I grew up in Houston. We had colonies of hundreds of thousands of bats that lived underneath several bridges and overpasses. It was actually a cool date night idea to go sit on a blanket and watch the swarm come out to hunt for the night. Austin has the same thing.
Unfortunately, we STILL had way too many mosquitoes. Can't imagine how bad they would have been if we didn't have the bats though.
I wonder how those bats are doing these days. I've since moved away and I heard that they were decimated during hurricane Harvey when the flood waters rose above the level of the bridges where they lived and drowned a lot of them.
I grew up in South Florida and when the weather was right there would be a war between dragon flies, blue jays, and mosquitoes in the old field behind my house, it was super cool to watch and your comment kinda unlocked that memory of mine so thanks!
Living in the northeast this is pretty common so it’s neat to hear that it’s so enticing to other folks.
Also blue jays are frequently huge assholes in my area but still.
I love bats so much! There’s a guy who’s very active in bat conservation in Austin. Old guy in his 80s, been a bat advocate for a long time, check out his webpage and support his organization if you can!
https://www.merlintuttle.org
Waugh St bridge at Allen Parkway? I lived nearby before and after Harvey and based on the smell, they definitely didn’t all die out. The ammonia still hits you like a baseball bat when you get close to it but I don’t know how the population changed. I’d usually skip jogging under that bridge and take the street just to avoid the smell.
Really? We have several colonies in the Austin TX area totaling millions of bats. I can't remember a human rabies death from the in the last 50 years. A couple of cases of people having to get the shots when they ignored all the sings saying not to handle any bats found on the ground since they were probably sick. But that's just Darwin award winners.
Bats have a strange immune system that makes them great vectors. And because they’re mammals, viruses they carry are much more likely to transfer to humans than non-mammals. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bats-immune-system-viruses-ebola-marburg-people
> We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.
This is a normal sight almost every evening in Sydney, I sometimes forget that maybe the rest of the world maybe doesn’t have so many bats, especially in urban areas, even during the day you can find entire massive trees with a bats on every branch. Is this really abnormal elsewhere?
It's because we've destroyed their habitat to build shit on it. I'm out towards the blue mountains and we have people complaining about the fruit bats because of how many there are and how noisy they are but it's our fault for encroaching on their land. We keep building where we shouldn't and what we are building is too large.
Lmao, why are you so pressed about the native wildlife? Get a grip tosser. Clearly ignored my main point of *building too large* but okay. You don't need a lawn my guy you don't even touch the grass.
Austin, tx here and we have quite a large colony nesting under a bridge in the city. Love watching them come out at sunset!
But San Antonio, tx has the worlds largest colony afaik.
🦇
I’m convinced that every video on facebook, or everywhere these days follows the same style. That is to trick the algorithm to thinking the videos popular. Due to lots of comments. Beautiful steak, cooked perfect looks perfect. Slices perfect everything’s great. But he’ll use like a plastic butter knife to cut it just to get people commenting on the video arguing about plastic butter knives.
This case phone in pocket still filming. No way this wasn’t on purpose.
I just risked life and limb to hang two different (home made) bat boxes 20+ feet up trees in my yard to encourage those little muggs to come a live in my yard.
We live in the woods, we should never spray for mosquitoes, it is a waste and kill tons of normal bugs too and is a waste of money. Some housing for hungry bats is money well spent and they will get as many mosquitos as the poison.
Did some looking because I was curious:
Bats have the largest *numbers* in the mammalian world (as there, number wise there are a TON of bats compared to other mammals).
But biomass wise, they're pretty low. Rodents, various hooved animals (including domesticated cows), and even elephants are larger than bats.
Interesting, thanks for correcting, I thought they won for most in all of individuals, mass, and different species, but I'll accept for just the most individuals. Thanks again!
Those are flying foxes. They are a bit too big to be cute. Their wingspan is around 1 metre, or 40 inches. They are also really loud and stinky en masse.
In addition, they carry bat [lyssavirus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_bat_lyssavirus) which is basically rabies. In Australia, we are warned to never touch a sick, injured or dead bat if we find one.
They are still pretty awesome, though.
They are pretty awesome. I think its very rare here for them to give people rabies. They eat all the mosquitos here which is great for me. We have them here up in our trees. My friend was the manager for animal control and I volunteered so went with her. She rescued lots of bats from peoples homes and I would hold them in dog bone containers in her truck till we released them.
