How much do YOU eat every day?

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On a rainy Thursday afternoon, I walked about 15 minutes to the Bat Jungle. I did a self-guided tour and discovered some amazing facts about bats. Yes, I know bats eat a lot, but I did not appreciate the vast amount they eat daily. At the Bat Jungle, there were three different scales I could step on.

The scales showed how much I would have to eat, as a human-sized bat, in order to survive, depending on whether I ate fruit, insects, or nectar. If I were a fruit bat, I would have to eat 475 pounds of chopped bananas a day! If I consumed insects, I would have to go through a 3.75-gallon bucket of bugs. If I drank nectar, I would need to down 180 liters (47.5 gallons) every 24 hours. 

Just think about having to drink 90 two-liter bottles of sweet nectar each day! A person my weight should drink 80 ounces of water a day, which is about 2 1/3 liters. Sometimes drinking even that much seems like a lot.

The photo shows what my ears might look like if I were a bat. I could definitely hear better when I put the hoses to my ears.

I'm not sure I'd like the new look though. I saw maybe a hundred bats sleeping, eating, and flying around inside a large glass enclosure. It was filled with feeders of nectar and fresh fruit hanging all over.

I imagine they toss insects in for those who depend upon insects for food. The bats that drank the nectar were busy flying around and would buzz in to quickly take a sip of nectar and then fly off. No wonder they need to eat so much! They certainly were using a lot of energy flying around. Many of the fruit bats were quietly hanging upside down with a piece of fruit clasped between their two hands just chomping away. 

Other fun bat facts:
  • A colony of bats can eat 250 tons of insects every night.
  • Bats are excellent pollinators and many of the plant species in Costa Rica rely specifically on bats for pollination.
  • Some bats eat meat including frogs, birds, fish, rats, and lizards.
  • Some bats can fly 60 miles per hour.
  • Baby bats are called pups.
  • Bats have one baby a year and will leave them at home at night when they are young because they are too heavy for the mama to carry.
  • A baby bat weighs about one-third the weight of a mother when it is born. That is like a 150 pound woman giving birth to a 50 pound baby. Holy smokes! That would be one big baby.

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