Photo by Charles Hood.
At dusk, the bats begin to stir.
Long shafts of golden light peek under the roadway and into their concrete roost, making halos of each crest of pale fur. A dozen or so pallid bats cluster together here, both side by side and piled on top of one another, a mass of elbows, ears, and shining black eyes in the fading light.
One bat yawns, her translucent ears pulled momentarily forward before she shifts to another place among the others on the wall.
Not until the light has turned purple does the first bat drop, plummeting downward for a moment before arcing up and away from the roost. The others follow quickly, membranous wings outstretched as they dip close to the ground in search of prey.
Our yawning bat is quite alert now. She’s emerged with the others and is flying low.
Unlike many species of insectivorous bats, pallid bats often land to catch their prey. Rather than eating the typical array of flying insects, pallid bats eat things like grasshoppers, beetles, and even scorpions from the ground.
Our bat is looking for such a meal now. She flies past the rustling of stems in the breeze without slowing and zeroes in on another kind of movement.
She detects a sound below and touches down quietly on the dry, tilled earth, folding her wings around her as she crawls closer to the source of the noise.
The grasshopper she’s heard could bound away at any moment as our bat creeps quietly nearer, listening closely, long snout sniffing the air as she edges in.
In an instant, she’s moved in to strike. A blur of movement, and the grasshopper is in her mouth, the bat’s sharp teeth crunching into its exoskeleton.
Our bat will repeat this process until she’s eaten roughly half of her body weight this night alone.
This is a simple act, an age-old exchange between predator and prey played out countless times each day on our planet at every level of the food web. The commonplace nature of moments like this make it easy to forget how vital they are.
But the impacts of this moment ripple outward in every direction.
When the pallid bat eats the grasshopper, that’s one potential pest removed from the crops we rely on to survive. It’s a dose of pesticides that isn’t needed to kill these pests, a dose of pesticides that doesn’t end up killing pollinators or running off into our waterways.
It’s also a transfer of energy and nutrients from the grasshopper into the bat, energy that can go into making more bats, enriching the soil beneath the roost, or even feeding a hungry owl.
Pallid bats, our newly appointed state bat in California, are one way into understanding the vital interconnectedness of our own species with many others.
But we could just as easily focus on the bat’s meal, the grasshopper, which serves us (and countless other beings) just as vitally by making nutrients from plants available to animals in the first place.
Birds, small reptiles, and of course bats feed on grasshoppers and other invertebrates, and those species are eaten in turn by even larger predators like owls, hawks, foxes, coyotes. The largest predators control deer populations, keeping them from devastating vegetation that feeds us, stores carbon, and provides oxygen for us and other animals to breathe.
I can’t say for sure that our own species would be existentially threatened without the presence of bats, but their loss would certainly be a devastating blow to us and the systems we rely on to survive.
The same goes for losing the grasshoppers that are eaten by the bats and the plants that are eaten by the grasshoppers.
This week is California Biodiversity Week, and I can’t stop thinking about the fact that almost no species on Earth can survive in isolation.
In addition to my roughly 30 trillion human cells, this illusion of my individual self is composed of about 39 trillion non-human microbes, many of them working together to help me do things like digest my food and fight off diseases.
Life is reliant on life, is reliant on life, is reliant on life.
Almost every form of life is supported by other life and supports more life in turn.
Which, of course, is why a healthy diversity of organisms is vitally important, including everything from the smallest algae to the most massive blue whale.
Sometimes, life forms can get out of balance and disrupt the interconnected web of life (invasive species, for example), but that web of life is to me the highest value.
Biodiversity is the highest value.
Happy California Biodiversity Week!
Love from all 39 trillion of us,
Michelle
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Big thanks to Charles Hood for giving me permission to use his stunning photos of pallid bats for this post.
