No other living group of mammals has proliferated so successfully. A few bats feed on nectar or fruit, but most feed on insects. They have prodigious appetites. A single bat, pirouetting through the night sky on blurred wings in pursuit of prey, may eat more than 600 flying insects in one evening totaling several million insects during the 30-year life span that individuals of some bat species enjoy. The largest bat colony in the U.S. downs an estimated 200 tons of insects in a single night.
Bats rank high among the animals that are victims of human myths and misunderstandings.
Superbly adapted to flying at night, bats can navigate in total darkness across a room crisscrossed with strings. They do it by emitting sounds that bounce off of objects and return to the bats' ears, which read them like radar. The result is that bats, contrary to one popular myth, are unlikely ever to entangle in the hair of nearby humans. A more serious myth, that bats generally carry rabies, is also false. Only 0.5 percent of apparently healthy bats examined in one U.S. study were infected with rabies.