I'd like to say a special thank you to William for this week's questions about bats.

I would also like to thank Ian, Schuma, James, Jay, Stephen, Elsie, and Druva for sending in questions for our next episodes of Sleep Tight Science.

You're listening to Sleep Tight Science. Did you know a bat can eat as many as 2,000 to 6,000 insects per night?

Wow!

That's a lot of bugs.

First question, why do bats hunt at night?

It is believed that bats hunt at night so that they don't have as much competition from insectivorous birds,

or birds that feed on insects.

Bats are nocturnal, which means that they are active at night.

When they leave their roost, or where they are sleeping,

they usually head to water, a stream, pond, or lake,

and open their mouth to get a drink while they are still flying. Then off they go to look for insects.

Bats use echolocation to help find to look for insects.

Bats use echolocation to help find their food.

Echo location is when bats make sounds from either their mouths or their noses.

These sounds then bounce off of objects and come back and are heard by the bat's sensitive ears.

Just using sound, bats can see everything but color.

The sounds they emit or make can help them to find things as small as mosquitoes,

which they love to feed on. The echoes coming back to their ears also help them to know the size

and shape of the insect and which way it is going.

Bats help us out a lot by eating the insects.

Their feeding helps make the insect population, or numbers, lower,

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