As Cookeville celebrates the bat with a celebration at the History Museum Saturday, a TWRA expert said bats play a vital ecological and economic role in the Upper Cumberland.
Statewide Bat Coordinator Dustin Thames said local agriculture and forestry benefit most. Thames said bats naturally control pest populations.
“Bats are critically important,” Thames said. “There was a study done a few years ago out of the University of Tennessee and they estimated that bats save farmers in the United States between 4 and 50 billion with a B dollars every year in ecosystem services by eating insects that would otherwise be pests to their crops.”
Thames said bats consume up to their entire body weight in insects each night to sustain the high energy required for flight. Some species in the Upper Cumberland travel up to 20 miles one way from their daytime roosts to forage for food. These feeding habits help maintain a balance in the ecosystem by keeping moth and beetle populations in check.
“And because of this disease, we’ve lost hundreds of thousands, millions of bats in the Upper Cumberland region, in Tennessee,” Thames said. “One species in particular, the Northern Long-eared Bat, it used to be one of the more common bats, especially in the Upper Cumberland region in forests on the Cumberland Plateau. But now we usually only see about four or five individuals across the entire state of Tennessee every year.”
Thames said White Nose Syndrome is a fungal disease introduced to Tennessee caves that causes bats to wake up frequently during winter hibernation. This disruption forces the animals to burn through their energy reserves before warm weather returns and insects become available.
“They really don’t want anything to do with humans, other than to kind of sneak into our attics and spend the day, but they really don’t want to bite us and they really want to stay as far away from us as possible,” Thames said.
Thames said public fear of bats is often fueled by exaggerated myths and popular culture, despite the animals relying on advanced echolocation rather than sight to navigate and hunt in complete darkness. Habitat loss continues to threaten local populations as human development expands into natural environments and removes the dead trees bats use for summer roosts.
“But you know, as humans as our communities grow, we’re cutting down trees and often cutting down snags that bats need as roosts and putting up bat houses can benefit the bat populations incredibly,” Thames said. “And it’s also nice to have, you know, a population of bats near your house eating insects that would otherwise be in your garden or, or you know, possibly biting you. So they’re doing a good service for us and they’re good to have around.”
Residents are encouraged to leave dead trees standing on their property when safe or to install properly constructed bat houses to support local conservation efforts.