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Lightweight cotton sateen, fully underlined with cotton lawn, lined with Bemsilk. Collar and draped bust from loose weave linen viscose blend. Worn with full organza petticoat. More detail: www.facebook.com/measuretwicecraft/posts/783336405099867
The wood-workshop inside Fargus. This is where the prototype of the bootstrap stretcher is shaped. It is fascinating to me that this labor has not been automated since 1911.
Bats are mammals of the order Chiroptera (/kaɪˈrɒptərə/; from the Greek χείρ - cheir, "hand" and πτερόν - pteron, "wing") whose forelimbs form webbed wings, making them the only mammals naturally capable of true and sustained flight. By contrast, other mammals said to fly, such as flying squirrels, gliding possums, and colugos, can only glide for short distances. Bats do not flap their entire forelimbs, as birds do, but instead flap their spread-out digits, which are very long and covered with a thin membrane or patagium.
Bats are the second largest order of mammals (after the rodents), representing about 20% of all classified mammal species worldwide, with about 1,240 bat species divided into two suborders: the less specialized and largely fruit-eating megabats, or flying foxes, and the highly specialized and echolocating microbats. About 70% of bat species are insectivores. Most of the rest are frugivores, or fruit eaters. A few species, such as the fish-eating bat, feed from animals other than insects, with the vampire bats being hematophagous, or feeding on blood.
Bats are present throughout most of the world, with the exception of extremely cold regions. They perform vital ecological roles of pollinating flowers and dispersing fruit seeds; many tropical plant species depend entirely on bats for the distribution of their seeds. Bats are economically important, as they consume insect pests, reducing the need for pesticides. The smallest bat is the Kitti's hog-nosed bat, measuring 29–34 mm in length, 15 cm across the wings and 2–2.6 g in mass. It is also arguably the smallest extant species of mammal, with the Etruscan shrew being the other contender. The largest species of bat are a few species of Pteropus (fruit bats or flying foxes) and the giant golden-crowned flying fox with a weight up to 1.6 kg and wingspan up to 1.7 m.
CLASSIFICATION AND EVOLUTION
Bats are mammals. In many languages, the word for "bat" is cognate with the word for "mouse": for example, chauve-souris ("bald-mouse") in French, murciélago ("blind mouse") in Spanish, saguzahar ("old mouse") in Basque, летучая мышь ("flying mouse") in Russian, slijepi miš ("blind mouse") in Bosnian, nahkhiir ("leather mouse") in Estonian, vlermuis (winged mouse) in Afrikaans, from the Dutch word vleermuis (from Middle Dutch "winged mouse"). An older English name for bats is flittermouse, which matches their name in other Germanic languages (for example German Fledermaus and Swedish fladdermus). Bats were formerly thought to have been most closely related to the flying lemurs, treeshrews, and primates, but recent molecular cladistics research indicates that they actually belong to Laurasiatheria, a diverse group also containing Carnivora and Artiodactyla.
The two traditionally recognized suborders of bats are:
- Megachiroptera (megabats)
- Microchiroptera (microbats/echolocating bats)
Not all megabats are larger than microbats. The major distinctions between the two suborders are:
- Microbats use echolocation; with the exception of the Rousettus genus, megabats do not.
- Microbats lack the claw at the second finger of the forelimb.
- The ears of microbats do not close to form a ring; the edges are separated from each other at the base of the ear.
- Microbats lack underfur; they are either naked or have guard hairs.
Megabats eat fruit, nectar, or pollen. Most microbats eat insects; others may feed on fruit, nectar, pollen, fish, frogs, small mammals, or the blood of animals. Megabats have well-developed visual cortices and show good visual acuity, while microbats rely on echolocation for navigation and finding prey.
The phylogenetic relationships of the different groups of bats have been the subject of much debate. The traditional subdivision between Megachiroptera and Microchiroptera reflects the view that these groups of bats have evolved independently of each other for a long time, from a common ancestor already capable of flight. This hypothesis recognized differences between microbats and megabats and acknowledged that flight has only evolved once in mammals. Most molecular biological evidence supports the view that bats form a single or monophyletic group.
Researchers have proposed alternative views of chiropteran phylogeny and classification, but more research is needed.
In the 1980s, a hypothesis based on morphological evidence was offered that stated the Megachiroptera evolved flight separately from the Microchiroptera. The so-called flying primates theory proposes that, when adaptations to flight are removed, the Megachiroptera are allied to primates by anatomical features not shared with Microchiroptera. One example is that the brains of megabats show a number of advanced characteristics that link them to primates. Although recent genetic studies strongly support the monophyly of bats, debate continues as to the meaning of available genetic and morphological evidence.
Genetic evidence indicates that megabats originated during the early Eocene and should be placed within the four major lines of microbats.
Consequently, two new suborders based on molecular data have been proposed. The new suborder of Yinpterochiroptera includes the Pteropodidae, or megabat family, as well as the Rhinolophidae, Hipposideridae, Craseonycteridae, Megadermatidae, and Rhinopomatidae families The other new suborder, Yangochiroptera, includes all of the remaining families of bats (all of which use laryngeal echolocation). These two new suborders are strongly supported by statistical tests. Teeling (2005) found 100% bootstrap support in all maximum likelihood analyses for the division of Chiroptera into these two modified suborders. This conclusion is further supported by a 15-base-pair deletion in BRCA1 and a seven-base-pair deletion in PLCB4 present in all Yangochiroptera and absent in all Yinpterochiroptera. Perhaps most convincingly, a phylogenomic study by Tsagkogeorga et al (2013) showed that the two new proposed suborders were supported by analyses of thousands of genes.
The chiropteran phylogeny based on molecular evidence is controversial because microbat paraphyly implies that one of two seemingly unlikely hypotheses occurred. The first suggests that laryngeal echolocation evolved twice in Chiroptera, once in Yangochiroptera and once in the rhinolophoids. The second proposes that laryngeal echolocation had a single origin in Chiroptera, was subsequently lost in the family Pteropodidae (all megabats), and later evolved as a system of tongue-clicking in the genus Rousettus.
Analyses of the sequence of the "vocalization" gene, FoxP2, were inconclusive as to whether laryngeal echolocation was secondarily lost in the pteropodids or independently gained in the echolocating lineages. However, analyses of the "hearing" gene, Prestin seemed to favor the independent gain in echolocating species rather than a secondary loss in the pteropodids.
In addition to Yinpterochiroptera and Yangochiroptera, the names Pteropodiformes and Vespertilioniformes have also been proposed for these suborders. Under this new proposed nomenclature, the suborder Pteropodiformes includes all extant bat families more closely related to the genus Pteropus than the genus Vespertilio, while the suborder Vespertilioniformes includes all extant bat families more closely related to the genus Vespertilio than to the genus Pteropus.
Little fossil evidence is available to help map the evolution of bats, since their small, delicate skeletons do not fossilize very well. However, a Late Cretaceous tooth from South America resembles that of an early microchiropteran bat. Most of the oldest known, definitely identified bat fossils were already very similar to modern microbats. These fossils, Icaronycteris, Archaeonycteris, Palaeochiropteryx and Hassianycteris, are from the early Eocene period, 52.5 million years ago. Archaeopteropus, formerly classified as the earliest known megachiropteran, is now classified as a microchiropteran.
Bats were formerly grouped in the superorder Archonta, along with the treeshrews (Scandentia), colugos (Dermoptera), and the primates, because of the apparent similarities between Megachiroptera and such mammals. Genetic studies have now placed bats in the superorder Laurasiatheria, along with carnivorans, pangolins, odd-toed ungulates, even-toed ungulates, and cetaceans. A recent study by Zhang et al. places Chiroptera as a sister taxon to the clade Perissodactyla (which includes horses and other odd-toed ungulates). However, the first phylogenomic analysis of bats shows that they are not sisters to Perissodactyla, instead they are sisters to a larger group that includes ungulates and carnivores.
Megabats primarily eat fruit or nectar. In New Guinea, they are likely to have evolved for some time in the absence of microbats, which has resulted in some smaller megabats of the genus Nyctimene becoming (partly) insectivorous to fill the vacant microbat ecological niche. Furthermore, some evidence indicates that the fruit bat genus Pteralopex from the Solomon Islands, and its close relative Mirimiri from Fiji, have evolved to fill some niches that were open because there are no nonvolant or nonflying mammals on those islands.
FOSSIL BATS
Fossilized remains of bats are few, as they are terrestrial and light-boned. Only an estimated 12% of the bat fossil record is complete at the genus level. Fossil remains of an Eocene bat, Icaronycteris, were found in 1960. Another Eocene bat, Onychonycteris finneyi, was found in the 52-million-year-old Green River Formation in Wyoming, United States, in 2003. This intermediate fossil has helped to resolve a long-standing disagreement regarding whether flight or echolocation developed first in bats. The shape of the rib cage, faceted infraspious fossa of the scapula, manus morphology, robust clavicle, and keeled sternum all indicated Onychonycteris was capable of powered flight. However, the well-preserved skeleton showed that the small cochlea of the inner ear did not have the morphology necessary to echolocate. O. finneyi lacked an enlarged orbical apophysis on the malleus, and a stylohyal element with an expanded paddle-like cranial tip - both of which are characteristics linked to echolocation in other prehistoric and extant bat species. Because of these absences, and the presence of characteristics necessary for flight, Onychonycteris provides strong support for the “flight first” hypothesis in the evolution of flight and echolocation in bats.
The appearance and flight movement of bats 52.5 million years ago were different from those of bats today. Onychonycteris had claws on all five of its fingers, whereas modern bats have at most two claws appearing on two digits of each hand. It also had longer hind legs and shorter forearms, similar to climbing mammals that hang under branches such as sloths and gibbons. This palm-sized bat had short, broad wings, suggesting it could not fly as fast or as far as later bat species. Instead of flapping its wings continuously while flying, Onychonycteris likely alternated between flaps and glides while in the air. Such physical characteristics suggest that this bat did not fly as much as modern bats do, rather flying from tree to tree and spending most of its waking day climbing or hanging on the branches of trees. The distinctive features noted on the Onychonycteris fossil also support the claim that mammalian flight most likely evolved in arboreal gliders, rather than terrestrial runners. This model of flight development, commonly known as the "trees-down" theory, implies that bats attained powered flight by taking advantage of height and gravity, rather than relying on running speeds fast enough for a ground-level take off.
The mid-Eocene genus Necromantis is one of the earliest examples of bats specialised to hunt vertebrate prey, as well as one of the largest bats of its epoch.
HABITATS
Flight has enabled bats to become one of the most widely distributed groups of mammals. Apart from the Arctic, the Antarctic and a few isolated oceanic islands, bats exist all over the world. Bats are found in almost every habitat available on Earth. Different species select different habitats during different seasons, ranging from seasides to mountains and even deserts, but bat habitats have two basic requirements: roosts, where they spend the day or hibernate, and places for foraging. Most temperate species additionally need a relatively warm hibernation shelter. Bat roosts can be found in hollows, crevices, foliage, and even human-made structures, and include "tents" the bats construct by biting leaves.
The United States is home to an estimated 45 to 48 species of bats. The three most common species are Myotis lucifugus (little brown bat), Eptesicus fuscus (big brown bat), and Tadarida brasiliensis (Mexican free-tailed bat). The little and the big brown bats are common throughout the northern two-thirds of the country, while the Mexican free-tailed bat is the most common species in the southwest, sometimes even appearing in portions of the Southeast.
