Facts about bats and their types

Bats are small and furry animals with wings like birds, their wings are covered with a flap of skin rather than feather. bats also give birth to live young like other mammals and nourish them with their milk.

Bats the only mammal that can fly or say naturally capable of true and sustained flight. By contrast, other mammals said to fly, such as flying squirrels, gliding possums, and colugos, glide rather than fly, and can only glide for a short distance.

About seventy percent of bats are insectivores. Most of the rest are frugivores. A few species such as the Fish-eating Bat feed from animals other than insects, with the vampire bats being the only mammalian parasite species.

Bat loves to live in warm places and thus the tropics and the quatorial rainforests are their favorite habitats. Bats are rarely found at the poles as they cannot bear the extreme cold temperatures.

The Bumblee Bat also known as Kitti's Hog-nosed Bat from Thailand is the worlds smallest mammal, measuring 29–34 mm in length, 15 cm across the wings and 2–2.6 g in mass.

The largest species of bat is the Giant Golden-crowned Flying Fox, which is 336–343 mm long, has a wingspan of 1.5 m and weighs approximately 1.1–1.2 kg.

Most bats are nocturnal and are active at twilight. Bat live together in large group called colonies. Living in colony help bats in many ways, they collectively conserve heat in groups. The female bats stay together iin colonies during the breeding season and these colonies are known as nursery roosts.

Bats hibernate during winter to conserve their energy, during this period they become inactive and survive on only a few grams of stored energy.

Female bats usually give birth to one to two pups each year. At birth the wings are too small to be used for flight. Young microbats become independent at the age of 6 to 8 weeks, while megabats do not until they are four months old.

A single bat can live over 20 years.

There are a few species of bat that consume blood exclusively as their diet. This type of diet is referred to as hematophagy, and three species of bat exhibit this behavior. These species include the Common Vampire Bat, the White-winged Vampire Bat, and the Hairy-legged Vampire Bat. The Common Vampire Bat typically consumes the blood of mammals, while the Hairy-legged and White-winged feed on the blood of birds.