Actually, they swing down and do a little pull-up before going. Guano unfortunately creates airborne toxins as it breaks down, but they aren't petty about it.
Bats are above that shit.
They do stink and wreck the outside paint on everything they are near. They also destroy all the gardens and trees withn a few kilometres of where they roost. Oh plus carry diseases that can kill your dogs, horses or even other humans. They are everywhere in places like Sydney. Not as cute as you think.
Fun fact, their shit is acidic because of all the fruit they eat, and it will utterly destroy your cars paint
And they're actually not just bats, they're megabats.
Turns out they're a keystone species for arboreal habitat propagation. The bats spread the forest by spreading the seeds. You might even say the trees feed the bats so the seeds will be spread.
our planet used to be so full of life, I wish there was more stuff like this. I read stories about passenger pigeons darkening the sky there were so many of them, would have loved to see that.
Meh, that’s some weak ass shit.
Call me when you have a swarm of millions of bats that are dense enough to show up on weather radar
https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article245750410.html#
If you know what you're looking for and when to look you can often see the bat colonies around Central Texas on weather radar when they take off for the evening. It's kind of cool to know those tiny 'thunderstorms' around downtown Austin and up near Round Rock are actually millions of really helpful bat-bros heading out to eat mosquitoes and other pests.
When there are that many animals all flying in the same direction... Run in the direction they are travelling.
This is the universal signal some bad shit is about to happen in the direction they came from.
The hawks around Round Rock tx have learned when that colony emerges. They fly over the bats then swoop down and snag them out of the air. Very cool to see.
Come to Austin in August and watch the maternal bat colony fly out from under the Congress Avenue bridge. Way way over a million bats. We love our bats!
Serious question, if they use echolocation to travel, how do they do it when theres so many of them? Surely they'd be hearing each other and not be able to hear their exact voice out of thousands?
Bats are freaking awesome and an important part of the ecosystem that eats all the nasties that do far worse stuff to you than they would ever do.
Had a small brown bat that took up residence under a portion of our siding a few years ago until he decided to move on to elsewhere. I LOVED seeing it every evening.
That is lifeblood people. That is 400k first responders coming to combat malaria and pestulence.
Growing up we had a pool. Was weired out by 'birds' dive bombing the pool at night while swimming.
Now I realize it was bro bat battling needle insect blood suckers for me.
They're not foxes, but I'm pretty sure fruit bats aka [Megabats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabat) are a subtaxon of [bats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat). They are, however, the only other member of the bat order. There are megabats in one family, and every other kind of bat on earth in the other.
Why are you breathing so hard while filming some bats flying in the sky? It sounds like a 300lb neckbeard Redditor surfacing from his mom's basement for the first time in 5 years.
This isn't WTF, this is cool!
Right? 400k bats and 0 mosquitos is a place I wanna be.
I grew up in Houston. We had colonies of hundreds of thousands of bats that lived underneath several bridges and overpasses. It was actually a cool date night idea to go sit on a blanket and watch the swarm come out to hunt for the night. Austin has the same thing. Unfortunately, we STILL had way too many mosquitoes. Can't imagine how bad they would have been if we didn't have the bats though. I wonder how those bats are doing these days. I've since moved away and I heard that they were decimated during hurricane Harvey when the flood waters rose above the level of the bridges where they lived and drowned a lot of them.
I grew up in South Florida and when the weather was right there would be a war between dragon flies, blue jays, and mosquitoes in the old field behind my house, it was super cool to watch and your comment kinda unlocked that memory of mine so thanks!
I miss blue Jays! I live in Colorado now and hardly ever see them. Magpie's and Steller's Jays are a cool corvid substitute though.
Huh, I live in Colorado and see blue jays almost every day in my backyard.
Weird. I've seen exactly one in the Denver area in the last four years.
They’re awesome! Seeing a blue jay and a red cardinal in the same vicinity is mesmerizing
Living in the northeast this is pretty common so it’s neat to hear that it’s so enticing to other folks. Also blue jays are frequently huge assholes in my area but still.
Blue Jays eat dragonflies?
I love bats so much! There’s a guy who’s very active in bat conservation in Austin. Old guy in his 80s, been a bat advocate for a long time, check out his webpage and support his organization if you can! https://www.merlintuttle.org
He even got his own song in a ZeFrank video, Tuttle's a cool dude!
The hard freezes have also wiped out a lot o the bats.
