With a body the size of a fist and wings that span more than a foot, the big brown bat must gorge on 6,000 to 8,000 bugs a night to maintain its stature.
With a body the size of a fist and wings that span more than a foot, the big brown bat must gorge on 6,000 to 8,000 bugs a night to maintain its stature. This mighty appetite can be a boon to farmers battling crop-eating pests.
But few types of bats live on American farms. That’s because the current practice of monoculture – dedicating large swathes of land to a single crop – doesn’t give the bats many places to land or to nest.
Retaining a bit of the wild in our working lands – including farmland, rangeland and forests – may be key to preserving biodiversity in the face of climate change, says a new review paper published this week in Science by conservation biologists at the University of California, Berkeley. The paper synthesizes more than 100 studies on conservation and landscape management published over the past 20 years.
Diversification could be as simple as adding trees or hedgerows along the edges of fields, giving animals like birds, bats and insects places to live, or as complex as incorporating a patchwork of fields, orchards, pasture and flowers into a single working farm.
Continue reading at University of California - Berkeley.
Image via University of California - Berkeley.
