Bats Help Battle Crop Pests
` Bats get a bad rap. These crop and farm-friendly creatures consume enourmous
amounts of insects daily. They eat beetles, moths and leafhoppers that cost
landowners billions of dollars in damages each year.
Agricultural ally vs. insects. The benefits of bats to farmers goes on and on.
A few examples would be-
-
1) Just 150 big brown bats can eat enough cucumber beetles
-
each summer to protect farmers from 33 million rootworm
-
larvae. The pests cost American Farmers an estimated
-
billion dollars per year!
-
-
2) Bats from just three caves near San Antonio, Texas eat about
-
a million pounds nightly of insects, including many costly pests.
3) A Georgia pecan grower is no longer losing 30% of his crop to
hickory shuckworms. He installed a bat houses. One of the houses hosts
a colony of 2,000 bats.
4) A little brown bat can eat 1200 insects in an hour!
Fact vs. myth on bats. Misconceptions abound on bats. For instance, they are not
blind, they do not become entangled in human hair and they seldom transmit disease
to other animals or humans. Some bats can maneuver like helicopters to pluck insects
from foliage, while others fly 10,000 feet high and dive like jets.
Like most animals, bats suffer from habitat loss. Their primary cause of decline is
destruction of natural roosts by humans. Landowners can help by building and putting
up bat houses on their property, or working with highway departments to create roosts
under bridges. The Natural Resource Conservation Service is helping to ensure mines
that are closed can continue to provide habitat and openings for bats.
This article and information on bats, including how to build a bat house, how to benefit
added a few more links for you below, including some links for the children!
Your local Conservationist with USDA/NRCS is Josh McElhaney,
(850) 587-5404 ext. 105 or email him at
Josh.McElhaney@fl.nacdnet.net