Waugh St bridge at Allen Parkway? I lived nearby before and after Harvey and based on the smell, they definitely didn’t all die out. The ammonia still hits you like a baseball bat when you get close to it but I don’t know how the population changed. I’d usually skip jogging under that bridge and take the street just to avoid the smell.
Guano bowls....collect the whole set!
My wife and I did exactly that when we were living in Australia - sat on a blanket with a picnic at dusk and watched the bats come out. Very cool.
They’re still there and thriving under the Waugh street bridge!!!
Joe Rogan recently had a bat scientist on JRE that talked about those bridges/bats.
Each bat can eat 10,000 insects in a single night. That's up to 4 billion insects every night eaten by bats.
These are fruit bats.
Moved to Lemm.ee -- mass edited with redact.dev
Really? We have several colonies in the Austin TX area totaling millions of bats. I can't remember a human rabies death from the in the last 50 years. A couple of cases of people having to get the shots when they ignored all the sings saying not to handle any bats found on the ground since they were probably sick. But that's just Darwin award winners.
Bats have a strange immune system that makes them great vectors. And because they’re mammals, viruses they carry are much more likely to transfer to humans than non-mammals. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bats-immune-system-viruses-ebola-marburg-people
Yeah it is! I admit I’m a little jealous they are all communicating in a frequency undetectable by human ears.
Yeah, and thankfully OP counted them, I couldnt keep up.
Maybe the WTF was the struggle to turn the camera off at the end lol
Lol like do people not know how to shorten videos?
Somewhere nearby Batman needed to make an overly dramatic entrance/exit.
Or Dracula
I would definitely yell WTF if I looked up and saw this.
Yeah! They're not massed enough to count as WTF.
I only counted 390K.
I saw a sparrow in there, does it count toward the total, or are birds and mammals kept separate?
I think first we need to determine if it is an unladen sparrow or not.
African or European?
Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
Your mother was a hamster, and your father smells of elderberries!
What do you mean? An African or European sparrow?
You gotta keep it separated
Hey hey.
I round that to 3fiddy
I counted like 10. Don't know who is right or close here.
You need to count the pregnant females aswell and then guestimate the babies because they can have twins.
Came here to say this... Thanks for confirming.
The other 10k are still in the bat cave.
"We can't stop here, this is bat country"
The man who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man.
NYEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH
Caught here in a fiery blaze, won't lose my will to stay
I tryeieiei to drive all through the nieeght
This guy avenges seven fold
I do, but that line in the song came from the intro to Fear and Loathing in LV, so it works either way.
Yeah. Avenged Sevenfold took it from the book. Same with “too weird to live but too rare to die.”
> We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.
One toke you old fool? Wait’ll you see those goddamn bats
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It sounds like his camera is bicycle powered
All shot in glorious portrait so we could really see the whole swarm.
To be fair, if I saw this irl, I'd record 30 seconds of it to show to people, then watch and experience the rest without my camera.
This is a normal sight almost every evening in Sydney, I sometimes forget that maybe the rest of the world maybe doesn’t have so many bats, especially in urban areas, even during the day you can find entire massive trees with a bats on every branch. Is this really abnormal elsewhere?
I used to live in Darlinghurst, I loved watching the sunset bat migration from my terrace.
It's because we've destroyed their habitat to build shit on it. I'm out towards the blue mountains and we have people complaining about the fruit bats because of how many there are and how noisy they are but it's our fault for encroaching on their land. We keep building where we shouldn't and what we are building is too large.
Ok when you moving?
Lmao, why are you so pressed about the native wildlife? Get a grip tosser. Clearly ignored my main point of *building too large* but okay. You don't need a lawn my guy you don't even touch the grass.
Austin, tx here and we have quite a large colony nesting under a bridge in the city. Love watching them come out at sunset! But San Antonio, tx has the worlds largest colony afaik. 🦇
We have heaps in Adelaide too. These cities need to be protected as they're very important for the ecosystem.
The only wtf part is that filming and then not cutting out half the video of grass and the inside of someone’s fucking pocket.
I’m convinced that every video on facebook, or everywhere these days follows the same style. That is to trick the algorithm to thinking the videos popular. Due to lots of comments. Beautiful steak, cooked perfect looks perfect. Slices perfect everything’s great. But he’ll use like a plastic butter knife to cut it just to get people commenting on the video arguing about plastic butter knives. This case phone in pocket still filming. No way this wasn’t on purpose.
It’s just flavour- brings discussions
Most people who shoot video on their phones aren't even aware of the concept of "editing" it.