ANATOMY
WINGS
The finger bones of bats are much more flexible than those of other mammals, owing to their flattened cross-section and to low levels of minerals, such as calcium, near their tips. In 2006, Sears et al. published a study that traces the elongation of manual bat digits, a key feature required for wing development, to the upregulation of bone morphogenetic proteins (Bmps). During embryonic development, the gene controlling Bmp signaling, Bmp2, is subjected to increased expression in bat forelimbs - resulting in the extension of the offspring's manual digits. This crucial genetic alteration helps create the specialized limbs required for volant locomotion. Sears et al. (2006) also studied the relative proportion of bat forelimb digits from several extant species and compared these with a fossil of Lcaronycteris index, an early extinct species from approximately 50 million years ago. The study found no significant differences in relative digit proportion, suggesting that bat wing morphology has been conserved for over 50 million years.The wings of bats are much thinner and consist of more bones than the wings of birds, allowing bats to maneuver more accurately than the latter, and fly with more lift and less drag. By folding the wings in toward their bodies on the upstroke, they save 35 percent energy during flight. The membranes are also delicate, ripping easily; however, the tissue of the bat's membrane is able to regrow, such that small tears can heal quickly. The surface of their wings is equipped with touch-sensitive receptors on small bumps called Merkel cells, also found on human fingertips. These sensitive areas are different in bats, as each bump has a tiny hair in the center, making it even more sensitive and allowing the bat to detect and collect information about the air flowing over its wings, and to fly more efficiently by changing the shape of its wings in response. An additional kind of receptor cell is found in the wing membrane of species that use their wings to catch prey. This receptor cell is sensitive to the stretching of the membrane. The cells are concentrated in areas of the membrane where insects hit the wings when the bats capture them.
OTHER
The teeth of microbats resemble insectivorans. They are very sharp to bite through the hardened armor of insects or the skin of fruit.
Mammals have one-way valves in their veins to prevent the blood from flowing backwards, but bats also have one-way valves in their arteries.
The tube-lipped nectar bat (Anoura fistulata) has the longest tongue of any mammal relative to its body size. This is beneficial to them in terms of pollination and feeding. Their long, narrow tongues can reach deep into the long cup shape of some flowers. When the tongue retracts, it coils up inside its rib cage.
Bats possess highly adapted lung systems to cope with the pressures of powered-flight. Flight is an energetically taxing aerobic activity and requires large amounts of oxygen to be sustained. In bats, the relative alveolar surface area and pulmonary capillary blood volume are significantly larger than most other small quadrupedal mammals.
ECHOLOCATION
Bat echolocation is a perceptual system where ultrasonic sounds are emitted specifically to produce echoes. By comparing the outgoing pulse with the returning echoes, the brain and auditory nervous system can produce detailed images of the bat's surroundings. This allows bats to detect, localize, and even classify their prey in complete darkness. At 130 decibels in intensity, bat calls are some of the most intense, airborne animal sounds.
To clearly distinguish returning information, bats must be able to separate their calls from the echoes that they receive. Microbats use two distinct approaches.
Low duty cycle echolocation: Bats can separate their calls and returning echoes by time. Bats that use this approach time their short calls to finish before echoes return. This is important because these bats contract their middle ear muscles when emitting a call, so they can avoid deafening themselves. The time interval between the call and echo allows them to relax these muscles, so they can clearly hear the returning echo. The delay of the returning echoes provides the bat with the ability to estimate the range to their prey.
High duty cycle echolocation: Bats emit a continuous call and separate pulse and echo in frequency. The ears of these bats are sharply tuned to a specific frequency range. They emit calls outside of this range to avoid self-deafening. They then receive echoes back at the finely tuned frequency range by taking advantage of the Doppler shift of their motion in flight. The Doppler shift of the returning echoes yields information relating to the motion and location of the bat's prey. These bats must deal with changes in the Doppler shift due to changes in their flight speed. They have adapted to change their pulse emission frequency in relation to their flight speed so echoes still return in the optimal hearing range.
The new Yinpterochiroptera and Yangochiroptera classification of bats, supported by molecular evidence, suggests two possibilities for the evolution of echolocation. It may have been gained once in a common ancestor of all bats and was then subsequently lost in the Old World fruit bats, only to be regained in the horseshoe bats, or echolocation evolved independently in both the Yinpterochiroptera and Yangochiroptera lineages.
Two groups of moths exploit a bat sense to echolocate: tiger moths produce ultrasonic signals to warn the bats that they (the moths) are chemically protected or aposematic, other moth species produce signals to jam bat echolocation. Many moth species have a hearing organ called a tympanum, which responds to an incoming bat signal by causing the moth's flight muscles to twitch erratically, sending the moth into random evasive maneuvers.
In addition to echolocating prey, bat ears are sensitive to the fluttering of moth wings, the sounds produced by tymbalate insects, and the movement of ground-dwelling prey, such as centipedes, earwigs, etc. The complex geometry of ridges on the inner surface of bat ears helps to sharply focus not only echolocation signals, but also to passively listen for any other sound produced by the prey. These ridges can be regarded as the acoustic equivalent of a Fresnel lens, and may be seen in a large variety of unrelated animals, such as the aye-aye, lesser galago, bat-eared fox, mouse lemur, and others.
By repeated scanning, bats can mentally construct an accurate image of the environment in which they are moving and of their prey item.
OTHER SENSES
Although the eyes of most microbat species are small and poorly developed, leading to poor visual acuity, no species is blind. Microbats use vision to navigate, especially for long distances when beyond the range of echolocation, and species that are gleaners - that is, ones that attempt to swoop down from above to ambush tasty insects like crickets on the ground or moths up a tree - often have eyesight about as good as a rat's. Some species have been shown to be able to detect ultraviolet light, and most cave dwelling species have developed the ability to utilize very dim light. They also have high-quality senses of smell and hearing. Bats hunt at night, reducing competition with birds, minimizing contact with certain predators, and travel large distances (up to 800 km) in their search for food. Megabat species often have excellent eyesight as good as, if not better than, human vision; they need this for the warm climates they live in and the very social world they occupy, where relations and friends need to be distinguished from other bats in the colony. This eyesight is, unlike its microbat relations, adapted to both night and daylight vision and enables the bat to have some colour vision whereas the microbat sees in blurred shades of grey.
BEHAVIOUR
Most microbats are nocturnal and are active at twilight. A large portion of bats migrate hundreds of kilometres to winter hibernation dens, while some pass into torpor in cold weather, rousing and feeding when warm weather allows for insects to be active. Others retreat to caves for winter and hibernate for six months. Bats rarely fly in rain, as the rain interferes with their echolocation, and they are unable to locate their food.
The social structure of bats varies, with some leading solitary lives and others living in caves colonized by more than a million bats. The fission-fusion social structure is seen among several species of bats. The term "fusion" refers to a large numbers of bats that congregate in one roosting area, and "fission" refers to breaking up and the mixing of subgroups, with individual bats switching roosts with others and often ending up in different trees and with different roostmates.
Studies also show that bats make all kinds of sounds to communicate with others. Scientists in the field have listened to bats and have been able to associate certain sounds with certain behaviours that bats make after the sounds are made.
Insectivores make up 70% of bat species and locate their prey by means of echolocation. Of the remainder, most feed on fruits. Only three species sustain themselves with blood.
Some species even prey on vertebrates. The leaf-nosed bats (Phyllostomidae) of Central America and South America, and the two bulldog bat (Noctilionidae) species feed on fish. At least two species of bat are known to feed on other bats: the spectral bat, also known as the American false vampire bat, and the ghost bat of Australia. One species, the greater noctule bat, catches and eats small birds in the air.
Predators of bats include bat hawks, bat falcons and even spiders.
REPRODUCTION
Most bats have a breeding season, which is in the spring for species living in a temperate climate. Bats may have one to three litters in a season, depending on the species and on environmental conditions, such as the availability of food and roost sites. Females generally have one offspring at a time, which could be a result of the mother's need to fly to feed while pregnant. Female bats nurse their young until they are nearly adult size, because a young bat cannot forage on its own until its wings are fully developed.
Female bats use a variety of strategies to control the timing of pregnancy and the birth of young, to make delivery coincide with maximum food ability and other ecological factors. Females of some species have delayed fertilization, in which sperm is stored in the reproductive tract for several months after mating. In many such cases, mating occurs in the fall, and fertilization does not occur until the following spring. Other species exhibit delayed implantation, in which the egg is fertilized after mating, but remains free in the reproductive tract until external conditions become favorable for giving birth and caring for the offspring.
In yet another strategy, fertilization and implantation both occur, but development of the fetus is delayed until favorable conditions prevail, during the delayed development the mother still gives the fertilized egg nutrients, and oxygenated blood to keep it alive. However, this process can go for a long period of time, because of the advanced gas exchange system. All of these adaptations result in the pup being born during a time of high local production of fruit or insects.
At birth, the wings are too small to be used for flight. Young microbats become independent at the age of six to eight weeks, while megabats do not until they are four months old.
LIFE EXPECTANCY
A single bat can live over 20 years, but bat population growth is limited by the slow birth rate.
HUNTING, FEEDING AND DRINKING
Newborn bats rely on the milk from their mothers. When they are a few weeks old, bats are expected to fly and hunt on their own. It is up to them to find and catch their prey, along with satisfying their thirst.
HUNTING
Most bats are nocturnal creatures. Their daylight hours are spent grooming and sleeping; they hunt during the night. The means by which bats navigate while finding and catching their prey in the dark was unknown until the 1790s, when Lazzaro Spallanzani conducted a series of experiments on a group of blind bats. These bats were placed in a room in total darkness, with silk threads strung across the room. Even then, the bats were able to navigate their way through the room. Spallanzani concluded the bats were not using their eyes to fly through complete darkness, but something else.
Spallanzani decided the bats were able to catch and find their prey through the use of their ears. To prove this theory, Spallanzani plugged the ears of the bats in his experiment. To his pleasure, he found that the bats with plugged ears were not able to fly with the same amount of skill and precision as they were able to without their ears plugged. Unfortunately for Spallanzani, the twin concepts of sound waves and acoustics would not be understood for another century and he could not explain why specifically the bats were crashing into walls and the threads that he'd strung up around the room, and because of the methodology Spallanzani used, many of his test subjects died.
It was thus well known through the nineteenth century that the chiropteran ability to navigate had something to do with hearing, but how they accomplish this was not proven conclusively until the 1930s, by Donald R. Griffin, a biology student at Harvard University. Using a locally native species, the little brown bat, he discovered that bats use echolocation to locate and catch their prey. When bats fly, they produce a constant stream of high-pitched sounds. When the sound waves produced by these sounds hit an insect or other animal, the echoes bounce back to the bat, and guide them to the source.
FEEDING AND DIET
The majority of food consumed by bats includes insects, fruits and flower nectar, vertebrates and blood. Almost three-fourths of the world's bats are insect eaters. Bats consume both aerial and ground-dwelling insects. Each bat is typically able to consume one-third of its body weight in insects each night, and several hundred insects in a few hours. This means that a group of a thousand bats could eat four tons of insects each year. If bats were to become extinct, it has been calculated that the insect population would reach an alarmingly high number.
VITAMIN C
In a test of 34 bat species from six major families of bats, including major insect- and fruit-eating bat families, all were found to have lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C, and this loss may derive from a common bat ancestor, as a single mutation. However, recent results show that there are at least two species of bat, the frugivorous bat (Rousettus leschenaultii) and insectivorous bat (Hipposideros armiger), that have retained their ability to produce vitamin C. In fact, the whole Chiroptera are in the process of losing the ability to synthesize Vc which most of them have already lost.
AERIAL INSECTIVORES
Watching a bat catch and eat an insect is difficult. The action is so fast that all one sees is a bat rapidly change directions, and continue on its way. Scientist Frederick A. Webster discovered how bats catch their prey. In 1960, Webster developed a high-speed camera that was able to take one thousand pictures per second. These photos revealed the fast and precise way in which bats catch insects. Occasionally, a bat will catch an insect in mid-air with its mouth, and eat it in the air. However, more often than not, a bat will use its tail membrane or wings to scoop up the insect and trap it in a sort of "bug net". Then, the bat will take the insect back to its roost. There, the bat will proceed to eat said insect, often using its tail membrane as a kind of napkin, to prevent its meal from falling to the ground. One common insect prey is Helicoverpa zea, a moth that causes major agricultural damage.
FORAGE GLEANERS
These bats typically fly down and grasp their prey off the ground with their teeth, and take it to a nearby perch to eat it. Generally, these bats do not use echolocation to locate their prey. Instead, they rely on the sounds produced by the insects. Some make unique sounds, and almost all make some noise while moving through the environment.
