Bat fact 5: Bats keep themselves extremely clean.
Fastidious bats will groom themselves – and sometimes other bats – for hours.
Pictured: Brown long-eared bat
Image: flickr.com/sanmartin/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
About Rhishja Cota-LarsonRhishja is the founder of Saving Rhinos, which publishes news and information about the illegal trade in rhino horn and rhino conservation issues. She is the Editor of the blogs "Rhino Horn is Not Medicine" and "Project Pangolin", and author of the book "Murder, Myths & Medicine". Check out savingrhinos.org, rhinoconservation.org, and pangolins.org to learn more. When Rhishja is not blogging about the illegal wildlife trade, she enjoys rocking out to live music.
This is actually not true. Recent studies have shown that bats belong to a clade called Laurasiatheria, that includes moles, shrews, cetaceans, ungulates, carnivores, pangolines, etc. Primates, on the other hand, are more closely related to lagomorphs and rodents than to bats. A good review of the higher-level phylogeny of mammals is “The new framework for understanding placental mammal evolution” BioEssays (2009) 31: 853-864
I didn’t realize bats pollinated! This is especially good since I had heard that honeybees are disappearing (I guess due to insecticides or other reasons – I’m not sure why).