Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Last night on our way home from performing in a play, my housemates and I noticed this sleepy little red bat on a city windowsill.
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Today we came back to the theater to perform the Sunday matinee and she was on the ground. :(
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I scooped her up in a shirt and put her back on the windowsill (never touch a bat with your bare hands). She was still there after the show so now we are taking her to the wildlife rehabber.
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The warmth of the car has woken up the bat and it is now trying to escape containment. Thankfully I am stronger than a bat.
This bat is mad as hell about being in rehab
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We think she’ll be fine though.
Of course she’s mad you put her ass in the drunk tank
back at it again in the Emballonuridae family, with another small, three-species genus of bat, Coleura, containing:
african sheath-tailed bat (C. afra)
seychelles sheath-tailed bat (C. seychellensis)
and the more recently proposed Madagascar sheath-tailed bat (C. kibomalandy)…
…who doesn’t photograph quite as well as his taxonomic neighbors.
afra is distributed across central Africa and is listed as ‘least concern’, while seychellensis is found only in the Seychelles archipelago and is considered critically endangered. kibomalandy is localized to madagascar and was named a separate species from afra in 2012.
there are several things i like about this genus: afra, kibomalandy, and seychelles all occur in a very charming grey color with bright red phalanges that set them apart from other Emballonuridae species. further, all species in this genus have, if i may say, very handsome pointy little faces. as you can see, afra is a small species, no larger than a field mouse, which is adorable. look how little it is in that person’s hand. i want to be held like that. i’ll also slightly boost their rating based on seychellensis’s endangered status and because of the presence of a species from madagascar, because i have a friend from madagascar who’ll be mad if i don’t.
it’s another small genus today, folks, as we continue our journey through the Emballonuridae family of bats. Centronycteris contains a pair of species, originally considered to be subspecies of a single species but eventually proven to be distinct:
the shaggy bat (C. maximiliani)
Thomas’s shaggy bat (C. centralis)
i’ll be honest, i don’t entirely know how to distinguish between these two species visually. they share their most distinctive feature, their long coat, and are separated predominantly by distribution: centralis is the more northerly of the two species, found in South and Central America and even parts of Mexico while maximiliani is localized in South America. this genus is classified with the sac-winged bats despite having no wing-sacs.
whether i can tell them apart or not, Centronycteris score well because of their unique coat. i challenge you, yes, i defy you not to feel a surge of affection when you look upon this ridiculous winged ball of hair.
welcome to a new series at bowling-with-skulls, where i discuss every single genus of bat and conclude with a scientific ranking out of ten. ranking will be determined primarily based on charisma, which can be defined as cuteness, coolness, ugliness, cartoonish disproportionality, or an otherwise distinctive vibe. points may additionally be awarded for cool species names or unique adaptations. without further ado…
opening with a genus in the Yangochiroptera suborder, in the family Emballonuridae, Balantiopteryx, from Greek meaning ‘pouch wing’, is a small genus containing only 3 species of sac-winged bat:
thomas’s sac-winged bat (B. io)
grey sac-winged bat (B. plicata)
ecuadorian sac-winged bat (B. infusca)
these insectivorous bats are found in mexico and central america, and while i couldn’t find a picture of the wing-sac described in their name, it sounds really cool. both io and infusca are classified as ‘vulnerable’, while plicata is listed as ‘least concern’. all three species are on the small side, averaging just over six centimeters from tip to tail and weighing between 3.7 and 7 grams.
this genus scores high predominantly on the basis of their looks.
looka that shweet liddle facey face. das a baby, yes he is, yes he is a good baby, just a liddle guy, yes he is.
My favorite bit about this is imagining a librarian finding a bat on a shelf and their first thought is “Wait, wait, I have exactly the book for this!”
Convergent evolution is wild, bc like, crabs keep evolving to look the same but aren’t closely related, nature is just like: BIG MEATY CLAWS, little legs, pincers, head, tiny eyes, let’s do it again!
and trees look the same but oak trees are more closely related to rose bushes than they are pine trees, fucked up
nature just likes these damns shapes:
but on the other hand, mammals flying with powered flight?? That shit only happened ONCE and it had to do some janky shit to get there, especially with bat immune systems
like bat’s immune systems are HYPER-POWERED as well as repress most of their inflammatory reactions because in order to fly they needed a bonkers-high metabolic rate which unfortunately also create waste products from the process called “free radicals” that damage cells
however, despite these free radicals they manage to live up to FORTY YEARS, which is super long for a species their size, because their immune system are basically always ON and in an anti-viral state that make them incubators for disease due to warfare between their jacked immune systems and disease
bats are so gdamn weird, I love them, no other mammal has been able to copy off their homework and accomplish the same shape, and for that they are the anti-crab of the natural world, God bless
It really worked out for them too, like it’s a hell of a lane and they have it all to themselves, so they’ve really filled their niche. There are more bats than almost any other kind of mammal. Like, there are a higher number of individual bats, but also the most KINDS of bat.
For example there are about 30 million white-tailed deer alive in the world, whereas there are 15 million Mexican free-tailed bats living in ONE single colony in Texas. But also, there are about 43 species of deer on the whole planet, 38 species of feline, 34 species of canine… and about 1,300 species of bat.
It is estimated that one out of every five living mammals on Earth is a bat, or, to put it another way, if you took every single mammal on the planet and counted them as individuals, 20% of those animals would be some kind of bat.
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