![]() The topic of the symposium is pollinators other presenters include Pete Haggard, co-author with his wife Judy of Insects of the Pacific Northwest, speaking about butterflies, and Robert Hewitt, director of LBJ Enterprises and former president of the local Redwood Region Audubon Society, speaking about birds. He will also discuss his recent work with two bat pollinators in Arizona, including the endangered Lesser Long-Nosed bat. He will share more fun facts about bats at the annual HBGF Speakers' Symposium on Saturday, Nov. Joe Szewczak is an associate professor at HSU's Department of Biological Sciences. I don't think our hens would cozy up to a colony of bats, but stranger things have happened. If bats need a place to stay, they should go sleep with the chickens. And if I go upstairs and find bats hanging upside down from our Christmas decorations, I'm going to know who let them in. SCOTT: I think this concludes the fun facts portion of our evening. ME: Well, they're very small, and there's plenty of room up in the attic. SCOTT: We are not getting bats, if that's where you're going with this. But they know the bat house is out there, and they'll move into it if they need to. You can put up a bat house for them, but they would rather stay in an attic or under the eaves of a roof. ME: Amazing, huh? Bats don't make nests, they just find warm places to roost. And in one species of bat, the males can actually lactate, too. They nurse them until they're about six weeks old and they can fly around and eat bugs on their own. And do you know what the mothers feed them? Bats, being mammals, give birth to live pups that are about half the size of an adult bat. ME: It's none of our business how they have sex. SCOTT: I'll remember that next time I'm outside at night in a swarm of bugs. If a bat ever comes near you, it's probably because you've got a lot of bugs swarming around you. They just fly around at night and eat bugs. And it's not like they go after people and bite them. Natural populations of bats are less prone to rabies than other mammals like skunks. But actually, bats don't really have very high rates of rabies. It's not a big deal, though - you just have to get a rabies shot. Joe Szewczak - that's the guy at HSU - says he gets bitten all the time. SCOTT: Won't they bite you if you put them on a little perch in a laboratory? In the laboratory you can put them on a perch and train them to pick one object over another in exchange for food - like a soft thing versus a hard thing, a big thing versus a little thing - and once they're trained to do that, it's pretty easy to do tests to see how accurately they can distinguish between one bug and another. ![]() ME: You can actually train bats to do little tricks in exchange for mealworms. SCOTT: How do we know that bats can tell what kind of bug it is? They take about 10 snapshots a second of what's around them, just using sound. ME: You know how they emit these really high-frequency sounds to help them find things in the dark? Turns out that not only do they catch bugs in mid-air, but they can tell from the way the sound bounces off the bug whether it's the kind of bug they like to eat or not.
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