If Bats Disappear, So Does Your Forest | Keystone

A seven-gram animal with a sonar system that could embarrass military hardware eats half its body weight in pest insects every single night. Then, in 2006, a European fungus showed up in a New York cave and started the fastest wildlife decline in North American recorded history. Kaito explains why the little brown bat is a free pest control contractor worth billions, why white-nose syndrome is structurally identical to a human pandemic, and what happened to the forests when the bats disappeared. → Why the bat's Latin name is the most goth binomial in taxonomy → How a single colony eats its collective body weight in insects nightly → What seventy-four dollars per acre of forest actually buys you → Why one pup per year makes recovery arithmetic impossible → The funding gap between bat disease research and COVID response SOURCES: Boyles et al. (2011), Economic importance of bats in agriculture, Science Frick et al. (2010), An emerging disease causes regional population collapse of a common North American bat species, Science USGS National Wildlife Health Center, White-nose Syndrome surveillance data 🔔 Subscribe for more ecosystem services: every species we cover answers what does this do for us? #littlebrownbat #ecosystemservices #regulating #ecology #nature #science #whitenosesyndrome #pestcontrol #bats #wildlife Kaito also hosts Catalyst, a chemistry channel.    / @catalyst-chemicalsubstances   Episodes on the molecules and materials that built the modern world.