What makes bats attack

Which is why you will see a bat crawl to the wall and then up, this allows it to get into position for a more swoop-like motion of flight. Like I have said, this tends to feel more like an attack because it is almost like they are falling to attack you in your home. The best thing to help the bat not attack and get back to its normal flight patterns is to make sure the air flow in the house is as still as possible.

Turn off those fans people, a fan to a bat who is trying to fly and avoid you is like trying to hold a conversation with me while I do math. It never tends to end well, and usually, you do not get the desired result. A bat is a bat. There are tons of species of bats, but we will not go into all of them right now. The main one I want to talk about is Vampire Bats.

No, I will not refer to Dracula this does not count! Vampire bats, bats in general, date back thousands of years. For us here in the United States, we are safely out of their comfortable climate range. In June of , the country of Brazil saw a significant spike in their Vampire Bat attacks. Unfortunately, the northeast of Brazil saw a rise in bites by Vampire bats, rise coming to a total of over forty cases.

This many bat attacks on humans are not frequent, but not unheard of either. While we can predict the patterns of these bats and other mammals. We can not predict how they will react when we take their natural habitat, and they are forced to relocate.

Bats attacking humans, while a serious issue, does not seem to be something that requires significant concern in our region of the world or even this region of the United States specifically. With Vampire bats being the biggest culprits of bat attacks on humans and their pets, having the reassurance that they are not in this region is something I hope can help many readers sleep better at night.

Other folklore asserts that the bat will stay until driven out by thunder and lightning. The feared consequences of a bat in your hair can range from annoying to lethal and worse. Some beliefs are that your hair will snarl or turn gray or that the bat will pull it out. A similar belief found from the south of France to Canada is that if bat droppings fall in your hair, you will become mangy or even bald. While bats have mites and a variety of ectoparasitic insects, lice have never been found on bats.

Humans, however, have their own unique species of head louse and a pubic louse, also. Other consequences of a bat getting in your hair are thought to be bad luck or insanity. The worst that can happen is if the bat escapes carrying a strand of her hair; in Ireland it is believed that this will result in eternal damnation.

Regional beliefs in the United States describe several other serious consequences. Missouri folklore relates that a bat in your hair leads to insanity. Otherwise, the child will stop growing. Do bats really get into human hair? Certainly there are occasions when this happens, but hardly enough to explain the profusion of myths.

But this is to be expected in a disturbed roost containing several million bats, and myths about bats in hair do not come from the relatively few people who put themselves in such extreme situations. Yet how often do you recall running into one? Probably not many. Most of that is because they come out mainly at night and are exceptionally good at flying around unnoticed. Bats range in size from the size of your thumb to huge, winged flying foxes with wing-spans of almost 6 feet!

Most bats eat insects or fruit. These two diets give bats a crucial role in our ecosystem. They eat a stunning amount and variety of insect pests.

A group of scientists at Boston University calculated American farmers save anywhere from 3. In addition to eating insects that could harm crops, bats are extremely important as pollinators.

They help pollinate night blooming flowers and are responsible for pollinating over types of fruit. Fruits like the dragonfruit and those from the famous saguaro cactus depend solely on bats to spread and make fruit — no other animals can pollinate them! Other bats feed on fish, frogs, lizards and even other bats! Amazingly many of these bats are super-specialized to feed on individual animal groups like this.

Simply put, bats are awesome and we need them. Those are, of course, all fiction and not rooted totally in science fact… but it turns out that the myth of vampires does stem from a little bit of reality.

First of all, there are a few bats the vampire bats that drink blood. Vampire bats are the only bats in the world that drink blood! But, like most animals, they are opportunistic when it comes to an available food source — so they can definitely drink your blood. In total, there are three species of vampire bats that are known to drink the blood of humans. Even though it is extremely rare and conditions would have to be just right for it to occur, part of the vampire myth surely came from bizarre events of bats feeding on humans.

Most of the time vampire bats get a meal from a larger herbivore like a goat, cow, sheep or a horse. Once they get close, they use heat sensing organs in their nose to find where the veins and arteries are near the surface.

Then they make a small incision in the skin with their needle-like teeth.