Insect eating bats

There are many insect eating bats in Australasia, most are small (some are tiny!). They find their way through the dark by using 'echolocation', listening to the echos from their high pitched calls. These calls are usually well above the range of human hearing so we can't hear them, but some species like the White-striped mastiff bat can be heard by humans.
Insect eating bats are called 'micro bats' because of their small size, the smallest micro bats in Australasia weigh about 3 grams - that is about 1 tenth of a mouse!. They feed on a range of insects including many pest species. They also can slow their bodies down and go into torpor (kind of like a mini hibernation) to save energy when it is cold. They live a very long time for small animals, sometimes more than 30 years.

There are many unusual bats in Australasia;  The New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat actually spends much of its time scurrying on the ground in search of food rather than on the wing. A small blossom bat from Papua New Guinea has the scientific name Syconycteris hobbit after the famous J.R.R. Tolkein hobbit characters, it lives in moss forests and has hairy toes like its fictional namesakeThe large-footed Myotis is sometimes called the fishing bat , has very long toes which it uses to trawl the surface of water bodies for small fish and aquatic insects. The golden-tipped bat has a very specialised lifestyle, it hunts spiders in the night , finding them by using its 'sonar' and carefully plucking them from their webs. There are many species of tube-nosed bats that have long tubular nostrils which are believed to help the bats breath like a snorkel when they are eating juicy fruits! , they also often have a green tinge to their wings or fur which helps keep them hidden in foliage during the day.Most bats vocalise like us, through our mouths but horseshoe and leafnosed bats make their echolocation calls through their noses.The ghost bat, a large almost white carnivorous bat, feeds on small animals like rodents, frogs, birds and even other bats!Wallaces' striped faced fruit bat is known to have lived in Australia tens of thousands of years ago from ancient Aboriginal rock art. It is now only found in Sulawesi and the eastern islands of Indonesia. Long-eared bats hunt moths by stealth, some moths can hear the echolocation calls of bats, but the long-eared bats are very quiet and listen for the wing flutters of moths to catch them by surprise.