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Bats
(Chiroptera)

Bats are the only mammals that can fly.  You may see a complete guide of the bats that were studied at Tikal in the Sylvannus Morley Museum.  Their forelimbs are true wings that are flapped in powered flight.  Their wing membranes are made of remarkable skin that is strong, soft, flexible, and can heal quickly if punctured.  Their skin is amazingly elastic, when a bat closes its wings, a membrane does not fold, but contracts like a sheet of rubber, yet the wings open with almost no force required in stretching it.        All new world bats belong to the suborder Microchiroptera.  These bats all use a kind of sonar or echolocation.  High-frequency sounds are emitted through the mouth or nose, and the returning echoes inform that bat about the characteristics of nearby objects.  Echolocation enables bats not only to navigate in the complete darkness of caves and the low light of the forest under story, but also to home in on flying insects.  Most echolocation sounds are ultrasonic (above the human hearing range) but people with good hearing can hear a faint ticking sound as a bat flies close by.  A few species that feed on large insects echolocate with audible sounds.  Members of different families are often specialized for different styles of echolocation, with distinctive structures around the mouth and nose to emit the sounds, and configurations of the ears to gather them.  Most echo locating bats also see quite well, especially in dim light.

     Despite these senses, bats flying down a familiar path may not be paying attention or, from curiosity may fly close to people and may brush them with their wings, a bat will not get tangled in human hair (an old superstition) and will not bite spontaneously 

     But like many animals, a bat will bite in its own defense if it is restrained in the hand.  Relatively few species of bats in Neotropical rainforests have ever been found to carry rabies, but there is a risk, especially in populated regions with many livestock and dogs.  The best advice is either not to handle live bats or to use heavy gloves when doing so, for research purposes. 

     Bats are beneficial to man; they eat enormous quantities of insects, pollinate many important plants such as balsa, chicle (sapodilla), and calabash, and help regenerate the forest by dispersing seeds.  In numbers of species, bats are the most important order of mammals in Neotropical rainforest; there are generally more species of bats in a given forest than there are of all other species of mammals combined, 39% of all mammal species in the region are bats. 

     Worldwide, they are the second largest order of mammals, with about 950 species.

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