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they come out of eerie places like caves," he pointed out.
Turned into monsters by myths, bats have lived in the shadow of Count Dracula and the like. But bats often are gentle, docile creatures, Tuttle reports, and some can readily be trained. And bats help control insects. One insect-eating bat, for instance. can gobble up 1,000 bugs in an hour.
Some bats spend their lives in caves, while others use caves only for hibernation. This dependence now threatens their existence. Use and destruction of caves by explorers, souvenir hunters, developers, and others has meant huge declines in some U. S. bats in recent years.
On Endangered List
Four bats—the gray. Indiana, Virginia big-eared, and Ozark big-eared—have been placed on the U. S. endangered species list. Wildlife officials believe, for instance, there might be only 200 Ozark big-eared bats left, half of them clustered in one cave. Such gatherings are common among bats.
"In some caves there are a million or more bats, and if something blocks the entrance. that could be it for the whole million," said Ronald Nowak of the U. S. Office of Endangered Species. Although there are an estimated 450,000 Indiana bats, he said, most live in a dozen caves, so "it’s almost like there are only a dozen animals.”
Almost all of the country’s known gray bats winter in only nine caves, nearly twothirds of them grouped in a single one in northern Alabama. Any noise or light, such as an explorer’s headlamp, can arouse a bat colony from hibernation and deplete 10 to 30 days of stored energy. Some might eventually starve.
"Just walking through a cave at the wrong time can cause all the bats to pack up and leave, or send the babies into the water on the cave floor,” said Richard LaVal, bat biologist for the state of Missouri, home of many of the country’s endangered baits.
taking a tourist attraction out of a cave also can mean trouble for its residents. Several years ago at Marvel Cave, a tourist stop in the Missouri Ozarks, a dance Floor was constructed near the hibernating area of the cave’s 150,000 gray bats. Later the dance floor caught fire and thousands of bats
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