If you think of a bat, you might picture something scary or maybe movies reinforced a misconception.

You’re as blind as a bat.

Exactly.

If there’s a bat nearby, it must be ready to attack, and if there’s one, there’ve got to be thousands…

Whatever the thought, it’s often not a positive one. But what if so many of these beliefs about bats just aren’t true, and in reality, we need bats way more than they need us.

Bats represent the second largest group of mammal species in the world, just second to rodents. There's over 1400 species, they are by far the most diverse group of mammals.

This diversity can be seen in their diets, the way they move, whether or not they migrate or hibernate, and especially in their physical characteristics.

You will see bats that have huge ears, tiny ears, big eyes, little eyes, long-snouted, short-snouted, huge bats, tiny bats, and each bat is different in what they do in the environment.

The roles may be different, but the impacts are positive.

Bats are really important to our everyday lives for several main reasons. One is that they help control pest insect populations.

Pests that are tasty meals for bats can be incredibly detrimental to us. Some can kill us, others destroy our food, which impacts the economy.

Bats also pollinate lots of different plants around the world. And then finally a lot of bats eat fruit and help disperse the seeds and help regrow places like tropical rainforests.

So, bats are good and perhaps we haven’t been so great at giving them credit, but what made them the villain?

Let's start with the word vampire.

That’s right, if we’re talking about bats as villains, then we have to bring up this guy.
But vampires come from European folklore, describing a corpse that rises from the dead and feeds on human blood, not a bat…

So, to figure this out, let’s start here and rewind.

Along comes Hernán Cortés, the first night that Cortés and the soldiers spent in Mexico, there were these little animals that fly at night and then they land on the horses and then they bite them and eat their blood.

These blood thirsty bats were foreign to the Spanish conquistadors because they’re native to this region.

But eventually the stories of these creatures found their way to Europe and onto the pages of Irish author Bram Stoker’s horror masterpiece…

Count Chocula

No, not quite... Dracula.

Which is one of my favorites for obvious reasons, it’s a beautiful novel. But I think that Bram Stoker needed his Dracula to move long distances fast. And then he said, ‘I know what my Dracula is going to do. He is going to turn into a bat. And then he's going to fly long distances, turn into a human being and bite the girl.’

That’s the moment when the identity and the public image of bats was like that and then it started climbing down like this. Terrible.

The story of Dracula took off quickly, reaching the stage in 1924 and onto the silver screen in 1931, setting the tone for how bats would be perceived in popular culture for the century ahead.

But wait, what about these guys?

Let’s hear from an expert…

Hello, boys and girls.

No, not him, him.

There's only three species of vampire bats, the hairy legged vampire bats, and the white winged vampire bat, the third species though, is the common vampire bat.

I lead a group of researchers that studies disease transmission by bats.

Another area where bats catch a bad rap is the potential transmission of viruses.

Virtually all living animals have viruses. Really, whether bats do have an unusual number of human infecting viruses is really an issue that's still up for debate.


One of the most exciting things is exploring whether or not we can control diseases within wild bat populations. The two areas that I'm quite excited about are one called transferable vaccines, this is an idea of an oral vaccine, but it's integrated into a gel, which is spread onto a bat topically. You spread that onto some bats, release them, and then the other bats will groom the vaccine off of and potentially become vaccinated. But ultimately if you wanted to do more, that would be something called a transmissible vaccine. A vaccine that spreads more like an infectious virus.

I'm hoping that we'll get there with the bats, but it might be a decade or so.

But in the meantime...

Just because bats do have those viruses, it doesn't mean that we need to fear bats, generally, when these viruses are being transmitted from bats to humans, there's really a strong human component why that happens.

The capturing of wildlife for animal markets and deforestation are examples of how human encroachment on bats’ natural habitat may lead to virus transmission.

The species that are endangered are those species that rely on pristine, intact tropical rainforests. Those animals are losing more and more of their space because of our encroaching. This is the moment in which we have to think, how can I help bats?

Bats get such a bad rap and so another big part of bat conservation is education. Tell everyone, tell our friends, tell our family, how neat bats are and how important they really are.

Every day, we get benefits from them. Very rarely they get anything positive from us. It's time that we change that equation.