment and has outreach programs for Maine schools. More information may be obtained by calling 882-7323.