Bats continue to astound scientists with their abilities and adaptations. Worldwide, bats are efficient predators of nocturnal insects, including numerous costly agricultural pests, and they pollinate the flowers and disperse the seeds of hundreds of ecologically and economically important plants. The truth is, bats are not all blood-sucking vampires, dirty disease-carriers, or blind and likely to get tangled in hair. Bats are also cloaked in myth and superstition as a result, misinformation about them abounds. Wherever bats occur, they are masters of their domains, able to navigate in the pitch darkness of deep caverns and adapted for survival in a nocturnal aerial niche like no other mammals. Some families are large, containing hundreds of species that can be found worldwide other families are small, with some made up of a single species that is not closely related to any other species. The bat order is divided into 18 different families with all members of each family sharing similar evolutionary paths, physical features, adaptations, and sometimes even foraging strategies. And there are 3 species of bats that are, in a sense, parasitic they are true vampires, surviving only on the blood of other animals. Some bats are true carnivores that catch lizards, frogs, small rodents, birds, and even other bats several species have evolved adaptations that allow them to fish for small minnows and aquatic invertebrates. Insectivorous bats hunt flying insects or pluck stationary insects off the ground or foliage. Some are herbivores that visit plants and survive on flower nectar or fruit, and some even feed upon leaves.

Bats employ almost every mammalian feeding strategy. Some bats are jet black and some are snow white others have pelts from yellow, orange, and red through blue-gray.

Species range in size from giants with 6-foot wingspans to Lilliputians that weigh less than a penny. As a result of this radiation, bats exhibit astounding diversity. Over the millennia, bats have evolved to live on every continent except Antarctica, and in every habitat except the most extreme polar and desert regions.

Bats hibernate in winter