WASHINGTON — It’s Halloween. Cue the spooky music and imagine bats flitting around to set the scene, because bats are scary, right?
Shannon Pederson doesn’t want you to feel that way. Pederson, a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Maryland who’s studying bats at the Audubon Naturalist Society’s Woodend Sanctuary, is pretty sure that dispelling some of the myths about bats might help the much-maligned mammal.
So here goes:
Bats are not coming to suck your blood.
Some bats feed on blood, but you’ll find those vampire bats in Latin America. And Pederson says they don’t kill their prey; “they have special teeth” with a groove that allows them to commit a sort of a fly-by feed. Pederson explains, “they’ll fly near an animal, like a chicken or cattle, or something that can lose a small amount of blood each night.” Pederson says the bat will make a tiny cut, really nicking the skin just enough to cause a small amount of bleeding. The bat doesn’t hang on to suck blood; it laps it up and flies off, leaving the animal it’s fed on alive and well, if slightly irritated.
Bats don’t want to nest in your hair.
Pederson and other wildlife biologists say that a bat’s echolocation is so finely tuned that it would hardly bumble into your hair, and can in fact dodge tiny obstacles put in its way thanks to its navigational skills.
Not all bats have rabies.
Bats can carry the potentially deadly disease, but the CDC says most bats don’t have rabies, and of the bats that are typically captured because of interactions with humans or pets, only about 6 percent had rabies. One man who died of rabies from a vampire bat was the first case ever recorded in the U.S. — but the CDC reported he had been bitten while in Mexico.
Bottom line: You don’t want to handle bats, just as you wouldn’t handle raccoons or foxes which also carry rabies. But you need not suffer nightmares about bats. Instead, Pederson says, appreciate the fact that to bats, trick-or-treating on Halloween means feeding on masses of mosquitoes and other pesky insects.
WTOP’s Kate Ryan contributed to this report. Follow @WTOP on Twitter and WTOP on Facebook.