FRUITS AND FLOWER NECTAR
Fruit eating, or frugivory, is a specific habit found in two families of bats. Megachiropterans and microchiropterans both include species of bat that feed on fruits. These bats feed on the juices of sweet fruits, and fulfill the needs of some seeds to be dispersed. The fruits preferred by most fruit-eating bats are fleshy and sweet, but not particularly strong smelling or colorful. To get the juice of these fruits, bats pull the fruit off the trees with their teeth, and fly back to their roosts with the fruit in their mouths. There, the bats will consume the fruit in a specific way. To do this, the bats crush open the fruit and eat the parts that satisfy their hunger. The remainder of the fruit, the seeds and pulp, are spat onto the ground. These seeds take root and begin to grow into new fruit trees. Over 150 types of plants depend on bats in order to reproduce.Some bats prefer the nectar of flowers to insects or other animals. These bats have evolved specifically for this purpose. For example, these bats possess long muzzles and long, extensible tongues covered in fine bristles that aid them in feeding on particular flowers and plants.[68] When they sip the nectar from these flowers, pollen gets stuck to their fur, and is dusted off when the bats take flight, thus pollinating the plants below them. The rainforest is said to be the most benefitted of all the biomes where bats live, because of the large variety of appealing plants. Because of their specific eating habits, nectar-feeding bats are more prone to extinction than any other type of bat. However, bats benefit from eating fruits and nectar just as much as from eating insects.
VERTEBRATES
A small group of carnivorous bats feed on other vertebrates and are considered the top carnivores of the bat world. These bats typically eat a variety of animals, but normally consume frogs, lizards, birds, and sometimes other bats. For example, one vertebrate predator, Trachops cirrhosus, is particularly skilled at catching frogs. These bats locate large groups of frogs by distinguishing their mating calls from other sounds around them. They follow the sounds to the source and pluck them from the surface of the water with their sharp canine teeth. Another example is the greater noctule bat, which is believed to catch birds on the wing.
Also, several species of bat feed on fish. These types of bats are found on almost all continents. They use echolocation to detect tiny ripples in the water's surface to locate fish. From there, the bats swoop down low, inches from the water, and use specially enlarged claws on their hind feet to grab the fish out of the water. The bats then take the fish to a feeding roost and consume the animal.
BLOOD
A few species of bats exclusively consume blood as their diet. This type of diet is referred to as hematophagy, and three species of bats exhibit this behavior. These species are the common, the white-winged, and the hairy-legged vampire bats. The common vampire bat typically consumes the blood of mammals, while the hairy-legged and white-winged vampires feed on the blood of birds. These species live only in Mexico, Central, and South America, with a presence also on the Island of Trinidad.
DEFECATION
Bat dung, or guano, is so rich in nutrients that it is mined from caves, bagged, and used by farmers to fertilize their crops. During the U.S. Civil War, guano was used to make gunpowder.
To survive hibernation months, some species build up large reserves of body fat, both as fuel and as insulation.
DRINKING
In 1960, Frederic A. Webster discovered bats' method of drinking water using a high-speed camera and flashgun that could take 1,000 photos per second. Webster's camera captured a bat skimming the surface of a body of water, and lowering its jaw to get just one drop of water. It then skimmed again to get a second drop of water, and so on, until it has had its fill. A bat's precision and control during flight is very fine, and it almost never misses. Other bats, such as the flying fox or fruit bat, gently skim the water's surface, then land nearby to lick water from chest fur.
WIKIPEDIA
Cyanotype on vellum, exposed through digital negative transparencies, the sun chewed on it for ten minutes; developed in ammonia, water and tea-tannin.
It was then whisked off the patio by a sudden burst of wind, arriving on the street adjacent. A passing motorist unwittingly became an intimate collaborator by running over the print and dragging the mangled body along the asphalt.
Both back and front are proudly displayed.
In 1967, when the Sigma 5 was launched by Scientific Data Systems ( the company was later, in 1969, bought by Xerox), starting up a computer was very different from today. Read and enjoy. Images from a visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View 2008.
WE CODE: PSD TO HTML; PSD TO BOOTSTRAP; PSD TO AMP; PSD TO RESPONSIVE; PSD TO MOBILE; PDF TO HTML; HTML TO AMP; HTML TO MOBILE
HTML TO RESPONSIVE
Commonwealth Oil Refining Company, Inc. (CORCO) was an oil refinery established in the towns of Peñuelas and Guayanilla in Puerto Rico in the middle of the 20th century. The project started as part of Operation Bootstrap with the first unit being constructed in 1954. The company started operations in 1955 and was finally incorporated on May 19, 1963. Corco represented an investment of $25 million and had the capacity to refine 23,500 barrels (3,740 m3) of oil daily. Hugo David Storer Tavarez was one of the men in charge of the CORCO being established in Puerto Rico.
The refinery is located in an 800-acre (3.2 km2) site, and consists of numerous storage tanks and waste treatment units typical of petroleum refineries. CORCO has been inactive since 1982, and now functions as a terminal for the marine transportation and land-based storage of crude oil and petroleum products.
After the refinery ceased operations, an entity called Desarrollo Integral del Sur (South Integral Development) began developing a long-term plan for the reuse of the terrains and properties.
"I don't think any of us thought we'd be making another pirate movie, but here we are." Director Gore Verbinski, embarking on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
What's happening now?
At least a year has passed since we last saw Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Today, Will (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth (Kiera Knightly) plan to marry, but they are rudely interrupted by Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), who calls for their immediate arrest for helping Jack escape during their last adventure. They will face the gallows unless Will comes through on his deal with Lord Beckett to retrieve Jack's compass. Presiding over the East India Trading Company, Lord Beckett wants to use the compass to help his business achieve world domination, including control of the seas.
Meanwhile, having just escaped a Turkish prison, Jack returns to the Black Pearl with a drawing of a key, which he and his crew set out to find, but his compass is no help in giving direction. On board, Jack is visited by Will's pirate father Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsguaard), who serves on the Flying Dutchman under Captain Davy Jones (Bill Nighy).
Long ago, heartbroken over a woman, Davy Jones cut out his own heart to end his pain, placed it in a chest, and buried it on land for safe keeping. Now, he spends his time on the high seas ferrying the dead to the afterlife and is only allowed on shore once every 10 years. Betrayed by the woman he loved, his curse has made him and his crew so much part of the sea that some have become more sea creature than human. The Flying Dutchman can even sail underwater.
Davy Jones once made a deal with Jack, allowing him to captain the Pearl on borrowed time. Bootstrap Bill now comes to Jack, marking his hand with the cursed Black Spot: His time is up and he must pay his debt, head to the no-man's land of Davy Jones's Locker, or face the dreaded sea monster Kracken. As always, Jack works to negotiate his way out of this situation. Having the key he's looking for, which unlocks the buried chest containing Davy Jones's heart, would solve all of Jack's problems.
Of course, everyone crosses paths during this adventure: Elizabeth escapes from jail and gets signed Letters of Mark that pardon her and Will from their crimes. She heads out to sea to find Will. While helping Jack retrieve the key from the Flying Dutchman, Will meets Bootstrap Bill on board and vows to save his father from his eternal fate. Norrington (Jack Davenport), whose life has taken a bad turn, is keen on retrieving the Letters of Mark from Elizabeth to help regain his previous stature, but he eyes a bigger prize once he learns about Davy Jones's chest and its contents. Add some hungry cannibals, some magic, a giant squid, and Captain Jack's dad into the mix, and you've got Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest!
This one's for the boys.
When I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest in the theater, I had the weirdest feeling about seeing Johnny play the same character in a sequel. I never expected him to be in the position to make any sequels--or to want to, considering he likes to do his work on a project and move on. It was quite unsettling at first! But I got used to the idea, and I guess Johnny did too. "It's been amazing on every level," he says of working with the same cast and majority of the same crew as the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. "We were on that film for such a long time; it was really quite a big shoot. So, you get really close. You become this weird sort of gypsy family, you know, the traveling circus."
At first, I felt that Captain Jack was mainly in this movie for comic relief while everyone else had their deep dark secrets to deal with, but that's clearly not the case. Everyone has equal story weight here, and it's just a given that Captain Jack is going to get most of the laughs. Johnny wanted to play Captain Jack again because there's so much to explore in the character, and he has so much fun doing it, which is obvious on screen. He is, as expected, a scene-stealer in this revisited role. For all the fans out there, watching the DVD bonus features is a treat because you learn all the details Johnny brought to Captain Jack and his story: Every article of clothing and accessory is hand-picked. Everything dangling in his hair means something. Even some of his rings and props are his own. I like the idea of Johnny bringing in his friend's peacock-feathered wand to work one day to use as his scepter on the cannibal island. (Johnny would have a friend who has that lying around.) Who else would think of these things?
As this movie went on, I felt the story got bogged down with battle after battle, darkness, rain, sea water, slime, grime, and cannibals! Even Elizabeth's wedding dress is already ruined when we first see it in the opening scene. Some of this movie's gross-out moments were tailor-made for all the teenage boys in the audience.
But, as the laughter erupted shortly after the movie started, I realized that Pirates of the Caribbean is going to last forever for everybody! Everyone looked forward to seeing these beloved characters again, and the newly introduced characters became instant family members. Case in point, my favorite moment of this 2 1/2-hour action-packed ride was the last 30 seconds. Honestly, I nearly jumped out of my seat and screamed. Bring on Pirates 3! On my way out of the theater, kids were mimicking the sword fights in the halls using their fists and imagination. That's success!
It's a winner - slime, toes, beating hearts, and all!
I fell in love with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest while watching it again for Johnny Kitties! The story is full, complicated, and intertwined. When asked to write two sequels to their hit pirate movie, cowriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio opted to create a larger story, told over the course of the three movies. They envisioned the sequels sparking a community experience, where the discussion would go well beyond the films. "There was an intent to create Easter eggs, essentially. The more attention you pay to the movie, the more you find in it," Ted Elliott says. Terry Rossio agrees, "There are things even in plain sight revealed in Pirates 3 to be more important than they might have seemed when watching Pirates 1 and 2. It's a lot of fun to do that. I think part of the appeal of these movies is that you're visiting a world where everything is connected."
Everything in the film has a purpose and works to move the story forward. All of the characters have their own motivations--hidden or not--and they have to work together to achieve their goals. No one comes away from this adventure a clear hero.
The new characters introduced in this sequel, Lord Beckett, Bootstrap Bill, Davy Jones, and Tia Dalma (Naomi Harris), are fantastic too: the actors give great performances and add so much to their stories. Also, the look of the Flying Dutchman and its waterlogged crew is so imaginative and detailed.
The impressive stunts include swinging bone cages between majestic cliffs and a three-way sword fight on a detached, spinning waterwheel. Of the latter experience, Johnny remembers, "It was such an absurd, such a bizarre, request for one grown man to ask of another: 'Okay, what we'd like to do now is bind you inside the wheel and give you a sword. And, we're going to tailor the other guy in and you guys are going to fight as the wheel is rolling, and you go upside down several times.' Nothing they could ask of me would surprise me anymore: 'Johnny, we're going to put you in a cannon and volt you out to sea. You okay with that?' Sure, let's do it." That doesn't happen here, but a lot of other stunts do that make this movie fun!
It was worth all the hard work.
"To be honest, the actual work that goes into it is really difficult, but it is so much fun doing it," Orlando Bloom says of working on the sequel. "I can't imagine it'll ever be done again like this; it sort of feels like the end of an era in making movies in this way because it's really a huge fete. I think we all feel very lucky to be doing it." But the pressure was on: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest had a 200-day production schedule but took an entire year to complete. They worked backward from the release date but didn't even have a script for quite a while. On top of that, its sequel, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, was scheduled to be filmed immediately following this one, mainly to ensure that the entire cast was still available.
