Tiny Bats Roost Inside of Carnivorous Plants
BATS roost in big groups in caves. Wrong! If you’re a Hardwicke’s woolly bat, you prefer to sleep in a more luxurious – and private – place.
Kerivoula hardwickii roosts inside tropical pitcher plants in Borneo. These carnivorous plants usually attract insects, but Nepenthes hemsleyana lacks the scents that others have, so few bugs are lured in. Instead,
it benefits from the faeces of this tiny bat, which provides more than a
third of its nitrogen and may be crucial to the plant’s survival.“This is the only bat species that has ever been found roosting in pitchers,” says Caroline Regina Schöner, whose team discovered the bats
in 2009. “These bats managed to find a niche that no one else is
occupying."…(read more: New Scientist)
photographs by Merlin Tuttle/Science Source
A fine example of “if I fits, I sits” in the wild.
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