What is a bat’s natural diet?

Bats are primarily carnivores, meaning that they eat meat for the most part. But in contrast to the hysterics that are taught in many movies, bats primarily eat insects as the main staple of their diet. Consider that a bat is a rather small animal so it is not going to attack a cow or lion. I know that the notion seems absurd on its face, but many movies present it this exact way. They have colonies of bats swarming down on a field of cows, sucking the blood out and moving on like some kind of mammalian locusts. It is rather crazy.



Bats don’t want the hassle of large animals, primarily because they cannot get at the meat very easily. If you consider the size of a bat, usually about an ounce or two in weight, then you need to consider that they don’t have a lot muscle to them. They can’t be wasting a lot of their energy trying to tear apart meat to get food. They would probably burn themselves out before they had success.

This makes the ideal food for bats to be insects. Bats most commonly eat such things as roaches, beetles, wasps, and centipedes. What they are looking for are insects that have some substance to them, and these are the kinds of insects that have just that available. Take a look at these kinds of insects and it is easy to see what is being talked about here. These four types of insects have large thoracic and/or abdominal areas, meaning that they have a more meatier portion to them that can make for a real meal to a bat. In some areas there can be hundreds or thousands of these insects, allowing the whole colony feast in just one location. This is especially true around a hornet’s nest or where a large number of roaches have congregated to feast off of garbage.

While this is what most bats eat, there is a rather odd group that prefers to eat nothing but berries. Despite having some of the sharpest teeth of the species, they find that a tasty meal consists of blackberries, raspberries, blueberries and the like. This is one of those oddities that makes many wonder about some of the assumptions made about meat-eating dinosaurs, because this bat’s teeth are made perfectly for carnivorous activities, yet they prefer berries. This is another strange aspect of the animal world that adds to its many wonders.

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