Meet the Microbats: Winged Creatures' Secrets Revealed
For starters, old females are tougher than young males, according to a new study on these little-known mammals.
A bat the size of a bumblebee? It's no joke—many of the flying mammals come in miniature.
There are about 1,000 species of these so-called "microbats," whose body sizes range from a little over an inch (2.5 centimeters) to more than 5 inches (12 centimeters) long. The plentiful critters make up a whopping 17 percent of all mammals on Earth.
"If you haven't seen them before, they're just amazingly teeny tiny," says Pia Lentini, a bat expert at Australia's University of Melbourne. "And a lot of them have very squished faces." (See "Small Wonder: What Are the World's Tiniest Animals?")
But as tiny critters that dwell in the dark, microbats have gone largely unstudied, their daily lives still a mystery
