Red-Haired Ash Reads

This was a fascinating and informative book about bats! I feel like every time I read a book about bats new information has been discovered about them. While this book goes over basic characteristics of bats, it also includes recent discoveries, like the white-nose syndrome and viruses. 

There are over 1400 species of bats currently known in the world and more are identified every year. They are the second most diverse group of mammals in the world.  Bats are just  fascinating creatures but are often misunderstood and targeted for food, macabre displays, and because they do carry viruses (but so do other creatures). This book goes over basic characteristics of bats like their body structure, echolocation, habitats, feeding habits, and mating. 

A few fascinating facts from this book: different species of bats produce different echolocation calls; bats with large ears like the vampire bat, echolocate through their nose and not their mouth; and vampire bats have heat vision. There were a ton of other wonderful facts within this book but these were the three that I found the most fascinating. 

This book also discusses experiments done by people on bats like Lazzaro Spallanzani, Louis Jurine, Donald Griffin, and Elisabeth Kalko. I really loved these sections because it was fascinating to learn about the different kinds of experiments that have been done on bats and what they learned over the years. 

This also discusses white-nose syndrome, a fungus that grows on bats and spreads during their hibernation season and usually kills the bat. Since this fungus was first identified in 2007, the population of bats in North America has declined by 90%. It’s a devastating fungus for bats and while attempts are being made to find a cure, it hasn’t happened yet. I will be really interested in seeing future research about this and if any new preventatives have been found that will help the bat population.

Overall, this was just a fascinating and informative book. If you like learning about bats or animals, I highly recommend checking out this book. 

*ARC provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.*

---

Goodreads | The StoryGraph | Amazon

---