Filmed all over the Caribbean, Director Gore Verbinski sought out all the hard-to-reach places: "The only way a location is going to get picked by Gore is if you have to swim to it, hike to it, repel into it, or parachute into it," Unit Production Manager Doug Merrifield explains. "The more extreme and more remote the better." One of the locations is an island that completely submerges when the tide comes in every day. The cast ran and battled with swords while ankle-deep in sand in sweltering heat. Equipment had to be hauled on barges or moved by truck up narrow mountainside dirt roads.
Obviously, CGI was used to create the Flying Dutchman's sea creature crew, among other things, but more than you would expect is real in this movie. Aside from the ships and sets they built, the crew developed a new technology called Image-Based Motion Capture to allow them to capture the actors' entire performances. Dressed in grey outfits spotted with green Ping Pong-sized balls that serve as motion points, Bill Nighy and the Flying Dutchman crew performed as if they were in full costume. Gore Verbinski could then work with them and the camera just as he would any live-action sequence. Their 3D images were later animated and transformed into sea creatures but without losing the facial expressions and movements of the actors in their performances. That's movie magic!
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was filmed during the most active hurricane season on record. Hurricane Wilma did extensive damage to sets, equipment, and roads. Aside from the hurricanes, high seas even caused problems: If the waves reached 3 to 4 feet, the ships had to be evacuated because the sets were at risk of falling apart. Don't worry, it all turned out okay.
In fact, this movie was even nominated for a bunch of awards and won quite a few, mainly in the special effects/visual effects department for good reason! Johnny was also nominated for and won some awards too because he's really good at being Captain Jack Sparrow.
The Kitties are fighting!
This movie comes down to the hunt for Davy Jones's chest. Here, Captain Jack, Norrington (Simon), Will (Comet), and Elizabeth (Ashes) find it together but suddenly realize that no one can be trusted. They all want it for their own reasons. Because there's never a time when everyone's in the same scene (and because Davy Jones is tied to the sea), I had to embellish a little here with what I imagine is happening outside of the shot: Davy Jones watching and awaiting his fate aboard the Flying Dutchman. Will they work it out? Go rent the movie!
What's next?
This saga concludes in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.
For more Johnny Kitties or images from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest visit my blog here: melissaconnolly.blogspot.com/2013/07/johnny-kitties-celeb....
Bats are flying mammals in the order Chiroptera (pronounced /kaɪˈrɒptərə/). The forelimbs of bats are webbed and developed as wings, making them the only mammals naturally capable of true and sustained flight. By contrast, other mammals said to fly, such as flying squirrels, gliding possums and colugos, glide rather than fly, and can only glide for short distances. Bats do not flap their entire forelimbs, as birds do, but instead flap their spread out digits,[2] which are very long and covered with a thin membrane or patagium. Chiroptera comes from two Greek words, cheir (χείρ) "hand" and pteron (πτερόν) "wing."
There are about 1,100 bat species worldwide, which represent about twenty percent of all classified mammal species.[3] About seventy percent of bats are insectivores. Most of the rest are frugivores, or fruit eaters. A few species feed from animals other than insects. Bats are present throughout most of the world and perform vital ecological roles such as pollinating flowers and dispersing fruit seeds. Many tropical plant species depend entirely on bats for the distribution of their seeds.
Bats range in size from Kitti's Hog-nosed Bat measuring 29–33 mm (1.14–1.30 in) in length and 2 g (0.07 oz) in mass,[4] to the Giant Golden-crowned Flying-fox, which has a wing span of 1.5 m (4 ft 11 in) and weighs approximately 1.2 kg (3 lb).
Bats are mammals. Sometimes they are mistakenly called "flying rodents" or "flying rats", and they can also be mistaken for insects and birds. There are two suborders of bats:
Megachiroptera (megabats)
Microchiroptera (microbats/echolocating bats)
Not all megabats are larger than microbats. The major distinctions between the two suborders are:
Microbats use echolocation: megabats do not with the exception of Rousettus and relatives.
Microbats lack the claw at the second toe of the forelimb.
The ears of microbats do not close to form a ring: the edges are separated from each other at the base of the ear.
Microbats lack underfur: they are either naked or have guard hairs.
Megabats eat fruit, nectar or pollen while most microbats eat insects; others may feed on the blood of animals, small mammals, fish, frogs, fruit, pollen or nectar. Megabats have a well-developed visual cortex and show good visual acuity, while microbats rely on echolocation for navigation and finding prey.
The phylogenetic relationships of the different groups of bats have been the subject of much debate. The traditional subdivision between Megachiroptera and Microchiroptera reflects the view that these groups of bats have evolved independently of each other for a long time, from a common ancestor that was already capable of flight. This hypothesis recognized differences between microbats and megabats and acknowledged that flight has only evolved once in mammals. Most molecular biological evidence supports the view that bats form a single or monophyletic group.[5]
Researchers have proposed alternate views of chiropteran phylogeny and classification, but more research is needed.
Genetic evidence indicates that megabats originated during the early Eocene and should be placed within the four major lines of microbats.
Consequently, two new suborders based on molecular data have been proposed. The new suborder Yinpterochiroptera includes the Pteropodidae or megabat family as well as the Rhinolophidae, Megadermatidae, and Rhinopomatidae families. The new suborder Yangochiroptera includes all the remaining families of bats (all of which use laryngeal echolocation). These two new suborders are strongly supported by statistical tests. Teeling (2005) found 100% bootstrap support in all maximum likelihood analyses for the division of Chiroptera into these two modified suborders. This conclusion is further supported by a fifteen-base pair deletion in BRCA1 and a seven-base pair deletion in PLCB4 present in all Yangochiroptera and absent in all Yinpterochiroptera.[6] The Chiropteran phylogeny based on molecular evidence is controversial because microbat paraphyly implies that one of two seemingly unlikely hypotheses occurred. The first suggests that laryngeal echolocation evolved twice in Chiroptera, once in Yangochiroptera and once in the rhinolophoids.[7][8] The second proposes that laryngeal echolocation had a single origin in Chiroptera, was subsequently lost in the family Pteropodidae (all megabats), and later evolved as a system of tongue-clicking in the genus Rousettus.[9]
Analyses of the sequence of the "vocalization" gene, FoxP2 was inconclusive of whether laryngeal echolocation was secondarily lost in the pteropodids or independently gained in the echolocating lineages[10]. However, analyses of the "hearing" gene, Prestin seemed to favor the independent gain in echolocating species rather than a secondary loss in the pteropodids.[11]
In addition to Yinpterochiroptera and Yangochiroptera, the names Pteropodiformes and Vespertilioniformes have also been proposed for these suborders.[12][13] Under this new proposed nomenclature, the suborder Pteropodiformes includes all extant bat families more closely related to the genus Pteropus than the genus Vespertilio, while the suborder Vespertilioniformes includes all extant bat families more closely related to the genus Vespertilio than to the genus Pteropus.
In the 1980s, a hypothesis based on morphological evidence was offered that stated that the Megachiroptera evolved flight separately from the Microchiroptera. The so-called flying primates theory proposed that when adaptations to flight are removed, the Megachiroptera are allied to primates by anatomical features that are not shared with Microchiroptera. One example is that the brains of megabats show a number of advanced characteristics that link them to primates. Although recent genetic studies support the monophyly of bats,[14] debate continues as to the meaning of available genetic and morphological evidence.[15]
Little fossil evidence is available to help map the evolution of bats, since their small, delicate skeletons do not fossilize very well. However a Late Cretaceous tooth from South America resembles that of an early Microchiropteran bat. The oldest known definitely identified bat fossils, such as Icaronycteris, Archaeonycteris, Palaeochiropteryx and Hassianycteris, are from the early Eocene period, 52.5 million years ago[5]. These fossil bats were already very similar to modern microbats. Archaeopteropus, formerly classified as the earliest known megachiropteran, is now classified as a microchiropteran.
Bats were formerly grouped in the superorder Archonta along with the treeshrews (Scandentia), colugos (Dermoptera), and the primates, because of the apparent similarities between Megachiroptera and such mammals. Genetic studies have now placed bats in the superorder Laurasiatheria along with carnivorans, pangolins, odd-toed ungulates, even-toed ungulates, and cetaceans.[1]
The finger bones of bats are much more flexible than those of other mammals. One reason is that the cartilage in their fingers lacks calcium and other minerals nearer the tips, increasing their ability to bend without splintering. The cross-section of the finger bone is also flattened compared to the circular cross section that human finger bones have, and is very flexible. The skin on their wing membranes has more elasticity and so can stretch much more than other mammals.
The wings of bats are much thinner than those of birds, so bats can manoeuvre more quickly and more accurately than birds. It is also delicate, ripping easily.[22] However the tissue of the bat's membrane is able to regrow, such that small tears can heal quickly.[22][23] The surface of their wings is equipped with touch-sensitive receptors on small bumps called Merkel cells, found in most mammals including humans, similarly found on our finger tips. These sensitive areas are different in bats as each bump has a tiny hair in the center,[24] making it even more sensitive and allowing the bat to detect and collect information about the air flowing over its wings, thereby providing feedback to the bat to change its shape of its wing to fly more efficiently.[24] Some bats like the little brown bat can use this dexterious ability where it is able to drink in mid air.[25] Other bats such as the flying fox or fruit bat gently skim the water's surface, then land nearby to lick water from their chest fur.[26] An additional kind of receptor cell is found in the wing membrane of species that use their wings to catch prey. This receptor cell is sensitive to the stretching of the membrane.[24] The cells are concentrated in areas of the membrane where insects hit the wings when the bats capture them.
Other
The teeth of microbats resemble insectivorans. They are very sharp to bite through the hardened armor of insects or the skin of fruit.
Mammals have one-way valves in veins to prevent the blood from flowing backwards, but bats also have one-way valves in arteries.
One species of bat has the longest tongue of any mammal relative to its body size. This is beneficial to them in terms of pollination and feeding. Their long narrow tongues can reach deep into the long cup shape of some flowers. When their tongue retracts, it coils up inside their rib cage.[27]
Bats are mammals of the order Chiroptera (/kaɪˈrɒptərə/; from the Ancient Greek: χείρ - cheir, "hand" and Ancient Greek: πτερόν - pteron, "wing" whose forelimbs form webbed wings, making them the only mammals naturally capable of true and sustained flight. By contrast, other mammals said to fly, such as flying squirrels, gliding possums, and colugos, can only glide for short distances. Bats do not flap their entire forelimbs, as birds do, but instead flap their spread-out digits, which are very long and covered with a thin membrane or patagium.
Bats are the second largest order of mammals (after the rodents), representing about 20% of all classified mammal species worldwide, with about 1,240 bat species divided into two suborders: the less specialized and largely fruit-eating megabats, or flying foxes, and the highly specialized and echolocating microbats. About 70% of bat species are insectivores. Most of the rest are frugivores, or fruit eaters. A few species, such as the fish-eating bat, feed from animals other than insects, with the vampire bats being hematophagous, or feeding on blood.
Bats are present throughout most of the world, with the exception of extremely cold regions. They perform the vital ecological roles of pollinating flowers and dispersing fruit seeds; many tropical plant species depend entirely on bats for the distribution of their seeds. Bats are economically important, as they consume insect pests, reducing the need for pesticides. The smallest bat is the Kitti's hog-nosed bat, measuring 29–34 mm in length, 15 cm across the wings and 2–2.6 g in mass. It is also arguably the smallest extant species of mammal, with the Etruscan shrew being the other contender. The largest species of bat are a few species of Pteropus (fruit bats or flying foxes) and the giant golden-crowned flying fox with a weight up to 1.6 kg and wingspan up to 1.7 m.
The Mexican free-tailed bat is the fastest flying animal in horizontal flight.
ETYMOLOGY
In many languages, the word for "bat" is cognate with the word for "mouse": for example, chauve-souris ("bald-mouse") in French, murciélago ("blind mouse") in Spanish, saguzahar ("old mouse") in Basque, летучая мышь ("flying mouse") in Russian, slijepi miš ("blind mouse") in Bosnian, nahkhiir ("leather mouse") in Estonian, vlermuis (winged mouse) in Afrikaans, from the Dutch word vleermuis (from Middle Dutch "winged mouse").
