It sucks being a bat in the Anthropocene, or as some would have it, the Capitalocene.
Climate crisis-fuelled extreme heat is killing bats in droves. The wind power infrastructure being built to limit global warming is causing bat mortality too, although there are ways to minimise this.
You name it, human-caused habitat loss, diseases, food shortages, bats are up against it all.
Exploitation is another threat to bats, including for the fashioning of their dead bodies into house décor. This trade is the focus of a recent study, which tracked listings of dead bat décor on three major e-commerce sites. The paper focused on the trading of Asia’s Painted Woolly Bat in particular.
The researchers found hundreds of listings, with dead bats sold as standalone taxidermied corpses and stuffed into picture frames. Perhaps the most macabre format they found was dead bats laid out in coffins. This may be the most grimly apt representation of the Painted Woolly Bat because without regulation of the trade, it could help to send the species to its grave.
To continue reading this story, please follow this link to The 4 Percent newsletter, which originally published the article.
Image via Abu Hamas / Wikimedia, cropped to 1000×600, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
