BROWARD COUNTY, Fla. – Halloween may be the one time of year that we spend any time at all thinking about bats, but this flying animal some consider creepy is actually very necessary to our South Florida ecosystem and some are on the verge of becoming extinct.
Elena Suarez is a Broward County natural resources specialist, and Local 10 was there as she set up an acoustic monitoring device to listen to bat calls as they flew overhead.
“I’m just going to angle the microphone facing north as part of the bat surveying protocol,” she explained. “The hope today is to detect the Florida bonneted bat, the endangered species here in Florida.”
The bonneted bat is about 6.5 inches with a wingspan of 20 inches, and there are less than 1,000 bonneted bats left.
Most are all here in South Florida, and nowhere else in the world.
They are a bigger, high-flying bat that is very much a mystery.
“Since such little information is known about this species, their roosting sites, their foraging behavior, what they’re eating, any little information we can contribute gives us a better picture,” Suarez said.
They are known to live in man-made bat boxes, or the barrel tile roofs of old homes in Coral Gables and even in mangrove swamps and the Everglades.
But all of our South Florida construction and development is threatening to wipe out one of only 14 species of bats in our state.
“So because of this habitat loss, they lose their roosting sites, their foraging sites and it doesn’t sustain their population,” Suarez said.
These bats are a natural pesticide. They eat mosquitoes -- in fact, they eat millions of our insects and they also pollinate our plants.
But just like us humans, these rarely seen bats are vulnerable to hurricanes and disease and are also very sensitive to insecticides and pesticides.
Their protection is necessary to save their species, which is why Suarez will keep recording bat calls, attempting to crack the code on better ways to increase the numbers of this special animal that helps keep our South Florida ecosystem online and get those mosquitoes out of here.
The bonneted bat was added to the federal list of endangered species less than 10 years ago and their survival is now in peril -- mostly due to humans.
This bat detection project is underway and runs in tandem with Broward County and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
