The following article is reprinted courtesy of the Hamilton Spectator, McMaster University’s partner in the Science in the City Lecture Series.

Halloween fright night gives the bat a bad rap

By Wade Hemsworth
The Hamilton Spectator(Oct 30, 2006)

Pity the bat. All summer long it flies about, helpfully scrubbing the sky of bugs we don't want around, consuming them by the thousands.

It has the courtesy to perform this service while we sleep, locating its prey in the dark by using echoes of sounds mostly beyond the range of human hearing. As the sun rises, it wedges its tiny body into a crevice somewhere out of sight to await another night shift.

For all of this, we reward the bat with our scorn except for one brief sliver on the calendar, the time of year we call Halloween.

This is the one time when we call on the bat to help us feel scared, printing its image on candy wrappers, decorating our porches with its likeness, even dressing up our children to look like the tiny flying mammals.

It is this opportunity that compels Hamilton's bat man, scientist Paul Faure, to emerge from his McMaster University laboratory and tell us all why bats are worth loving.

"Bats, of course, are one of nature's wonders," he says. "Bats have a lot to tell us."

The bat is an incredible and largely untapped repository of scientific data, Faure says, with the potential to unlock mysteries about viruses and the tools to teach us new uses for ultrasound.

It may even hold the clue to a long life. The bat's longevity is astounding. It outlasts other mammals of similar size. Captive bats have lived longer than 40 years. Bats have few specialized predators, with the notable exception of a giant bat-eating centipede in Venezuela.

There are more than 1,000 species of bats worldwide, living on every continent except Antarctica, and ranging north of the Arctic Circle. Bats have much more to fear from humans than humans do from bats. In some tropical locations, meat from fruit bats is sold illegally as food. Closer to home, where bats are much, much smaller, pesticides and the continuing destruction of natural habitats threaten the diversity of our bat population.

Tonight, Faure will give a free public lecture on the bat, dispelling myths and misunderstandings as part of McMaster University's Science in the City lecture series.

Faure, 41, has dedicated most of his academic life to the study of bats. In addition to his deep knowledge of the winged mammals, Faure is a kind of bat-vocate, doing his best to improve the animal's public image.

But it's not always easy. When he tells people what he does for a living, they tend to react like this: "Eew! You study bats?"

He tries to work with it. "After years of hearing it, I feed off it a little bit now," he says, "and if I can turn one person from 'Eew!' to neutral, it's a victory."

Ontario is home to as many as eight species, but the brown bat is the most common. Its wing span is as large as 27 centimetres, but it weighs under 10 grams.

So before you decide you don't like it, you may want to know this: before dawn, it will eat up to 1,000 insects.

whemsworth@thespec.com

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