The Genius Bat
The Secret Life of the Only Flying Mammal
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"[A] wonderful book." —Nature
"A mind-opening adventure." —Natural History
An awe-inspiring tour of bat world by the world’s leading expert
With nearly 1500 species, bats account for more than twenty percent of mammalian species. The most successful and most diverse group of mammals, bats come in different sizes, shapes, and colors, from the tiny bumblebee bat to the giant golden-crowned flying fox. Some bats eat fruit and nectar; others eat frogs, scorpions, or fish. Vampire bats feed on blood. Bats are the only mammals that can fly; their fingers have elongated through evolution to become wings with a unique, super-flexible skin membrane stretched between them. Their robust immune system is one of the reasons for their extreme longevity. A tiny bat can live for forty years.
Yossi Yovel, an ecologist and a neurobiologist, is passionate about deciphering the secrets of bats, including using AI to decipher their communication. In The Genius Bat, he brings to vivid life these amazing creatures as well as the obsessive and sometimes eccentric people who study them–bat scientists. From muddy rainforests to star-covered night deserts, from guest houses in Thailand to museum drawers full of fossils in New York, this is an eye-opening and entertaining account of a mighty mammal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ecologist and neurobiologist Yovel shares the fruits of his decades of field and lab research on bats in this standout work of popular science. The almost 1,500 species of bats around the world, he explains, account for 20% of all mammalian species. Bats come in all shapes and sizes and have varying behaviors. Vampire bats, for example, engage in "reciprocal altruism," preferring to share the blood that forms their diet with others who had previously done the same with them, and Africa's male hammer-headed bats make sounds akin to the beeping of truck horns to attract females. Yovel chronicles the "arms race" between bats and the insects they eat, noting some prey have evolved to detect and "jam" bats' echolocation calls. Yovel also details his own contributions to bat science, including his work attaching over 1,000 GPS devices to bats in more than 10 countries to understand what life is like for these mammals. He's come to believe they are conscious creatures; "the vampire bat that returns home after a sleepless night and feeds a hungry member of its colony must have some consciousness." Yovel's passion and curiosity will leave readers with a greater appreciation for the wonders and mysteries of the bat world. This is a revelation.
