What are 5 facts about bats?

Here are five interesting facts about bats that show why they are unique and beneficial. First, bats are the only mammals capable of true sustained flight, their wings are made of thin membrane stretched between elongated finger bones like a human hand, allowing incredible agility. Second, most bats use echolocation to navigate and hunt in complete darkness, emitting high-pitched sounds and listening to echoes to locate insects, which is so precise they can catch a mosquito in flight. Third, bats are extremely beneficial for pest control, a single little brown bat can eat up to 1,000 mosquitoes and moths in one night, saving farmers billions of dollars in pesticide costs and reducing disease transmission. Fourth, bats are surprisingly long-lived for small mammals, small insect-eating bats can live 10 to 30 years in the wild, much longer than mice of similar size which live 1 to 3 years, due to their ability to fly and low reproductive rate of usually one pup per year. Fifth, there are over 1,400 species of bats worldwide making up about 20 percent of all mammal species, with diverse diets including insects, fruits, nectar, fish, frogs, and even blood in three species of vampire bats in Latin America, and fruit bats are important pollinators and seed dispersers for many plants like bananas and agave.