Typical habitats include temperate and tropical forests, deserts, open fields, agricultural areas, and in suburban and urban environments. ( Hill and Smith, 1984 Museum and Institute of Zoology, 2012 Vaughan, et al., 2000)īats can be found in many terrestrial habitats below the polar regions. Although bats are relatively common in temperate regions, they reach their greatest diversity in tropical forests. They are missing only from polar regions and from some isolated islands. ( Hill and Smith, 1984 Nowak, 1991 Vaughan, et al., 2000) Geographic Rangeīats are found throughout the world in tropical and temperate habitats. Megachiropteran species control their body temperature within a tight range of temperatures and none hibernates many microchiropterans have labile body temperatures, and some hibernate. Microchiropterans use highly sophisticated echolocation for orientation megachiropterans orient primarily using their eyes, although members of one genus, Rousettus, are capable of a simple form of echolocation that is not related to echolocation in microchiropterans. Megachiropterans are found only in the Old World tropics, while microchiropterans are much more broadly distributed. Megachiropterans and microchiropterans differ in many other ways. Some bats are carnivorous (feeding on rodents, other bats, reptiles, birds, amphibians, and even fish), many consume fruit, some are specialized for extracting nectar from flowers, and one subfamily (three species in the subfamily Desmodontinae) feeds on nothing but the blood of other vertebrates. However, many microchiropterans have become specialized to eat other kinds of diets. The majority of species are insectivorous, and insectivory is widely distributed through all microchiropteran families. The remaining 16 families (around 759 species) belong to Microchiroptera. All feed primarily on plant material, either fruit, nectar or pollen. Megachiroptera includes one family ( Pteropodidae) and about 166 species. ( Teeling, et al., 2002 Teeling, et al., 2005 Van den Bussche and Hoofer, 2004 Vaughan, et al., 2000) These groups will be used throughout this account in describing the diversity of bat life histories. Although these groups probably do not represent monophyletic lineages (discussed in more detail below), there are several relevant ecological differences between them. ( Hill and Smith, 1984 Nowak, 1991 Vaughan, et al., 2000)īats are often divided into two major groups, usually given the rank of suborders, Megachiroptera and Microchiroptera. In some tropical areas, there are more species of bats than of all other kinds of mammals combined. The approximately 925 species of living bats make up around 20% of all known living mammal species. Bats are the second-most speciose group of mammals, after rodents.
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