HOUSTON – Summer nights in our city means, heat, humidity … and BATS! Welcome to the time of year our resident Mexican Free-Tails fly in the hundreds of thousands, from our local bridges to your neighborhood, in search for dinner. Working in partnership with ‘mosquito control’ on a strictly volunteer basis, they are granted free room and board in Houston for their dutiful service. Their ‘room’ is the Waugh Street bridge. (The bridge’s under-structure is designed in a way where over 250,000 of these bats have called it home!) Their board? Mosquitos!
It’s estimated in their sometimes 100-mile round trip flights, that as a colony, they consume over 2.5 tons of bugs each night, eating up to 75% of their body weight. (In an indirect, but descriptive comparison of my dream Saturday night: it’s like a 200 pound person eating 150 pounds of BBQ!) In this case, our local bats weight about 0.03 pounds, or 12.3 grams. In a literal comparison, most are eating around 9 grams of mosquitoes each night. If you take your common mosquito weighing around 5mg, it means they’re eating nearly 2,000 mosquitos per bat, per night.
Read more at Houston.com
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