They eat bugs, and they help plants grow with pollination.
We even have some of our medicines thanks to bats.
Here are some things about bats you should know:
Bats are mammals, just like us. A bat can have 1 baby each year, and they feed them milk just like we do. Bats have many of the same bones that we do; they have fingers, toes, hips, and even little tiny knees! Bats have hair too, and they are the only mammal that can fly.
Not all bats are blind! Most have eyes, but they use ecolocation to find their way around in the dark. Ecolocation is when bats make little tiny sounds that bounce off of something in their way, so when they hear the echo, they know they should turn. If you want to use ecolocation, you have to have really big ears like a bat, because when a bat makes a sound, the echo is really quiet. That's kind of like saying: "Hey, stalactite, where are you?"
At Oregon Caves National Monument, bats only grow to be about 2 inches long. That's really small! Most of them are only the size of your thumb. Even though they are so small, a grown-up bat can eat 1200 mosquitoes in 1 hour. That's like YOU eating 80 large pizzas for one meal!