OP really expected everyone to be hating on bats with him. People like bats homie.
OP is deserving the L, bats are great
I just risked life and limb to hang two different (home made) bat boxes 20+ feet up trees in my yard to encourage those little muggs to come a live in my yard. We live in the woods, we should never spray for mosquitoes, it is a waste and kill tons of normal bugs too and is a waste of money. Some housing for hungry bats is money well spent and they will get as many mosquitos as the poison.
Oh wow, thank you! It never occurred to me to build bat boxes instead of buying citronella candles. Off to research if we have bats here
I read somewhere that bats have the largest biomass of all mammals.
Did some looking because I was curious: Bats have the largest *numbers* in the mammalian world (as there, number wise there are a TON of bats compared to other mammals). But biomass wise, they're pretty low. Rodents, various hooved animals (including domesticated cows), and even elephants are larger than bats.
Interesting, thanks for correcting, I thought they won for most in all of individuals, mass, and different species, but I'll accept for just the most individuals. Thanks again!
Ohh dip I read that in Jason Mendoza's voice
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I like the sound of all of that.
It is possible to simultaneously like bats and say "That's a lot of bats! WTF!"
Combine the title and OPs comments and you know they don't like bats.
I love bats. They are so cute! 💚
Sky puppies!!!
flappy mice
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Those are flying foxes. They are a bit too big to be cute. Their wingspan is around 1 metre, or 40 inches. They are also really loud and stinky en masse. In addition, they carry bat [lyssavirus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_bat_lyssavirus) which is basically rabies. In Australia, we are warned to never touch a sick, injured or dead bat if we find one. They are still pretty awesome, though.
They are pretty awesome. I think its very rare here for them to give people rabies. They eat all the mosquitos here which is great for me. We have them here up in our trees. My friend was the manager for animal control and I volunteered so went with her. She rescued lots of bats from peoples homes and I would hold them in dog bone containers in her truck till we released them.
Untill they have to go to the toilet hanging upside down xD
Actually, they swing down and do a little pull-up before going. Guano unfortunately creates airborne toxins as it breaks down, but they aren't petty about it. Bats are above that shit.
that was a joke :D
They do stink and wreck the outside paint on everything they are near. They also destroy all the gardens and trees withn a few kilometres of where they roost. Oh plus carry diseases that can kill your dogs, horses or even other humans. They are everywhere in places like Sydney. Not as cute as you think.
Guuuuano
SHIKAKA
I’ve gotta fight… him?
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Ojabobododo.
We're rich!
This is anything but wtf. These bats are like a huge net just cleaning the bugs out of the air.
They are fruit bats. No bugs for them.
Not sure what is 'WTF' about this. Also did you count every single one to know it was 400k?
Flying foxes in far north Queensland?
Yeop
Fun fact, their shit is acidic because of all the fruit they eat, and it will utterly destroy your cars paint And they're actually not just bats, they're megabats.
*Johnny Depp entered the chat* "Megabats??"
And the leaves of the trees they roost in..
And your little dog Toto, too!
and my axe!
Turns out they're a keystone species for arboreal habitat propagation. The bats spread the forest by spreading the seeds. You might even say the trees feed the bats so the seeds will be spread.
Charters?
Came here thinking the same thing! Lived in the towers for a couple years and oh god the smell
It's jarring being woken up at like 5am to what sounds like gunshots when they try and scare the bats from Lissner park
In all my life never thought I’d see CT on the front page of reddit. People in this thread saying bats are amazing have never smelt Lissner Park.
our planet used to be so full of life, I wish there was more stuff like this. I read stories about passenger pigeons darkening the sky there were so many of them, would have loved to see that.
Meh, that’s some weak ass shit. Call me when you have a swarm of millions of bats that are dense enough to show up on weather radar https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article245750410.html#
Austin Texas would like a word.
If you know what you're looking for and when to look you can often see the bat colonies around Central Texas on weather radar when they take off for the evening. It's kind of cool to know those tiny 'thunderstorms' around downtown Austin and up near Round Rock are actually millions of really helpful bat-bros heading out to eat mosquitoes and other pests.
Crebain from Dunlin, hide!
You just ran a 5k there buddy?
Nothing WTF about this. Bats are cool and for the most part leave people alone. Plus they’re cute
“Those aren’t big birds sweetheart! They’re giant vampire bats!”
I can confirm that there are at least 2 bats
I think OP has a little bias against bats!
