BATS A LOVE STORY

DAZZLING IN FLIGHT, MYSTERIOUSLY RESISTANT TO DISEASE, VITAL TO ECOSYSTEMS AROUND THE GLOBE—BATS ARE A SCIENTIFIC WONDER.

WORDS BY JAMES GORMAN

Not everyone falls in love with bats, but those who do fall hard. AS A YOUNG SCIENTIST, Sharon Swartz studied gibbons. But she was intrigued by the fine skeletal structure of bat wings and by the evolutionary trade-offs necessary for mammals to take flight. So she took a detour from her primate research and traveled to Australia to study the large bats known as flying foxes. She recalled one evening when she visited a suburban golf course where roosting bats filled the trees. First one, then a few more, then hundreds of the creatures lifted off as the sun set until, she said, there was “a river of bats in the sky.” The next night Swartz, now a professor of biology and engineering at Brown University, and her colleague trapped bats in…

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National Geographic (Digital) - 1 Issue, August 2024

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