Birds, bats and lizards may play an important role in Earth’s climate by protecting plants from insects that forage on foliage. A new study suggests that preserving these animals could be a low-tech way to fight climate change. “The presence, abundance and diversity of birds, bats and lizards, the top predators in the insect world, has impacts on the growth of plants,” said ecologist Daniel... 

Bats are nocturnal, but some need sunlight to set their internal compass. “Recent evidence suggests that bats can detect the geomagnetic field,” wrote Max Planck Institute ornithologists Richard Holland, Ivailo Borissov and Bjorn Siemers in an article published March 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We demonstrate that homing greater mouse-eared bats calibrate a magnetic... 

Bats can subtly adjust the frequency of the sounds they use to do echolocation to adjust to particularly cluttered terrain. In a laboratory testing room filled with dangling plastic chains, bats wearing tiny, half-gram microphones were recorded flying through the obstacle course. When confronted with the forest of chains, the bats tended to reduce or increase the sounds they emitted by a few kilohertz.... 

A fierce attempt to keep endangered Virginia big-eared bats alive in captivity has shown just how difficult that noble task may be. The effort was prompted by the discovery of white nose syndrome, an extremely virulent disease that has killed more than a million bats since 2007, in one of the handful of caves where Virginia big-eared bats live. Of 40 bats moved to the Smithsonian National Zoo last...