SO: DD-2

A flying fox’s wings can stretch out 5 feet. They are made of a very thin layer of flexible skin. It is packed with steel-strong collagen proteins and super-flexible elasticetic proteins! 

When bats are far from their prey, they send out 10-20 pulses per second of their high-frequency sonar sound.

When bats are close to their prey, whether it be a moth or a mosquito, they’ll up this pulse rate to what is called the “terminal buzz”. This produces pulses as high as 2000 per second!

The spacing between the finger bones of the flying fox’s wings’ long-wing fingers is critical for their agile flight. The length of every finger bone is critical, too.

In complete darkness, using only sound, fishing bats can detect a two-millimeter ripple minnows below the water make with their hair-thin fins!




Two millimeters is the width of three mechanical pencil leads!

Some bats have been known to fly through the spinning blades of a fan!

Outside of San Antonio, Texas, there is the largest bat colony in the world inside a huge bat cave called Bracken Cave.

Bracken Cave can be home to as many as twenty million bats! They fly to the cave in March each year to make it home.

When bats exit of Bracken Cave, they come out at a somewhat steady rate. No one knows how they leave in an orderly fashion.

One mistake with a bat’s sonar could mean a high speed crash with a cave wall, stalactite or another bat.

There can be as many as 1500 bat “pups” per square foot clinging to the roof of the cave.

Bats care for their “pups” upside down, high in a cave in the dark! Guano is waste from the bats which is on the floor of the cave. A baby bat has to cling to its mom and the mother bat needs to hold tightly to her pup. This keeps Junior from falling into the guano below. These behaviors–both the mother’s and the baby’s–are DNA-coded into their brains. (Research if you need to.)

A single bat can catch 1000 insects an hour! They try to avoid mosquitos because they have little nutritional value.

A bat can fly better than most birds because its wings are controlled by its precisely-built fingers.

Bats have very elongated toes that can change the shape of their wings very quickly making high speed turns easy for them.

A nursing mother bat can catch over 4500 insects in a night! Then mom comes back to nurse her young like a mother dog does her puppies. The bat milk is made from the molecules of bug bodies. mmmmTasty! (Think!)

The total population of bats in Bracken Cave–twenty thousand bats– get to their personalized sleeping spot on the cave ceiling without collisions.

Some bats can be remarkably ugly. Their ugly face is great equipment for hi-tech flying.

The 5-foot-wide wingspan flying foxes sleep often in trees. These stunning bats wrap themselves with their wings at night. They have “normal looking faces” because they do not echolocate.

Just as 1800’s trappers in the American West would follow a certain course to see if their traps caught anything, the long-eared bats fly to many places and stop to see if there is food in special spots along the route. They can go 20 miles to get their food.

List 2 summaries of the devotional parts in this article and give a different personal application to each.