John Clayton
Most of us have had an unpleasant experience at
one time or another in our lives with bats. There have been several times
in my public school teaching experience when a bat got loose in my classroom
scattering screaming students as it swooped around the room trying to find
a way out. These negative experiences tend to make us have a negative attitude
toward this most interesting and useful creature.
Bats are incredible creatures. Radar screens sometimes
find them covering as much as 10,000 square miles in their search for food.
Insect eating bats will eat nearly their body weight in bugs in a single
night. One study of the bats in Bracken Cave in Texas found that their
digestive systems and fruit are designed so the seeds of the fruit are
not damaged by digestion. The result is the bats plant all kinds of fruit-bearing
trees and bushes sustaining beneficial plant populations. This is especially
true in desert and rain forest areas.
Almost all of the negative stories and fears about
bats are untrue. When someone says "blind as a bat" they are
way off base. Some bats can see a bug the size of a rice grain by starlight.
Our best military night scopes are needed for man to see that well. Fear
of rabies is an overstated problem. Only 24 people are believed to have
contracted rabies from a bat in the whole history of the United States,
and the common brown bat has never given rabies to anyone even though it
is our most common bat. There are no vampire bats north of Mexico, and
vampires do not suck blood--they lap up blood from a wound. Bats do not
get snarled in women's hair and will avoid contact with a human if they
possibly can.
Bats are incredibly designed. They can fly 80 miles
per hour, can share a cave with 8.7 million other bats and get along, and
with 8.7 million bats in a cave a mother bat can find her baby every time
recognizing its vocal pattern. Even the location device to find insects
is incredible. High frequency sounds are emitted through the bat's nose
or mouth. The ultrasonic sounds bounce back to the bat which tells the
bat where the bug is, its size, shape, and direction of motion. Fruit bats
have delicate senses of smell and sight and do not use echolocation methods.
The bat is designed to help man by controlling insects, pollinating flowers,
or planting beneficial plants. The sophistication of the highly complex
animal speaks of design that could only be accomplished by a talented engineer--not
by blind chance.
This article taken from: Does God Exist?, May/June 1997.
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