An older English name for bats is flittermouse, which matches their name in other Germanic languages (for example German Fledermaus and Swedish fladdermus), related to fluttering of wings. Middle English had bakke, which may have undergone a shift from -k- to -t- influenced by Latin blatta, "moth, nocturnal insect".
CLASSIFICATION AND EVOLUTION
Bats are placental mammals. Bats were formerly thought to have been most closely related to the flying lemurs, treeshrews, and primates, but recent molecular cladistics research indicates that they actually belong to Laurasiatheria, a diverse group also containing Carnivora and Artiodactyla.
The two traditionally recognized suborders of bats are:
- Megachiroptera (megabats)
- Microchiroptera (microbats/echolocating bats)
Not all megabats are larger than microbats. The major distinctions between the two suborders are:
- Microbats use echolocation; with the exception of the genus Rousettus, megabats do not.
- Microbats lack the claw at the second finger of the forelimb.
- The ears of microbats do not close to form a ring; the edges are separated from each other at the base of the ear.
- Microbats lack underfur; they are either naked or have guard hairs.
Megabats eat fruit, nectar, or pollen. Most microbats eat insects; others may feed on fruit, nectar, pollen, fish, frogs, small mammals, or the blood of animals. Megabats have well-developed visual cortices and show good visual acuity, while microbats rely on echolocation for navigation and finding prey.
The phylogenetic relationships of the different groups of bats have been the subject of much debate. The traditional subdivision between Megachiroptera and Microchiroptera reflects the view that these groups of bats have evolved independently of each other for a long time, from a common ancestor already capable of flight. This hypothesis recognized differences between microbats and megabats and acknowledged that flight has only evolved once in mammals. Most molecular biological evidence supports the view that bats form a single or monophyletic group.
Researchers have proposed alternative views of chiropteran phylogeny and classification, but more research is needed.
In the 1980s, a hypothesis based on morphological evidence was offered that stated the Megachiroptera evolved flight separately from the Microchiroptera. The so-called flying primate hypothesis proposes that, when adaptations to flight are removed, the Megachiroptera are allied to primates by anatomical features not shared with Microchiroptera. One example is that the brains of megabats show a number of advanced characteristics that link them to primates. Although recent genetic studies strongly support the monophyly of bats, debate continues as to the meaning of available genetic and morphological evidence.
Genetic evidence indicates that megabats originated during the early Eocene and should be placed within the four major lines of microbats.
Consequently, two new suborders based on molecular data have been proposed. The new suborder of Yinpterochiroptera includes the Pteropodidae, or megabat family, as well as the families Rhinolophidae, Hipposideridae, Craseonycteridae, Megadermatidae, and Rhinopomatidae The other new suborder, Yangochiroptera, includes all of the remaining families of bats (all of which use laryngeal echolocation). These two new suborders are strongly supported by statistical tests. Teeling (2005) found 100% bootstrap support in all maximum likelihood analyses for the division of Chiroptera into these two modified suborders. This conclusion is further supported by a 15-base-pair deletion in BRCA1 and a seven-base-pair deletion in PLCB4 present in all Yangochiroptera and absent in all Yinpterochiroptera. Perhaps most convincingly, a phylogenomic study by Tsagkogeorga et al (2013) showed that the two new proposed suborders were supported by analyses of thousands of genes.
The chiropteran phylogeny based on molecular evidence is controversial because microbat paraphyly implies that one of two seemingly unlikely hypotheses occurred. The first suggests that laryngeal echolocation evolved twice in Chiroptera, once in Yangochiroptera and once in the rhinolophoids. The second proposes that laryngeal echolocation had a single origin in Chiroptera, was subsequently lost in the family Pteropodidae (all megabats), and later evolved as a system of tongue-clicking in the genus Rousettus.
Analyses of the sequence of the "vocalization" gene, FoxP2, were inconclusive as to whether laryngeal echolocation was secondarily lost in the pteropodids or independently gained in the echolocating lineages. However, analyses of the "hearing" gene, Prestin, seemed to favor the independent gain in echolocating species rather than a secondary loss in the pteropodids.
In addition to Yinpterochiroptera and Yangochiroptera, the names Pteropodiformes and Vespertilioniformes have also been proposed for these suborders. Under this new proposed nomenclature, the suborder Pteropodiformes includes all extant bat families more closely related to the genus Pteropus than the genus Vespertilio, while the suborder Vespertilioniformes includes all extant bat families more closely related to the genus Vespertilio than to the genus Pteropus.
Little fossil evidence is available to help map the evolution of bats, since their small, delicate skeletons do not fossilize very well. However, a Late Cretaceous tooth from South America resembles that of an early microchiropteran bat. Most of the oldest known, definitely identified bat fossils were already very similar to modern microbats. These fossils, Icaronycteris, Archaeonycteris, Palaeochiropteryx and Hassianycteris, are from the early Eocene period, 52.5 million years ago. Archaeopteropus, formerly classified as the earliest known megachiropteran, is now classified as a microchiropteran.
Bats were formerly grouped in the superorder Archonta, along with the treeshrews (Scandentia), colugos (Dermoptera), and the primates, because of the apparent similarities between Megachiroptera and such mammals. Genetic studies have now placed bats in the superorder Laurasiatheria, along with carnivorans, pangolins, odd-toed ungulates, even-toed ungulates, and cetaceans. A recent study by Zhang et al. places Chiroptera as a sister taxon to the clade Perissodactyla (which includes horses and other odd-toed ungulates). However, the first phylogenomic analysis of bats shows that they are not sisters to Perissodactyla, instead they are sisters to a larger group that includes ungulates and carnivores.
Megabats primarily eat fruit or nectar. In New Guinea, they are likely to have evolved for some time in the absence of microbats, which has resulted in some smaller megabats of the genus Nyctimene becoming (partly) insectivorous to fill the vacant microbat ecological niche. Furthermore, some evidence indicates that the fruit bat genus Pteralopex from the Solomon Islands, and its close relative Mirimiri from Fiji, have evolved to fill some niches that were open because there are no nonvolant or nonflying mammals on those islands.
FOSSIL BATS
Fossilized remains of bats are few, as they are terrestrial and light-boned. Only an estimated 12% of the bat fossil record is complete at the genus level. Fossil remains of an Eocene bat, Icaronycteris, were found in 1960. Another Eocene bat, Onychonycteris finneyi, was found in the 52-million-year-old Green River Formation in Wyoming, United States, in 2003. This intermediate fossil has helped to resolve a long-standing disagreement regarding whether flight or echolocation developed first in bats. The shape of the rib cage, faceted infraspious fossa of the scapula, manus morphology, robust clavicle, and keeled sternum all indicated Onychonycteris was capable of powered flight. However, the well-preserved skeleton showed that the small cochlea of the inner ear did not have the morphology necessary to echolocate. O. finneyi lacked an enlarged orbical apophysis on the malleus, and a stylohyal element with an expanded paddle-like cranial tip - both of which are characteristics linked to echolocation in other prehistoric and extant bat species. Because of these absences, and the presence of characteristics necessary for flight, Onychonycteris provides strong support for the “flight first” hypothesis in the evolution of flight and echolocation in bats.
The appearance and flight movement of bats 52.5 million years ago were different from those of bats today. Onychonycteris had claws on all five of its fingers, whereas modern bats have at most two claws appearing on two digits of each hand. It also had longer hind legs and shorter forearms, similar to climbing mammals that hang under branches, such as sloths and gibbons. This palm-sized bat had short, broad wings, suggesting that it could not fly as fast or as far as later bat species. Instead of flapping its wings continuously while flying, Onychonycteris likely alternated between flaps and glides while in the air. Such physical characteristics suggest that this bat did not fly as much as modern bats do, rather flying from tree to tree and spending most of its waking day climbing or hanging on the branches of trees. The distinctive features noted on the Onychonycteris fossil also support the claim that mammalian flight most likely evolved in arboreal gliders, rather than terrestrial runners. This model of flight development, commonly known as the "trees-down" theory, implies that bats attained powered flight by taking advantage of height and gravity, rather than relying on running speeds fast enough for a ground-level take off.
The mid-Eocene genus Necromantis is one of the earliest examples of bats specialised to hunt vertebrate prey, as well as one of the largest bats of its epoch. The late-Eocene Witwatia is another similarly large predatory bat, while Aegyptonycteris is among the first and largest omnivorous bat species.
The extinct bats Palaeochiropteryx tupaiodon and Hassianycteris kumari are the first fossil mammals to have their colouration discovered, both of a reddish brown.
HABITATS
Flight has enabled bats to become one of the most widely distributed groups of mammals.[38] Apart from the Arctic, the Antarctic and a few isolated oceanic islands, bats exist all over the world. Bats are found in almost every habitat available on Earth. Different species select different habitats during different seasons, ranging from seasides to mountains and even deserts, but bat habitats have two basic requirements: roosts, where they spend the day or hibernate, and places for foraging. Most temperate species additionally need a relatively warm hibernation shelter. Bat roosts can be found in hollows, crevices, foliage, and even human-made structures, and include "tents" the bats construct by biting leaves.
The United States is home to an estimated 45 to 48 species of bats. The three most common species are Myotis lucifugus (little brown bat), Eptesicus fuscus (big brown bat), and Tadarida brasiliensis (Mexican free-tailed bat). The little and the big brown bats are common throughout the northern two-thirds of the country, while the Mexican free-tailed bat is the most common species in the southwest, sometimes even appearing in portions of the Southeast.
ANATOMY
WINGS
The finger bones of bats are much more flexible than those of other mammals, owing to their flattened cross-section and to low levels of minerals, such as calcium, near their tips. In 2006, Sears et al. published a study that traces the elongation of manual bat digits, a key feature required for wing development, to the upregulation of bone morphogenetic proteins (Bmps). During embryonic development, the gene controlling Bmp signaling, Bmp2, is subjected to increased expression in bat forelimbs - resulting in the extension of the offspring's manual digits. This crucial genetic alteration helps create the specialized limbs required for volant locomotion. Sears et al. (2006) also studied the relative proportion of bat forelimb digits from several extant species and compared these with a fossil of Lcaronycteris index, an early extinct species from approximately 50 million years ago. The study found no significant differences in relative digit proportion, suggesting that bat wing morphology has been conserved for over 50 million years.
The wings of bats are much thinner and consist of more bones than the wings of birds, allowing bats to maneuver more accurately than the latter, and fly with more lift and less drag. By folding the wings in toward their bodies on the upstroke, they save 35 percent energy during flight. The membranes are also delicate, ripping easily; however, the tissue of the bat's membrane is able to regrow, such that small tears can heal quickly. The surface of their wings is equipped with touch-sensitive receptors on small bumps called Merkel cells, also found on human fingertips. These sensitive areas are different in bats, as each bump has a tiny hair in the center, making it even more sensitive and allowing the bat to detect and collect information about the air flowing over its wings, and to fly more efficiently by changing the shape of its wings in response. An additional kind of receptor cell is found in the wing membrane of species that use their wings to catch prey. This receptor cell is sensitive to the stretching of the membrane. The cells are concentrated in areas of the membrane where insects hit the wings when the bats capture them.
CIRCULATORY SYSTEM
Bats seem to make use of particularly strong venomotion (rhythmic contraction of venous wall muscles). In most mammals, the walls of the veins provide mainly passive resistance (maintaining their shape as deoxygenated blood flows through them), but in bats they appear to actively support blood flow back to the heart with this pumping action.
Bats also possess a system of sphincter valves on the arterial side of the vascular network that runs along the edge of their wings. In the fully open state, these allow oxygenated blood to flow through the capillary network across the flight membrane (i.e. wing surface), but when contracted, they shunt flow directly to the veins, bypassing the wing capillaries. This is likely an important tool for thermoregulation, allowing the bats to control the amount of heat exchanged through the thin flight membrane (many other mammals use the capillary network in oversized ears for the same purpose).
