Classification and revolution

Habitat

Bat

Fosil

Hunting, Feeding, and drinking

Bat

Bats are flying mammals in the order Chiroptera (The forelimbs of bats are webbed and developed as wings, making them the only mammals naturally capable of true and sustained flight. By contrast, other mammals said to fly, such as flying squirrels, gliding possums and colugos, glide rather than fly, and can only glide for short distances. Bats do not flap their entire forelimbs, as birds do, but instead flap their spread out digits, which are very long and covered with a thin membrane or patagium. Chiroptera comes from two Greek words, cheir "hand" and pteron () "wing."

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There are about 1,100 bat species worldwide, which

represent about twenty percent of all classified mammal

species. About seventy percent of bats are insectivores. Most of the rest are frugivores, or fruit eaters. A few species such as the Fish-eating Bat feed from animals other than insects, with the vampire bats being the only mammalian parasite species. Bats

are present throughout most of the world and perform vital

ecological roles such as pollinating flowers and dispersing fruit seeds.
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Many tropical plant species depend entirely on bats for the distribution of their seeds. The smallest bat is the Kitti's Hog-nosed Bat, measuring 2934 mm (1.141.34 in) in length, 15 cm (5.91 in)

across the wings and 22.6 g (0.070.09

oz) in mass. The largest species of bat is the Giant Golden-crowned Flying-fox, which is 336343 mm (13.2313.50 in) long, has a wingspan of 1.5 m (4 ft 11 in) and weighs approximately 1.11.2 kg (2 3 lb).
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Bats are mammals. Sometimes they are mistakenly called "flying rodents" or "flying rats", and they can also be mistaken for insects and birds. There are two traditionally recognized suborders of bats: -Megachiroptera (megabats) -Microchiroptera (microbats/echolocating bats) Not all megabats are larger than microbats. The major distinctions between the two suborders are: Microbats use echolocation: megabats do not with the exception of Rousettus and relatives. Microbats lack the claw at the second toe of the forelimb. The ears of microbats do not close to form a ring: the edges are separated from each other at the base of the ear. Microbats lack underfur: they are either naked or have guard hairs. Megabats eat fruit, nectar or pollen while most microbats eat insects; others may feed on the blood of animals, small mammals, fish, frogs.
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The phylogenetic relationships of the different groups of bats have been the subject of much debate. The traditional subdivision between Megachiroptera and Microchiroptera reflects the view that these groups of bats have evolved independently of each other for a long time, from a common ancestor that was already capable of flight. This hypothesis recognized differences between Classification and evolution microbats and megabats and acknowledged that flight has only evolved once in mammals. Most molecular biological evidence supports the view that bats form a single or monophyletic group. Researchers have proposed alternate views of chiropteran phylogeny and classification, but more research is needed.
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Consequently, two new suborders based on molecular data have

been proposed. The new suborder Yinpterochiroptera includes the

Pteropodidae or megabat family as well as the Rhinolophidae, Hipposideridae, Craseonycteridae, Megadermatidae, and Rhinopomatidae families. The new suborder Yangochiroptera includes all the remaining families of bats (all of which use laryngeal echolocation). These two new suborders are strongly supported by statistical tests. Teeling (2005) found 100% bootstrap support in all maximum likelihood analyses for the division of Chiroptera into these two modified suborders. This conclusion is further supported by a fifteen-base pair deletion in BRCA1 and a seven-base pair deletion in PLCB4 present in all Yangochiroptera and absent in all Yinpterochiroptera.
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Habitat

flight has enabled bats to become one of the most widely distributed groups of mammals. Apart from the Arctic, the Antarctic and a few isolated oceanic islands, bats exists all over the world. Bats are found in almost every habitat available on Earth. Different species select different habitat during different seasons ranging from seasides to mountains and even deserts but bat habitats have two basic requirements: roosts, where they spend the day or hibernate, and places for foraging. Bat roosts can be found in hollows, crevices, foliage, and even human-made structures; and include "tents" that bats construct by biting leaves.
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Fosil
There are few fossilized remains of

bats, as they are terrestrial and lightboned. An Eocene bat, Onychonycteris finneyi, was found in the fifty-two-million-year-old Green River Formation in South Dakota, United States, in 2004 and was added as a new genus and placed in a new family when published in Nature in 2008. It had characteristics indicating that it could fly, yet the well-preserved skeleton showed that the cochlea of the inner ear lacked development needed to support the greater hearing abilities of modern bats.

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The appearance and flight movement of bats 52.5 million years ago were different from those of bats today. Onychonycteris had claws on all five of its fingers, whereas modern bats have at most two claws appearing on two digits of each hand. It also had longer hind legs and shorter forearms, similar to climbing mammals that hang under branches such as sloths and gibbons. This palm-sized bat had broad, short wings suggesting that it could not fly as fast or as far as later bat species. Instead of flapping its wings continuously while flying, Onychonycteris likely alternated between flaps and glides while in the air. Such physical characteristics suggest that this bat did not fly as much as modern bats do, rather flying from tree to tree and spending most of its waking day climbing or hanging on the branches of trees.
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Hunting, feeding, and drinking

Hunting

Most bats are nocturnal creatures. Their daylight hours are spent

grooming, sleeping, and resting; it is during the nighttime hours that they hunt. The means by which bats navigate while finding and catching their prey in the dark was unknown until the 1790s, when Lazzaro Spallanzani conducted a series of experiments on a group of blind bats. These bats were placed in a room submerged in total darkness, with silk threads strung across the room. Even then, the bats were able to navigate their way through the room.
Spallanzani decided that bats were able to catch and find their prey

through the use of their ears. To prove this theory, Spallanzani plugged the ears of the bats in his experiment.
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 Bats seem to use their ears to locate and catch their prey, but

how they accomplish this wasnt discovered until the 1930s, by one Donald R. Griffin. Griffin, who was a biology student at Harvard College at the time, discovered that bats use echolocation to locate and catch their prey. When bats fly, they produce a constant stream of high-pitched sounds that only bats are able to hear. When the sound waves produced by these sounds hit an insect or other animal, the echoes bounce back to the bat, and guide them to the source.

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 Feeding and diet

The majority of food consumed by bats includes insects, fruits and flower nectar, vertebrates and blood. Almost three-fourths of the worlds bats are insect eaters. Insects consumed by bats include both aerial insects, and ground-dwelling insects. Each bat is typically able to consume one third of its body weight in insects each night, and several hundred insects in a few hours. This means that a group of one thousand bats could eat four tons of insects each year. If bats were to become extinct, the insect population is calculated to reach an alarmingly high number.
Vitamin C

In a test of 34 bat species from six major families of bats, including major insect and fruit-eating bat families, found that bats in all tested families have lost the ability to make vitamin C, and this loss may derive from a common bat ancestor, as a single mutation.

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Bat

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Thanks for your attention