Fun with Science Club®


			How do tent bats keep their homes alive? Carrie Straight 05.18.01 Bats hang-out during the daytime (roost) in a variety of places. Some bats even make shelters out of large-leafed plants. Some tropical bats bite through certain parts of leaves (along the mid-vein) to make what biologists call tents. This causes the leaf to droop down on the sides and create a place to hang out near the middle. The problem with this is that by biting through veins in the leaf, the leaf is hurt and can die. The veins in a leaf transport water and food to other parts of the leaf. If too many veins or the wrong ones are cut then the leaf dies immediately, and the bats would have to create a new tent much sooner. A dead leaf does not make a good tent, because it could get broken off of the tree. Amazingly, some leaf-tents live for up to a year after they have been created. This is good for the bats because they don’t have to make as many tents during the year. This made scientists think that water and food was still being transported around in the leaf, and that bats knew what veins to cut off so that the leaf stayed alive. So scientists went to Costa Rica and looked at different leaves that bats made into tents by bats. They measured and labeled which veins bats chewed through and how long the leaf lived after the damage. Then they looked at how water moved through these damaged leaves by taking the leaf off the tree and placing its stem in a container with water. They added a colored dye to the water and watched where it went in the leaf’s veins. They also took leaves that were not damaged by bats and used the dye to see how water normally moves within the leaf (a comparison group). The scientists found out that the bats did change the flow of water through the leaves they damaged, but that the bats chose types of plants to make tents out of that were able to live for a long time after they created their tents.


			Cholewa, Ewa, Maarten J. Vonhof, Sylvie Bouchard, Carol A. Peterson, and Brock Fenton. 2001. The pathways of water movement in leaves modified into tents by bats. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 72: 179-191.