OTHER
The teeth of microbats resemble insectivorans. They are very sharp to bite through the hardened armor of insects or the skin of fruit.
The tube-lipped nectar bat (Anoura fistulata) has the longest tongue of any mammal relative to its body size. This is beneficial to them in terms of pollination and feeding. Their long, narrow tongues can reach deep into the long cup shape of some flowers. When the tongue retracts, it coils up inside its rib cage.
Bats possess highly adapted lung systems to cope with the pressures of powered-flight. Flight is an energetically taxing aerobic activity and requires large amounts of oxygen to be sustained. In bats, the relative alveolar surface area and pulmonary capillary blood volume are significantly larger than most other small quadrupedal mammals
ECHOLOCATION
Bat echolocation is a perceptual system where ultrasonic sounds are emitted specifically to produce echoes. By comparing the outgoing pulse with the returning echoes, the brain and auditory nervous system can produce detailed images of the bat's surroundings. This allows bats to detect, localize, and even classify their prey in complete darkness. At 130 decibels in intensity, bat calls are some of the most intense, airborne animal sounds.
To clearly distinguish returning information, bats must be able to separate their calls from the echoes that they receive. Microbats use two distinct approaches.
- Low duty cycle echolocation: Bats can separate their calls and returning echoes by time. Bats that use this approach time their short calls to finish before echoes return. This is important because these bats contract their middle ear muscles when emitting a call, so they can avoid deafening themselves. The time interval between the call and echo allows them to relax these muscles, so they can clearly hear the returning echo. The delay of the returning echoes provides the bat with the ability to estimate the range to their prey.
- High duty cycle echolocation: Bats emit a continuous call and separate pulse and echo in frequency. The ears of these bats are sharply tuned to a specific frequency range. They emit calls outside of this range to avoid self-deafening. They then receive echoes back at the finely tuned frequency range by taking advantage of the Doppler shift of their motion in flight. The Doppler shift of the returning echoes yields information relating to the motion and location of the bat's prey. These bats must deal with changes in the Doppler shift due to changes in their flight speed. They have adapted to change their pulse emission frequency in relation to their flight speed so echoes still return in the optimal hearing range.
The new Yinpterochiroptera and Yangochiroptera classification of bats, supported by molecular evidence, suggests two possibilities for the evolution of echolocation. It may have been gained once in a common ancestor of all bats and was then subsequently lost in the Old World fruit bats, only to be regained in the horseshoe bats, or echolocation evolved independently in both the Yinpterochiroptera and Yangochiroptera lineages.
Two groups of moths exploit a bat sense to echolocate: tiger moths produce ultrasonic signals to warn the bats that they (the moths) are chemically protected or aposematic, other moth species produce signals to jam bat echolocation. Many moth species have a hearing organ called a tympanum, which responds to an incoming bat signal by causing the moth's flight muscles to twitch erratically, sending the moth into random evasive maneuvers.
In addition to echolocating prey, bat ears are sensitive to the fluttering of moth wings, the sounds produced by tymbalate insects, and the movement of ground-dwelling prey, such as centipedes, earwigs, etc. The complex geometry of ridges on the inner surface of bat ears helps to sharply focus not only echolocation signals, but also to passively listen for any other sound produced by the prey. These ridges can be regarded as the acoustic equivalent of a Fresnel lens, and may be seen in a large variety of unrelated animals, such as the aye-aye, lesser galago, bat-eared fox, mouse lemur, and others.
By repeated scanning, bats can mentally construct an accurate image of the environment in which they are moving and of their prey item.
OTHER SENSES
Although the eyes of most microbat species are small and poorly developed, leading to poor visual acuity, no species is blind. Microbats use vision to navigate, especially for long distances when beyond the range of echolocation, and species that are gleaners - that is, ones that attempt to swoop down from above to ambush insects, like crickets on the ground or moths up a tree, often have eyesight about as good as a rat's. Some species have been shown to be able to detect ultraviolet light, and most cave-dwelling species have developed the ability to utilize very dim light. They also have high-quality senses of smell and hearing. Bats hunt at night, reducing competition with birds, minimizing contact with certain predators, and travel large distances (up to 800 km) in their search for food.
Megabat species often have excellent eyesight as good as, if not better than, human vision. This eyesight is, unlike its microbat relations, adapted to both night and daylight vision and enables the bat to have some colour vision whereas the microbat sees in blurred shades of grey.
BEHAVIOUR
Most microbats are nocturnal and are active at twilight. A large portion of bats migrate hundreds of kilometres to winter hibernation dens, while some pass into torpor in cold weather, rousing and feeding when warm weather allows for insects to be active. Others retreat to caves for winter and hibernate for six months. Bats rarely fly in rain, as the rain interferes with their echolocation, and they are unable to locate their food.
The social structure of bats varies, with some leading solitary lives and others living in caves colonized by more than a million bats.[69] The fission-fusion social structure is seen among several species of bats. The term "fusion" refers to a large numbers of bats that congregate in one roosting area, and "fission" refers to breaking up and the mixing of subgroups, with individual bats switching roosts with others and often ending up in different trees and with different roostmates.
Studies also show that bats make various sounds in order to communicate with one another. Scientists in the field have listened to bats and have been able to associate certain sounds with certain behaviours that bats make after the sounds are made.
Insectivores make up 70% of bat species and locate their prey by means of echolocation. Of the remainder, most feed on fruits. Only three species sustain themselves with blood.
Some species even prey on vertebrates. The leaf-nosed bats (Phyllostomidae) of Central America and South America, and the two bulldog bat (Noctilionidae) species feed on fish. At least two species of bat are known to feed on other bats: the spectral bat, also known as the American false vampire bat, and the ghost bat of Australia. One species, the greater noctule bat, catches and eats small birds in the air.
Predators of bats include bat hawks, bat falcons and even spiders.
REPRODUCTION
Most bats have a breeding season, which is in the spring for species living in a temperate climate. Bats may have one to three litters in a season, depending on the species and on environmental conditions, such as the availability of food and roost sites. Females generally have one offspring at a time, which could be a result of the mother's need to fly to feed while pregnant. Female bats nurse their young until they are nearly adult size, because a young bat cannot forage on its own until its wings are fully developed.
Female bats use a variety of strategies to control the timing of pregnancy and the birth of young, to make delivery coincide with maximum food ability and other ecological factors. Females of some species have delayed fertilization, in which sperm is stored in the reproductive tract for several months after mating. In many such cases, mating occurs in the fall, and fertilization does not occur until the following spring. Other species exhibit delayed implantation, in which the egg is fertilized after mating, but remains free in the reproductive tract until external conditions become favorable for giving birth and caring for the offspring.
In yet another strategy, fertilization and implantation both occur, but development of the fetus is delayed until favorable conditions prevail, during the delayed development the mother still gives the fertilized egg nutrients, and oxygenated blood to keep it alive. However, this process can go for a long period of time, because of the advanced gas exchange system. All of these adaptations result in the pup being born during a time of high local production of fruit or insects.
At birth, the wings are too small to be used for flight. Young microbats become independent at the age of six to eight weeks, while megabats do not until they are four months old.
LIFE EXPECTANCY
A single bat can live over 20 years, but bat population growth is limited by the slow birth rate. Five species have been recorded living over 30 years in the wild: the brown long-eared bat (Plecotus auritus), little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus), Brandt's bat (Myotis brandti), lesser mouse-eared bat (Myotis blythii) and greater horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus ferrumequinum).
HUNTING, FEEDING AND DRINKING
Newborn bats feed solely on their mother's milk. When they are a few weeks old, bats are expected to fly and hunt on their own. It is up to them to find and catch their prey, along with satisfying their thirst.
To survive hibernation months, some species build up large reserves of body fat, both as fuel and as insulation.
HUNTING
Most bats are nocturnal creatures. Their daylight hours are spent grooming and sleeping; they hunt during the night. The means by which bats navigate while finding and catching their prey in the dark was unknown until the 1790s, when Lazzaro Spallanzani conducted a series of experiments on a group of hooded and surgically blinded bats. These bats were placed in a room in total darkness, with silk threads strung across the room. Even then, the bats were able to navigate their way through the room. Spallanzani concluded the bats were not using their eyes to fly through complete darkness, but something else.
Spallanzani decided the bats were able to catch and find their prey through the use of their ears. To prove this theory, Spallanzani plugged the ears of the bats in his experiment. To his pleasure, he found that the bats with plugged ears were not able to fly with the same amount of skill and precision as they were able to without their ears plugged. Unfortunately for Spallanzani, the twin concepts of sound waves and acoustics would not be understood for another century and he could not explain why specifically the bats were crashing into walls and the threads that he'd strung up around the room, and because of the methodology Spallanzani used, many of his test subjects died.
It was thus well known through the nineteenth century that the chiropteran ability to navigate had something to do with hearing, but how they accomplish this was not proven conclusively until the 1930s, by Donald R. Griffin, a biology student at Harvard University. Using a locally native species, the little brown bat, he discovered that bats use echolocation to locate and catch their prey. When bats fly, they produce a constant stream of high-pitched sounds. When the sound waves produced by these sounds hit an insect or other animal, the echoes bounce back to the bat, and guide them to the source.
FEEDING AND DIET
The majority of food consumed by bats includes insects, fruits and flower nectar, vertebrates and blood. Almost three-fourths of the world's bats are insect eaters. Bats consume both aerial and ground-dwelling insects. Each bat is typically able to consume one-third of its body weight in insects each night, and several hundred insects in a few hours. This means that a group of a thousand bats could eat four tons of insects each year. If bats were to become extinct, it has been calculated that the insect population would reach an alarmingly high number.
VITAMIN C
The Chiroptera as a whole are in the process of losing the ability to synthesize vitamin C: most have lost it completely. In a test of 34 bat species from six major families of bats, including major insect- and fruit-eating bat families, all were found to have lost the ability to synthesize it, and this loss may derive from a common bat ancestor, as a single mutation. However, recent results show that there are at least two species of bat, the frugivorous bat (Rousettus leschenaultii) and insectivorous bat (Hipposideros armiger), that have retained their ability to produce vitamin C.
AERIAL INSECTTIVORES
Watching a bat catch and eat an insect is difficult. The action is so fast that all one sees is a bat rapidly changing directions, and continuing on its way. Scientist Frederick A. Webster discovered how bats catch their prey. In 1960, Webster developed a high-speed camera that was able to take one thousand pictures per second. These photos revealed the fast and precise way in which bats catch insects. Occasionally, a bat will catch an insect in mid-air with its mouth, and eat it in the air. However, more often than not, a bat will use its tail membrane or wings to scoop up the insect and trap it in a sort of "bug net". Then, the bat will take the insect back to its roost. There, the bat will proceed to eat said insect, often using its tail membrane as a kind of napkin, to prevent its meal from falling to the ground. One common insect prey is Helicoverpa zea, a moth that causes major agricultural damage.
FORAGE GLEANERS
These bats typically fly down and grasp their prey off the ground with their teeth, and take it to a nearby perch to eat it. Generally, these bats do not use echolocation to locate their prey. Instead, they rely on the sounds produced by the insects. Some make unique sounds, and almost all make some noise while moving through the environment.
FRUITS AND FLOWER NECTAR
Fruit eating, or frugivory, is found in particular species from both major suborders. These bats favor fleshy and sweet fruits, but not those particularly strong smelling or colorful. They pull the fruit off the trees with their teeth, then fly back to their roosts to consume them, sucking out the juice and spitting the seeds and pulp out onto the ground.
This helps disperse the seeds of these fruit trees, which may take root and grow where the bats have left them. Over 150 types of plants depend on bats in order to reproduce.
Some Chiropterans consume nectar instead, for which they have acquired specialized adaptations. These bats possess long muzzles and long, extensible tongues covered in fine bristles that aid them in feeding on particular flowers and plants. However, because of these features, nectar-feeding bats cannot easily turn to other food sources in times of scarcity, making them more prone to extinction than any other type of bat.
