Vandals kill thousands of fruit bats

[Cheryl Jones]

BEIRUT: The largest single colony of fruit bats in the Middle East, residing in a cave in the Akkar region of north Lebanon, was last weekend largely destroyed by vandals, with thousands of bats killed.

Dr. Mounir Abi-Said, founder of Animals Encounter, and a professor at the American University of Beirut and the Lebanese University, conducted a routine check on the colony as part of research into the highly endangered animal begun in 2007.

“The cave was full of shotgun pellets, spent fireworks and AK-47 bullet casings and there was evidence that fires had been started in the cave,” Abi-Said told The Daily Star.

Read on
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Enviro ... z1kgelTY3d

[BrianC]

Very sad indeed that someone want's bats dead. Surely making information that the good bats do available to the populous would be helpful, but Abi-Said Informed the reader that caving is one of the reasons that bats there are endangered, then ask's for help from the caving organisations, go figure. Sound familiar?

[Jon]

Bat's, 99 & 44/100 % of people have nothing in THEIR life that they can bitch about bats. Yet most are freaked out by them. If bats were people, they would be the most oppressed race of all time. Damn, they eat nasty biting bugs, they pollinate beautiful flowers and tasty food. Guano, what's not to love?

[GroundquestMSA]

If bats were people, they would be the most oppressed race of all time.

Because bats have been driven to near extinction for greedy purposes, right? Like the natives of Tasmania, or the Carribean Islands, or many N. and S. American regions and so on and so on?

[Larry E. Matthews]

These were Fruit Bats, so I'll bet some local farmers were pissed that the bats had eaten some of their fruit. How to solve the problem? Kill those damn bats !!!

Same thing happened here in the US perhaps 100 years ago. The Carolina Parakeet had a fondness for fruit, so the farmers killed them, too. They were easy to kill, since they lived in small colonies in hollow trees.

[Phil Winkler]

I saw a stat once that something like 80% of the plants below the Equator are pollinated by bats. There are easily more species of bats in the world then anything else, too, as I recall. Several hundred?

[LukeM]

I saw a stat once that something like 80% of the plants below the Equator are pollinated by bats. There are easily more species of bats in the world then anything else, too, as I recall. Several hundred?

I was curious about this so I did some searching and it looks like bats have the second highest number of species of any mammal outside of rodents. About 925 species, or 25% of all mammal species. (http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Chiroptera.html)

I'm not sure about 80% of all plants below the equator being pollinated by bats simply because there are so many plants that they would have no interest in. Maybe 80% of all fruit-bearing plants below the equator?

And about this news, I really hope that some of the bats simply escaped to other places.

[Phil Winkler]

Luke, Fruit sounds right as does the species thing. I read those stats a long time ago. Still pretty interesting, tho.

[Crash Kennedy]

There are actually more than 1250 species of bats. The 925 figure is very old.

BCI's website always has some of the most up-to-date info on bats. www.batcon.org

[eyecave]

humans are stupid.... ....they are also very very selfish in their every single behavior... ....most of us hide that very well....some better than others but there are a few of us incapable of anything except stupidity and selfish behavior.... ..the intelligent and average can be reached by knowledge to a point.....they are still very susceptible to parrot behavior because they are still stupid......

unfortunately the ones considered stupid by our stupid rating group are without hope on their own...they are susceptible to impulsive types of behavior...especially those involving violence or violent types of actions.....hence repetitive visits to a cave filled with living and stationary targets...........left alone dangerous to society.....but, they are also very easy to control.....and if the controls appear as a normal part of society they will parrot any behavior or thought being presented to them as normal.....

what i would actually like to do is put a killer robot in all bat caves that would only activate after certain bat actions......i would also make it a hair trigger device......designed to discourage those "acceptable" hibernation disturbances we call doctoral research personnel.... .