Fruit Bats of Madagascar

While most attention tends to focus on large charismatic animals such as rhinos and tigers, it will probably come as no surprise to discover that many species of bat are endangered. Here in Britain, all bats are legally protected by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, making it an offence to disturb their roots. That's perhaps an unusually robust example, but other protections and conservation efforts exist across the world.

On the other hand, it is true that the majority of bat species are not especially threatened, at least on a worldwide scale - although things may be different locally. Bearing in mind that around one in six bat species are so recently identified and so little studied that we simply don't know how common they are, only around another one in six are rare enough to be listed as "threatened" by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Still, that's not exactly a small proportion, and since there are somewhere around 1,400 named species of bat, it's not small in absolute terms, either.

Tha bats are a highly diverse group, representing no fewer than 21 taxonomic families, none of which are likely as familiar to the layman as terms such as "cat family" or "deer family". Some of these contain very few species, representing oddities that don't quite fit into any of the main subgroups, but there are still five families with over a hundred species each. Of these, the one that contains the highest proportion of threatened species is the fruit bat or "flying fox" family, the Pteropodidae.

A Nice Warm Cuddle

Marianas flying fox,
a related species

One of the defining features of mammals is that they're warm-blooded - at least, when they're not hibernating. The only other living creatures that are truly warm-blooded are the birds... but what exactly do we mean by 'warm-blooded', anyway?

It's not the actual temperature of the blood that's relevant, here. The blood of a "cold-blooded" animal, such as a lizard, is, after all, pretty warm when it's basking in the sun. (Which is, in fact, why they bask in the sun in the first place). It's because of that that "warm-blooded" isn't the preferred term among scientists. Back when I was school I was told that the correct word was homoeothermic, but today, when we're talking about mammals and birds, the preferred term is endothermic. The two words don't mean quite the same thing, and it's actually possible for an animal to be one without being the other.

"Homoeothermy" means that the animal is able to keep a constant body temperature, largely regardless of what the environment around it is doing. Get too hot, and you find some way to cool down, and get too cold and you warm up somehow. There are a very small number of non-hibernating mammals that aren't homoeothermic. Naked mole rats are the clearest example; because they live in underground tunnels where the temperature doesn't change much, they've lost the ability to compensate if it ever does change. It's just not a problem they face, and it may be part of the reason why they don't have any fur - they don't need to keep their body heat in.

There are at least two ways for an animal to become homoeothermic. One of them is just to be enormous. Large objects lose heat slowly, so, perhaps with the aid of a few behavioural modifications, a really big animal can keep warm through a cold night simply because the night isn't long enough to have an effect on it. This probably won't work through a long winter, and the animal also takes a long time to heat up (though the latter might be an advantage in the noon-day sun), but, for many purposes, it may well be enough. This sort of homoeothermy isn't really relevant to mammals, but it may well have played a role in the lives of the really big dinosaurs like Diplodocus.