The Worst Thing You Didn't Know About Bats
- Kevin Lankes
- Nov 3
- 5 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/KLtovm-ryUo
We all have this innate cultural understanding that bats are some of the spookiest critters around, but the scariest thing about them is actually the number of babies they kill. I’m willing to bet you weren’t expecting that, because I wasn’t. Now don’t get me wrong, they’re definitely really creepy otherwise.
There’s lot of other things to talk about. I mean there’s a reason bats are everywhere around Halloween. They’re pretty much standard Fall decor at this point, at least as much as those leaf garlands your mom brings home from Michael’s every October. Bats have also heavily influenced lots of lore for other scary creatures like vampires, they carry rabies, which is terrifying, they fly around silently and eerily in the night, like stealthy little rat ninjas, and anytime a creepy movie wants to set the ambiance, the main characters are going to have to fight through a swarm of bats. Though they definitely give a lot of people the heebie jeebies, none of these things happens to be the spookiest fact about bats. So let’s talk about how many baby deaths bats are responsible for each year and how. Because the how is a big one in this case. You might say bats are actually the victims here, too. What a spooky Halloween twist that is.
A study from just last year has blown open this crazy chain of death and destruction to wildlife biomes and their close connection to human health. A researcher from the University of Chicago by the name of Eyal Frank discovered the link. So the thing is, bats eat 40% of their own body weight, or more, in insects each and every night. These include common crop pests. Bats are nature’s pesticide.
Unfortunately, bat populations in North America are steadily declining. In 2006, an invasive bat fungus crossed the ocean from Europe and showed up in a bat colony in Albany. The fungus is called Pseudogymnoascus destructans, and it manifests in a white fuzz on bat noses, which is why the condition is colloquially referred to as white-nose syndrome. Which is good because I don’t want to try to pronounce that again. Super creepy and fitting for today’s video, the fungus grows on hibernating bats while they’re still and asleep in their lairs. Research shows that it has the potential to wipe out an entire colony in just five years.
A separate study from the North American Bat Conservation Alliance, published in 2023, which is pretty amusingly called the State of the Bats Report, found that 53% of North American bat species are now at risk of extinction. The companion study was published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences last year. 102 experts across North America pinpointed the key threats to the 153 bat species on the continent. Climate change is the number one cause of bat colony collapse. Big shocker there. But white nose syndrome is also a huge and troublesome factor. As of the publication date of this study and Frank’s study last year, twelve out of the fifty bat species that eat insects have been hit by this invasive fungus.
I don’t know if you’ve pieced together what this has to do with human health and infant mortality yet, but I’m about to tell you. You see, in areas where bat populations have declined, farmers jacked up their use of pesticides by an average of 31%. These same areas also have a higher infant mortality rate, which is now 8% above normal background. This accounts for 1,334 additional deaths than the average. Over a thousand kids are dying in places where bats are threatened. You can’t get spookier than that.
The data is so convincing that the study shows a causal link between bat decline and increased infant mortality. Anyone who reads a lot of studies or knows about science gets why that’s so crazy. For the most part, the data can show us correlations, and correlation does not equal causation, it’s just a thing that’s happening at the same time as another thing, and you need a whole lot of related studies to find enough evidence to say something is causal. In this case, the bat fungus operated as a kind of natural control here. Because researchers could compare countries where bat populations had plummeted with those where they hadn’t, and the fungus itself was not discriminatory, so it was already controlling for other factors across the board that you often have to consider and eliminate for in laboratory conditions, like socio-economic factors, other health conditions, and so on.
The sad thing is, this isn’t even the only study like this. There’s all kinds of research related to declining wildlife populations and the downwind effects on human health and society. One study in India showed us that the loss of vultures over time increased deaths in humans because vultures weren’t around to clean up disease-carrying roadkill and other gross waste. In the U.S., pesticide use increases during years when the plague of cicadas rises from the depths of the earth like the demon spawn that they are, and the people born in those years are shown to do worse academically and are more likely than their peers to drop out of school at some point. More infants also die during those cicada swarm years, too.
Because we live in a wealthy hibernating industrialist’s gilded age nightmare, our capitalist systems don’t really give a shit about an 8% increase in baby deaths. It’s really unfortunate, and maybe that’s actually the spookiest fact of all. But what the system might care about is that Frank’s study discovered that increased pesticide use can’t make up for the lack of bats, economically speaking. Maybe this is something the people in power will actually care about. Pesticides don’t work as well as bats do for controlling pest populations. Farmers in countries with declining bat populations are finding their crop quality diminishing, and they have fewer healthy crops to sell, which means revenue is down by about 29% for them. Add in the increased cost of additional pesticides, and we can directly trace a $27 billion dollar loss to farmers in these areas across a span of about a decade. I’m kind of grossed out by this next fact but we’ve put a number on the lives of the children we’ve lost, but that’s a thing in our society I guess, so add in those costs and we’re up to $40 billion dollars.
The spookiest fact about bats is not how they’re going to suck your blood, or get caught in your hair, because that’s actually a myth and it doesn’t happen anyway, and you’re also really unlikely to get rabies, but sure still get the shots if you’re exposed to a lot of bats. But the scariest thing about bats is that populations are collapsing, and bats actually serve as a natural pesticide. So pesticide use is increasing, and that’s leading to a big rise in deaths of our children. And that’s a really awkward Halloween-time fact, because Halloween is really such a kid-friendly holiday now. I know because I’m a cool kid and I love Halloween. But be careful out there. And I don’t mean trick or treating. Take a look at some guides for reducing pesticide exposure in your life, and make sure to advocate for systemic solutions that will get us to a place where we aren’t using as many pesticides overall. I’m planning to do a followup video with the guidelines for that and the solutions for pesticide overuse, so make sure to subscribe to the channel and hit the notification button so you can be around for that.
Let's speak for the bats, because they can’t speak for themselves. And even if they do suck your bloods out, they won’t want to because your blood’s full of pesticides.
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