Underappreciated Bats to Appear on Postage Stamps

Aug. 22 -- Talk about bad press. No mammal on the planet has suffered from an image problem more than the common bat, but the growing awareness of the vital role bats play in maintaining the health of our ecosystem is about to get a little boost.

On Sept. 13, the U.S. Postal Service is scheduled to release four first class stamps with photos of bats. But that won't make up for decades of horror flicks depicting bats as disease carrying varmints that come out at night to terrorize humans.

That phony image has left bats struggling to survive around the world as humans do just about everything they can to wipe them out. More than half of the species found in the United States are listed as endangered, or are in severe decline, according to Bat Conservation International, a Texas-based outfit founded two decades ago by ecologist Merlin Tuttle, the bats' best friend.

Unique and Insect-Eating

Bats are very vulnerable because mothers produce only one pup a year, and they live in huge colonies, so wiping out one habitat can jeopardize thousands of bats.

Tuttle has been studying bats for more than 40 years, and his organization has grown so fast, it now employs 39 biologists and educators, and is supported by 14,000 members in 70 countries.

They want to do more than just polish the image of the bat. They want the rest of us to sit up and take notice of one of the most remarkable families of mammals on the planet. The bat is the only mammal that truly flies, and it eats so many damaging insects — like mosquitoes — that it's a wonder it took the Postal Service 155 years to get with the program.

And creative biologists are figuring out all sorts of ways to employ the rare talents of the bat.

Putting Bats to Use

Francisco J. Vilella, a vertebrae ecologist at Mississippi State University, will spend the next three years gluing tiny radio transmitters to bats in an effort to monitor the environmental health of a pine forest. Bats, like birds, eat a lot of insects. The common brown bat of North America can eat 1,200 mosquitoes an hour. How the bats fare as they hunt their meals should help Vilella determine the extent of biodiversity in the nighttime forest.