Here is a link to a article about Texas bats:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8229779/
June 28, 2005 AP
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Title: Texas bats are a cotton farmer's best friend
No chemicals needed when they devour crop pests like moths
Every night as the sun sets across Central Texas, an estimated 100 million
bats take flight.
Sound scary? Not to farmers.
The nocturnal mammals feast on a smorgasbord of pests whose offspring devour
corn and cotton plants. Crop damage from such pests - and from chemicals to
treat fields - cost farmers $1 billion a year nationwide, said Gary
McCracken, a bat researcher at the University of Tennessee.
"The bats really chow down on these moths in big numbers," said McCracken,
who is studying the bats' impact on insects.
Bats can devour about 1,000 tons of insects each night in Texas, which has
the nation's largest bat population and the world's largest single bat
colony. The bat is the state's official flying mammal.
Reason to protect bats
McCracken's study, in its second year, uses infrared thermal imaging cameras
to get a more accurate count of bats in Central Texas. Other scientists will
try to figure out how much of a bat's diet is comprised of moths.
"This is very important work, and we're happy to see it taking place," said
Barbara French, science officer with Austin, Texas-based Bat Conservation
International, a nonprofit group that works to protect bats and their
habitats.
Most of Texas' bats live within a 100-mile radius of San Antonio.
By eating the moths, bats prevent them from laying thousands of eggs, which
grow up to become corn earworms and pink cotton bollworms that chomp through
crop fields.
"That definitely translates into a dollar savings to the farmers," said
Patricia Morton, a spokeswoman for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department,
which is part of the study.
Female bats, which have only one pup a year, migrate to Texas in March to
munch on moths and feed their offspring. Each night a mother bat gobbles
down two-thirds of her body weight. Surviving adult moth generations migrate
through Texas on their way to Midwest corn fields.
"So our bats in Texas are the front line," Morton said.
If the bats in Central Texas eat enough moths, there will be fewer heading
north to the world's largest cotton patch, Texas Cooperative Extension
cotton entomologist Jim Leser said.
That could be good news for South Plains cotton farmers during late July,
August and September, he said.
Radar spotted millions
The research, funded by a $2.4 million National Science Foundation grant,
took shape after mysterious large "clouds" appeared on National Weather
Service radar in Central Texas in the early 1990s on otherwise clear days.
The clouds turned out to be millions of bats.
Not long afterward, a weather service radar station in South Texas picked up
more strange clouds intersecting with the bat clouds thousands of feet above
ground. Researchers found the unknown clouds to be millions of migrating
moths.
Watching black clouds of bats spiral out of caves is a popular spectator
sport in Texas. Bracken Cave, north of San Antonio, is home to the world's
largest bat colony with an estimated 20 million. The Congress Avenue Bridge
in Austin is the world's largest urban colony.
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