Bats are something of an unofficial mascot for Austin, home to 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats – the largest urban colony in the word. We could see a massive decline in Texas bat numbers in the coming years, a new report says. | via TexasStandard
Mexican free-tailed bats fly out from underneath the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin as part of their nightly feeding routine.
Wow. So the findings seem pretty alarming. Some top-line points — 52% of North American bats are at severe risk of population decline in coming years. Can you tell us a bit more about these bat populationsYeah, bats are an incredible part of our biodiversity here in North America, and we’re really worried about the status. The experts think that within the next 15 years we could see serious declines in over half of our species that call North America home.
Is population decline accelerating compared to previous years or events like, you know, that big freeze – could they be thought of as sort of one-offs or single isolated catastrophic events? Well, it would be devastating to our agricultural industry. Bats provide billions of dollars of value to our U.S. farmers. And some of the best work studying the value of bats to agriculture has been done in Texas. And so we know that Mexican free-tailed bats and other bat species are eating tons of insects every night that help our farmers. So that would be really devastating to our agriculture.
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