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Article: Dinner on the wing.(bats eat insects that are pests to humans)

Article from:
Child Life
Article date:
April 1, 1996
Author:
Copyright

Swat! Slap! Scratch, scratch! Summer's coming, and soon bugs will be everywhere. When you reach for the nearest bottle of insect repellent, remember things could be a lot worse if not for a small, flying mammal--the bat.

In one night, a single little brown bat can eat between 3,000 and 7,000 mosquitoes. That's not the only thing bats do, though. They help farmers by eating pests that ruin crops. (This reduces the need to use pesticides.) Bats pollinate flowers and disperse seeds for important plants that grow bananas, mangoes, breadfruit, cashews, dates, and figs.

A colony of 500 bats can get rid of more than a quarter of a million insects in a single hour. ...

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