Nectar feeding also aids a variety of plants, since these bats serve as pollinators: pollen gets stuck to the bats' fur while they sip the nectar, and is transferred to the next flower they visit (or dusts off in flight). Rainforests are said to benefit the most from bat pollination, because of the large variety of plants that depend on it.
VERTEBRATES
Some bats are primarily carnivorous, feeding on vertebrates. These bats typically eat a variety of animals, especially frogs, lizards, birds, and sometimes other bats.
Trachops cirrhosus, for example, is particularly skilled at catching frogs. These bats locate large groups of frogs by tracking their mating calls, then plucking them from the surface of the water with their sharp canine teeth. Another example is the greater noctule bat, which is believed to catch birds in flight.
Also, several bat species, found on all continents, feed on fish. They use echolocation to detect tiny ripples on the water's surface, swoop down and use specially enlarged claws on their hind feet to grab the fish, then take their prey to a feeding roost and consume it.
BLOOD
A few species, specifically the common, white-winged, and hairy-legged vampire bats, exclusively consume animal blood. This is referred to as hematophagy. The common vampire bat typically feeds on mammals, while the hairy-legged and white-winged vampires feed on birds instead. These species are found throughout Central and South America, as well as in Mexico and on the island of Trinidad.
DEFECATION
Bat dung, or guano, is so rich in nutrients that it is mined from caves, bagged, and used by farmers to fertilize their crops. During the U.S. Civil War, guano was used to make gunpowder.
DRINKING
In 1960, Frederic A. Webster discovered some bats' method of drinking water using a high-speed (1000 FPS) camera and flashgun. He captured one skimming just above the surface of the water, lowering its jaw to collect a small quantity of water on each pass, taking repeated passes until it drank its fill.
Other bats, such as the flying fox or fruit bat, gently skim the water's surface, then land nearby to lick the water from their chest fur.
INTERACTION WITH HUMANS
DISEASE TRANSMISSION
Bats are natural reservoirs for a large number of zoonotic pathogens, including rabies, histoplasmosis (directly and in guano), Henipavirus (i.e. Nipah virus and Hendra virus) and possibly ebola virus.
Their high mobility, broad distribution, long life spans, substantial sympatry, and social behaviour (communal roosting and fission-fusion social structure) make bats favourable hosts and vectors of disease. Compared to rodents, bats carry more zoonotic viruses per species, and each virus is shared with more (especially sympatric) species. They also seem to be highly resistant to many of the pathogens they carry, suggesting a potential commensal/mutualistic relationship or specific adaptations to the bats' immune systems. Furthermore, their interactions with humans' livestock and pets (e.g. cattle, pigs, goats), such as predation (in the case of vampire bats), an accidental encounter, or an animal scavenging a bat carcass, compound the risk of zoonotic transmission.
Among ectoparasites, bats carry fleas and mites, as well as specific parasites called bat bugs. However, they are one of the few mammalian orders that cannot host lice (most of the others are water animals). This may be due to overwhelming competition from more effective, specialized parasites, such as the bat bugs which occupy the same niche.
They are also implicated in the emergence of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), since they serve as a natural host for the type of virus involved (the genus Coronavirus, whose members typically cause mild respiratory disease in humans). A joint CAS/CSIRO team using phylogenetic analysis found that the SARS Coronavirus originated within the SARS-like Coronavirus group carried by the bat population in China. However, note that they only served as the source of the precursor virus (which "jumped" to humans and evolved into the strain responsible for SARS): bats do not carry the SARS virus itself.
RABIES
As of 2016, bats present a significant hazard in areas where the virus is endemic (such as the southern United States). They serve as the natural reservoirs for the rabies virus. For example, studies performed on Mexican free-tailed bats in Austin, Texas found an exposure rate of 45% among otherwise healthy individuals.
In the United States, bats typically constitute around a quarter of reported cases of rabies in wild animals. However, their bites account for the vast majority of cases of rabies in humans. Of the 36 cases of domestically acquired rabies recorded in the country in 1995–2010, two were caused by dog bites and four patients were infected by receiving transplants from an organ donor who had previously died of rabies. All other cases were caused by bat bites.
Rabies is considered fully preventable if the patient is administered a vaccine prior to the onset of symptoms. However, unlike raccoon or skunk bites, bat bites may go ignored or unnoticed and hence untreated. Many victims may not realize they have been bitten, because bats have very small teeth and do not always leave obvious marks. Victims may also be bitten while sleeping or intoxicated, and children, pets, and the mentally handicapped are especially vulnerable. Rabid bats are broadly distributed throughout the United States; in 2008–2010, cases were reported in every state except Alaska and Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.
The most severe threat to humans and domestic animals comes from sick, downed, or dead bats, which typically have a very high infection rate (e.g. 70% for the Austin bats). Furthermore, since they may be clumsy, disoriented, and unable to fly, these stricken bats are much more likely to come into contact with humans.
Public health organizations such as the CDC generally recommend that any contact with a potentially infected animal (including any bat) be reported promptly, and those at risk of infection are treated with a post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) regimen to prevent contraction of the virus, which is near-universally fatal with very few exceptions. 30,000 PEP treatments are performed each year in the US, in large part due to contact with bats.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provide fully detailed information on all aspects of bat management in North America, including how to capture a bat, what to do in case of exposure, and how to bat-proof a house humanely. In certain countries, such as the United Kingdom, it is illegal to handle bats without a license and advice should be sought from an expert organisation, such as the Bat Conservation Trust, if a trapped or injured bat is found. Where rabies is not endemic, as throughout most of Western Europe, small bats can be considered harmless. Larger bats may bite if handled.
There is evidence that bat rabies virus can infect victims purely through airborne transmission ("cryptic rabies"), without direct physical contact of the victim with the bat itself. This phenomenon has very rarely been reported, and has occurred among victims breathing virus-infected air in environments such as caves, after long exposures.
Evidence suggests that all active widespread rabies strains (i.e. those affecting most terrestrial carnivores/omnivores) evolved from strains that were originally endemic to bats. Through zoonosis, these strains mutated and "jumped" to other species. In North America, for example, this jump reportedly occurred in the mid-1600s.
WIKIPEDIA
Yesterday I got a handful of macroalgae to bootstrap a mini-refugium in the back of the Fluval M90. The light feeds the algae, the algae feeds invertibrate critters, and the critters feed the fish. Depending on what type of fish we end up with we could also use the algae as a food source.
Other Name: Finca de Trujilo Alto
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Listed: October 7, 2011
This rural forest-like estate historic district was the residence of Luis Muñoz Marín from the 1940s until his death in 1980. Luis Muñoz Marín was the first Puerto Rican governor elected by the people. Luis Muñoz Marín is also called the “Father of Modern Puerto Rico,” a key figure in the development and implementation of Operation Commonwealth, Operation Bootstrap and Operation Serenity, one of the most revered leaders in Puerto Rico’s history, Luis Muñoz Marín is one of the most important political figures of the Americas in the Twentieth Century.
Previous to his tenure as the first home-rule governor, Muñoz Marín had a distinguished careers in journalism, as both a reporter and director of a newspaper, and political activism. After returning from the United States where he studied as a young man and adult, Muñoz Marín joined the Socialist Party and the Free Federation of Workers of Puerto Rico. Both groups were dedicated to fight against poverty and the inequality suffered by Puerto Ricans, causes that he fervently endorsed. He campaigned across Puerto Rico extensively and participated in workers strikes to better the conditions of workers. During the Great Depression Muñoz Marín and others popular figures effectively convinced President Roosevelt to extend the New Deal and other important efforts into Puerto Rico. All the meanwhile, Muñoz Marín and his associates were taking their political campaign to the next level and established the PPD, the Popular Democratic Party (Partido Popular Democrático), which won twenty-nine out of seventy-six municipalities in the following election. In the 1948 general elections, Luis Muñoz Marín became the first Puerto Rican governor elected by the popular vote. His election as Governor stood up against hunger, injustice, ignorance, sickness and oppression. By the 1950s, after the implementation of Operations Commonwealth and Bootstrap, an “economic miracle” was taking place in Puerto Rico; the Island was now a modern urban-industrial society.
The main house is made mostly of concrete, with the exception of wood doors and windows. One of the most impressive features is an L-shaped balcony accessible from the sizeable living area. The main house and office contain all the furniture, art, books and household items from the time Luis Muñoz Marín and his wife lived on the property.
The library/personal office is another concrete building contributing to this historic property listing. The spaces in the library have all the period furniture, books and items of its owner on display just as he left them when he died. The library/personal office was built in 1965 along with an administrative office and archive building used mostly by Mr. Marín’s staff. Both buildings are significant because these were the spaces which Marín used to write his Memoirs and the other where important documents were first stored and organized.
Down a short pathway is the bohío, built in 1948, where the family gathered for activities and important meeting with dignitaries where held. The bohío was expanded by the family many times over the years and even replaced when it was damaged by a fallen tree in 1998. Though the original bohío does not stand, the historical significance of this space is not lost. Today’s version is a rectangular wooden shed supported by five columns wide, six columns in length and two center columns. All beams and rafters are wood, the floor concrete patterns, and the ceiling is built with Palm tree foliage covered in zinc shingles.
NPS Cultural Resources Celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month
The green macroalgae Bootstrap Caulerpa (Caulerpa filiformis). Fairy Bower, Manly, NSW
Bootstrap Caulerpa is easy to recognise because of its brilliant green colour. It is the dominant macroalgae on many rock platforms in the Sydney area. There is some evidence that it is much more common now than in past decades, and that it is rapidly displacing other species. This suggests it is a recent introduction, probably brought accidentally from southern Africa where it occurs extensively. (Its cousin C. taxifolia is a particularly aggressive introduced pest in NSW).
Few animals eat Bootstrap Caulerpa in NSW. Some herbivorous fish will eat it only if no other algae is available. The small green sacoglossan Oxynoe viridis is one of the few animals known to prefer it.
Fashions from Emily Thornhill.
Makeup by Jungle Rose (Shalika)
Photos by Fuzzytek (Stephen)
Models: Samm Will & Brandi Bryant
Finished product for the Davy Jones crew I've been working on. I only have 3 left to finish up and I started on a Davy Jones and a new Bootstrap Bill
Bats are mammals of the order Chiroptera (/kaɪˈrɒptərə/; from the Greek χείρ - cheir, "hand" and πτερόν - pteron, "wing") whose forelimbs form webbed wings, making them the only mammals naturally capable of true and sustained flight. By contrast, other mammals said to fly, such as flying squirrels, gliding possums, and colugos, can only glide for short distances. Bats do not flap their entire forelimbs, as birds do, but instead flap their spread-out digits, which are very long and covered with a thin membrane or patagium.
Bats are the second largest order of mammals (after the rodents), representing about 20% of all classified mammal species worldwide, with about 1,240 bat species divided into two suborders: the less specialized and largely fruit-eating megabats, or flying foxes, and the highly specialized and echolocating microbats. About 70% of bat species are insectivores. Most of the rest are frugivores, or fruit eaters. A few species, such as the fish-eating bat, feed from animals other than insects, with the vampire bats being hematophagous, or feeding on blood.
Bats are present throughout most of the world, with the exception of extremely cold regions. They perform vital ecological roles of pollinating flowers and dispersing fruit seeds; many tropical plant species depend entirely on bats for the distribution of their seeds. Bats are economically important, as they consume insect pests, reducing the need for pesticides. The smallest bat is the Kitti's hog-nosed bat, measuring 29–34 mm in length, 15 cm across the wings and 2–2.6 g in mass. It is also arguably the smallest extant species of mammal, with the Etruscan shrew being the other contender. The largest species of bat are a few species of Pteropus (fruit bats or flying foxes) and the giant golden-crowned flying fox with a weight up to 1.6 kg and wingspan up to 1.7 m.
