Bats: 10 Essential Bat Facts, Plus Photo Gallery!
Bat fact 6: Although they have relatively good eyesight, insectivorous Microchiroptera (microbats) use echolocation to find prey and avoid objects and predators in the darkness.
Bats create sounds using their mouth or nose, and when the sound hits an object, an echo bounces back to the bat. Using echolocation, a bat can detect and avoid an object no wider than a piece of thread.
Pictured: Endangered gray bat
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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).