2.28.2010

The Bat


The Bat is one of the most unusual animal, that's why I chose to write a article on bats. So everybody knows that bats are flying mammals, the forelimbs are webbed and developed as wings, that's why they are capable of sustaining flight. Unlike other flying creatures bats are not such good at flying, they're flight is rather chaotic and they could only sustain flight for a short period of time, but they could travel large distances up to 800km in search for food. The eyes of bats are small and poorly developed, in a way bats are blind, but it has been discovered that some species of bats are capable of detecting ultraviolet light, but they also have a high quality sense of smell and hearing. The teeth of bats resemble insectivorans, they are very sharp to bite through the hardened armor of insects or the skin of fruit. Mammals have one-way valves in veins to prevent the blood from flowing backwards, but bats also have one-way valves in arteries, but one species of bat has the longest tongue of any mammal relative to its body size. This is beneficial to them in terms of pollination and feeding their long narrow tongues can reach deep into the long cup shape of some flowers. When their tongue retracts, it coils up inside their rib cage. Bats are nocturnal creatures during daytime bats are grooming, sleeping and resting, it's during the night time that they hunt, to avoid competition with birds. The way that bats mange to hunt at night is by using their ears, bats use echolocation to locate and catch their pray , when bats fly they produce a constant stream of high pitch sounds that only bats can hear, when the sound waves produced by these sounds hit an insect or an animal the sound waves bounce back to the bat, and guides the bat to the source, bats rarely fly in rain as the rain interferes with their echo location, and they are unable to locate their food.. The majority of food that a bat consumes includes: insects, fruits and flower nectar, vertebrates and blood(in some species of bats namely the so called specie of Vampire Bat, which is known to feed on other animals blood). I'll live a link here with the school's website cobra.rdosr.ro.