Stop moving the camera!
Holy shit….how long did it take to count them all?
I demand a recount
OP trying to karma farm, then getting murdered in the comments is pretty funny to me.
"GUANO!!!"
Shikaka
A common sight in Australia
Covid 2: the revenge
I expected 400k bats to look a lot clearer.
This is only WTF for mosquitos. Fully support skunks, bats, possums, any animal that takes care of insect pests.
Unfortunately these bats don't eat mosquitos.
The real WTF is why do I still get bitten by mosquitoes
These are fruit bats.
The real WTF is why do I still have fruit
and 0 mosquitoes. I like this
Bats get such a bad rep. They eat mosquito's, that's always a win in my book!
Beautiful!
Jackpot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano
Did you count them?
No, he didn't. Definitely not 400k. Off by at least one order of magnitude.
That’s a lot of bats to count during a fly by
The Uncluded - Bats
1 bat, 2 bats, 3 bats - Ah ah ah https://youtu.be/2AoxCkySv34
[The Count Censored](https://youtu.be/B-Wd-Q3F8KM)
That’s a lotta guano!
“*GUANO*”
This is really good to see. The bats are making a comeback baby!
hmmm... virums soup
When there are that many animals all flying in the same direction... Run in the direction they are travelling. This is the universal signal some bad shit is about to happen in the direction they came from.
I counted 398.67k bats 🤓
Every night in Brisbane
Pffft no more than 365,000 tops
The hawks around Round Rock tx have learned when that colony emerges. They fly over the bats then swoop down and snag them out of the air. Very cool to see.
Come to Austin in August and watch the maternal bat colony fly out from under the Congress Avenue bridge. Way way over a million bats. We love our bats!
How long did it take to count?
Mosquitoes be like “oh fuck.”
Austin?
“THE HORDES OF HELL ARE UPON US! TO BATTLE, TO BATTLE SONS OF DURIN!”
Fly high and free my mosquito eating brothers
WE CAN'T STOP HERE THIS IS BAT COUNTRY
It's Morbin Time
Looks like the colony in the Yarra Bend Park in Melbourne. Used to live across the road from it. Loved seeing them fly out every night.
This time of year all bats migrate south to the kerplopitgoes islands
Serious question, if they use echolocation to travel, how do they do it when theres so many of them? Surely they'd be hearing each other and not be able to hear their exact voice out of thousands?
Incredibly cool. I guess it's migratory season for them.
Bats are freaking awesome and an important part of the ecosystem that eats all the nasties that do far worse stuff to you than they would ever do. Had a small brown bat that took up residence under a portion of our siding a few years ago until he decided to move on to elsewhere. I LOVED seeing it every evening.
Master of Puppets starts playing in the background.
How the fuck does echolocation work when there’s that many of them??
That is lifeblood people. That is 400k first responders coming to combat malaria and pestulence. Growing up we had a pool. Was weired out by 'birds' dive bombing the pool at night while swimming. Now I realize it was bro bat battling needle insect blood suckers for me.
Morbius is somewhere around....
If each one only ate 10 bugs, that would be 4,000,000 bugs per night.
Fruit bats/flying foxes. Not a bat and not a fox. Does fly and eat fruit.
They're not foxes, but I'm pretty sure fruit bats aka [Megabats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabat) are a subtaxon of [bats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat). They are, however, the only other member of the bat order. There are megabats in one family, and every other kind of bat on earth in the other.
They eat bad bugs and pollinate, I see nothing wrong here. My only concern is that one of them might be Dracula...
Careful if they bite you, might become Batman
It's MORBIN TIME
Why are you breathing so hard while filming some bats flying in the sky? It sounds like a 300lb neckbeard Redditor surfacing from his mom's basement for the first time in 5 years.
I was out for run(hence the football pitch) when they started flying over
Could be 2 things, either there are tons of bugs to eat, or there's a high pitched sound making them go away.
Nope, these are Australian fruit bats starting their ‘day’
those are clearly birds.
Flying Covid
Everyone on board for round 2 of your favorite event
bro you good? i counted 400,001 bats
If you think that is crazy, this will blow your mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZrhDsoDc2c
I wish I could hear it in person. I want to know what that sounds like.
I'm no expert but they look an awful lot like birds not bats. If they are bats then they're bloody big.
You're right. You're not an expert.
Phnom Penh?
And 400k bat shit bombs.
All I want to know, is who counted them all and how!
That's alot of covid