# Bats

    For the film, see Bats (film).
Bats are are flying mammals in the order Chiroptera. The forelimbs of bats are webbed and developed as wings, making them the only mammals naturally capable of true and sustained flight. Bats do not flap their entire forelimbs, as birds do, but instead flap their spread out digits, which are very long and covered with a thin membrane or patagium.
There are about 1,100 bat species worldwide, which represent about twenty percent of all classified mammal species. About seventy percent of bats are insectivores. Most of the rest are frugivores, or fruit eaters. A few species such as the Fish-eating Bat feed from animals other than insects, with the vampire bats being the only mammalian parasite species. Bats are present throughout most of the world and perform vital ecological roles such as pollinating flowers and dispersing fruit seeds. Many tropical plant species depend entirely on bats for the distribution of their seeds.

## Quotes

* Mad Hatter: Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you're at! Up above the world you fly, Like a tea tray in the sky. Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you're at!
** Lewis Carroll, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat", Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ch. VII
* Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot, so my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible... a... a... [...] a bat! That's it! It's an omen... I shall become a bat!
** The Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of Doom, Detective Comics #33 (November 1939), written by Bill Finger
* I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.
** Thomas Nagel, What is it like to be a bat?
* I was much entertained last summer with a tame bat, which would take flies out of a person's hand. If you gave it anything to eat, it brought its wings round before the mouth, hovering and hiding its head in the manner of birds of prey when they feed. The adroitness it shewed in shearing off the wings of flies, which were always rejected, was worthy of observation, and pleased me much. Insects seemed to be most acceptable, though it did not refuse raw flesh when offered: so that the notion, that bats go down chimneys and gnaw men's bacon, seems no improbable story. While I amused myself with this wonderful quadruped, I saw it several times confute the vulgar opinion, that bats, when down on a flat surface, cannot get on the wing again, by rising with great ease from the floor. It ran, I observed, with more despatch than I was award of of; but in a most ridiculous and grotesque manner.
** Reverend Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne (3rd ed.). Allan Bell & Company. 1834. p. 28. (with notes by Captain Thomas Brown)

### Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

    Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 57.
* The sun was set; the night came on apace, And falling dews bewet around the place; The bat takes airy rounds on leathern wings, And the hoarse owl his woeful dirges sings.
** John Gay, Shepherd's Week, Wednesday; or, The Dumps.
* Far different there from all that charm'd before, The various terrors of that horrid shore; * * * * * * Those matted woods where birds forget to sing. But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling.
** Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770), line 345.
* Ere the bat hath flown His cloister'd flight.
** William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1605), Act III, scene 2, line 40.
* On the bat's back I do fly After summer merrily.
** William Shakespeare, The Tempest (c. 1610-1612), Act V, scene 1, line 91.

## External links

* Encyclopedic article on Bat on Wikipedia
* The dictionary definition of bat on Wiktionary
* Media related to Chiroptera on Wikimedia Commons
* Data related to Chiroptera on Wikispecies