CLASSIFICATION AND EVOLUTION
Bats are mammals. In many languages, the word for "bat" is cognate with the word for "mouse": for example, chauve-souris ("bald-mouse") in French, murciélago ("blind mouse") in Spanish, saguzahar ("old mouse") in Basque, летучая мышь ("flying mouse") in Russian, slijepi miš ("blind mouse") in Bosnian, nahkhiir ("leather mouse") in Estonian, vlermuis (winged mouse) in Afrikaans, from the Dutch word vleermuis (from Middle Dutch "winged mouse"). An older English name for bats is flittermouse, which matches their name in other Germanic languages (for example German Fledermaus and Swedish fladdermus). Bats were formerly thought to have been most closely related to the flying lemurs, treeshrews, and primates, but recent molecular cladistics research indicates that they actually belong to Laurasiatheria, a diverse group also containing Carnivora and Artiodactyla.
The two traditionally recognized suborders of bats are:
- Megachiroptera (megabats)
- Microchiroptera (microbats/echolocating bats)
Not all megabats are larger than microbats. The major distinctions between the two suborders are:
- Microbats use echolocation; with the exception of the Rousettus genus, megabats do not.
- Microbats lack the claw at the second finger of the forelimb.
- The ears of microbats do not close to form a ring; the edges are separated from each other at the base of the ear.
- Microbats lack underfur; they are either naked or have guard hairs.
Megabats eat fruit, nectar, or pollen. Most microbats eat insects; others may feed on fruit, nectar, pollen, fish, frogs, small mammals, or the blood of animals. Megabats have well-developed visual cortices and show good visual acuity, while microbats rely on echolocation for navigation and finding prey.
The phylogenetic relationships of the different groups of bats have been the subject of much debate. The traditional subdivision between Megachiroptera and Microchiroptera reflects the view that these groups of bats have evolved independently of each other for a long time, from a common ancestor already capable of flight. This hypothesis recognized differences between microbats and megabats and acknowledged that flight has only evolved once in mammals. Most molecular biological evidence supports the view that bats form a single or monophyletic group.
Researchers have proposed alternative views of chiropteran phylogeny and classification, but more research is needed.
In the 1980s, a hypothesis based on morphological evidence was offered that stated the Megachiroptera evolved flight separately from the Microchiroptera. The so-called flying primates theory proposes that, when adaptations to flight are removed, the Megachiroptera are allied to primates by anatomical features not shared with Microchiroptera. One example is that the brains of megabats show a number of advanced characteristics that link them to primates. Although recent genetic studies strongly support the monophyly of bats, debate continues as to the meaning of available genetic and morphological evidence.
Genetic evidence indicates that megabats originated during the early Eocene and should be placed within the four major lines of microbats.
Consequently, two new suborders based on molecular data have been proposed. The new suborder of Yinpterochiroptera includes the Pteropodidae, or megabat family, as well as the Rhinolophidae, Hipposideridae, Craseonycteridae, Megadermatidae, and Rhinopomatidae families The other new suborder, Yangochiroptera, includes all of the remaining families of bats (all of which use laryngeal echolocation). These two new suborders are strongly supported by statistical tests. Teeling (2005) found 100% bootstrap support in all maximum likelihood analyses for the division of Chiroptera into these two modified suborders. This conclusion is further supported by a 15-base-pair deletion in BRCA1 and a seven-base-pair deletion in PLCB4 present in all Yangochiroptera and absent in all Yinpterochiroptera. Perhaps most convincingly, a phylogenomic study by Tsagkogeorga et al (2013) showed that the two new proposed suborders were supported by analyses of thousands of genes.
The chiropteran phylogeny based on molecular evidence is controversial because microbat paraphyly implies that one of two seemingly unlikely hypotheses occurred. The first suggests that laryngeal echolocation evolved twice in Chiroptera, once in Yangochiroptera and once in the rhinolophoids. The second proposes that laryngeal echolocation had a single origin in Chiroptera, was subsequently lost in the family Pteropodidae (all megabats), and later evolved as a system of tongue-clicking in the genus Rousettus.
Analyses of the sequence of the "vocalization" gene, FoxP2, were inconclusive as to whether laryngeal echolocation was secondarily lost in the pteropodids or independently gained in the echolocating lineages. However, analyses of the "hearing" gene, Prestin seemed to favor the independent gain in echolocating species rather than a secondary loss in the pteropodids.
In addition to Yinpterochiroptera and Yangochiroptera, the names Pteropodiformes and Vespertilioniformes have also been proposed for these suborders. Under this new proposed nomenclature, the suborder Pteropodiformes includes all extant bat families more closely related to the genus Pteropus than the genus Vespertilio, while the suborder Vespertilioniformes includes all extant bat families more closely related to the genus Vespertilio than to the genus Pteropus.
Little fossil evidence is available to help map the evolution of bats, since their small, delicate skeletons do not fossilize very well. However, a Late Cretaceous tooth from South America resembles that of an early microchiropteran bat. Most of the oldest known, definitely identified bat fossils were already very similar to modern microbats. These fossils, Icaronycteris, Archaeonycteris, Palaeochiropteryx and Hassianycteris, are from the early Eocene period, 52.5 million years ago. Archaeopteropus, formerly classified as the earliest known megachiropteran, is now classified as a microchiropteran.
Bats were formerly grouped in the superorder Archonta, along with the treeshrews (Scandentia), colugos (Dermoptera), and the primates, because of the apparent similarities between Megachiroptera and such mammals. Genetic studies have now placed bats in the superorder Laurasiatheria, along with carnivorans, pangolins, odd-toed ungulates, even-toed ungulates, and cetaceans. A recent study by Zhang et al. places Chiroptera as a sister taxon to the clade Perissodactyla (which includes horses and other odd-toed ungulates). However, the first phylogenomic analysis of bats shows that they are not sisters to Perissodactyla, instead they are sisters to a larger group that includes ungulates and carnivores.
Megabats primarily eat fruit or nectar. In New Guinea, they are likely to have evolved for some time in the absence of microbats, which has resulted in some smaller megabats of the genus Nyctimene becoming (partly) insectivorous to fill the vacant microbat ecological niche. Furthermore, some evidence indicates that the fruit bat genus Pteralopex from the Solomon Islands, and its close relative Mirimiri from Fiji, have evolved to fill some niches that were open because there are no nonvolant or nonflying mammals on those islands.
FOSSIL BATS
Fossilized remains of bats are few, as they are terrestrial and light-boned. Only an estimated 12% of the bat fossil record is complete at the genus level. Fossil remains of an Eocene bat, Icaronycteris, were found in 1960. Another Eocene bat, Onychonycteris finneyi, was found in the 52-million-year-old Green River Formation in Wyoming, United States, in 2003. This intermediate fossil has helped to resolve a long-standing disagreement regarding whether flight or echolocation developed first in bats. The shape of the rib cage, faceted infraspious fossa of the scapula, manus morphology, robust clavicle, and keeled sternum all indicated Onychonycteris was capable of powered flight. However, the well-preserved skeleton showed that the small cochlea of the inner ear did not have the morphology necessary to echolocate. O. finneyi lacked an enlarged orbical apophysis on the malleus, and a stylohyal element with an expanded paddle-like cranial tip - both of which are characteristics linked to echolocation in other prehistoric and extant bat species. Because of these absences, and the presence of characteristics necessary for flight, Onychonycteris provides strong support for the “flight first” hypothesis in the evolution of flight and echolocation in bats.
The appearance and flight movement of bats 52.5 million years ago were different from those of bats today. Onychonycteris had claws on all five of its fingers, whereas modern bats have at most two claws appearing on two digits of each hand. It also had longer hind legs and shorter forearms, similar to climbing mammals that hang under branches such as sloths and gibbons. This palm-sized bat had short, broad wings, suggesting it could not fly as fast or as far as later bat species. Instead of flapping its wings continuously while flying, Onychonycteris likely alternated between flaps and glides while in the air. Such physical characteristics suggest that this bat did not fly as much as modern bats do, rather flying from tree to tree and spending most of its waking day climbing or hanging on the branches of trees. The distinctive features noted on the Onychonycteris fossil also support the claim that mammalian flight most likely evolved in arboreal gliders, rather than terrestrial runners. This model of flight development, commonly known as the "trees-down" theory, implies that bats attained powered flight by taking advantage of height and gravity, rather than relying on running speeds fast enough for a ground-level take off.
The mid-Eocene genus Necromantis is one of the earliest examples of bats specialised to hunt vertebrate prey, as well as one of the largest bats of its epoch.
HABITATS
Flight has enabled bats to become one of the most widely distributed groups of mammals. Apart from the Arctic, the Antarctic and a few isolated oceanic islands, bats exist all over the world. Bats are found in almost every habitat available on Earth. Different species select different habitats during different seasons, ranging from seasides to mountains and even deserts, but bat habitats have two basic requirements: roosts, where they spend the day or hibernate, and places for foraging. Most temperate species additionally need a relatively warm hibernation shelter. Bat roosts can be found in hollows, crevices, foliage, and even human-made structures, and include "tents" the bats construct by biting leaves.
The United States is home to an estimated 45 to 48 species of bats. The three most common species are Myotis lucifugus (little brown bat), Eptesicus fuscus (big brown bat), and Tadarida brasiliensis (Mexican free-tailed bat). The little and the big brown bats are common throughout the northern two-thirds of the country, while the Mexican free-tailed bat is the most common species in the southwest, sometimes even appearing in portions of the Southeast.
ANATOMY
WINGS
The finger bones of bats are much more flexible than those of other mammals, owing to their flattened cross-section and to low levels of minerals, such as calcium, near their tips. In 2006, Sears et al. published a study that traces the elongation of manual bat digits, a key feature required for wing development, to the upregulation of bone morphogenetic proteins (Bmps). During embryonic development, the gene controlling Bmp signaling, Bmp2, is subjected to increased expression in bat forelimbs - resulting in the extension of the offspring's manual digits. This crucial genetic alteration helps create the specialized limbs required for volant locomotion. Sears et al. (2006) also studied the relative proportion of bat forelimb digits from several extant species and compared these with a fossil of Lcaronycteris index, an early extinct species from approximately 50 million years ago. The study found no significant differences in relative digit proportion, suggesting that bat wing morphology has been conserved for over 50 million years.The wings of bats are much thinner and consist of more bones than the wings of birds, allowing bats to maneuver more accurately than the latter, and fly with more lift and less drag. By folding the wings in toward their bodies on the upstroke, they save 35 percent energy during flight. The membranes are also delicate, ripping easily; however, the tissue of the bat's membrane is able to regrow, such that small tears can heal quickly. The surface of their wings is equipped with touch-sensitive receptors on small bumps called Merkel cells, also found on human fingertips. These sensitive areas are different in bats, as each bump has a tiny hair in the center, making it even more sensitive and allowing the bat to detect and collect information about the air flowing over its wings, and to fly more efficiently by changing the shape of its wings in response. An additional kind of receptor cell is found in the wing membrane of species that use their wings to catch prey. This receptor cell is sensitive to the stretching of the membrane. The cells are concentrated in areas of the membrane where insects hit the wings when the bats capture them.
OTHER
The teeth of microbats resemble insectivorans. They are very sharp to bite through the hardened armor of insects or the skin of fruit.
Mammals have one-way valves in their veins to prevent the blood from flowing backwards, but bats also have one-way valves in their arteries.
The tube-lipped nectar bat (Anoura fistulata) has the longest tongue of any mammal relative to its body size. This is beneficial to them in terms of pollination and feeding. Their long, narrow tongues can reach deep into the long cup shape of some flowers. When the tongue retracts, it coils up inside its rib cage.
Bats possess highly adapted lung systems to cope with the pressures of powered-flight. Flight is an energetically taxing aerobic activity and requires large amounts of oxygen to be sustained. In bats, the relative alveolar surface area and pulmonary capillary blood volume are significantly larger than most other small quadrupedal mammals.
ECHOLOCATION
Bat echolocation is a perceptual system where ultrasonic sounds are emitted specifically to produce echoes. By comparing the outgoing pulse with the returning echoes, the brain and auditory nervous system can produce detailed images of the bat's surroundings. This allows bats to detect, localize, and even classify their prey in complete darkness. At 130 decibels in intensity, bat calls are some of the most intense, airborne animal sounds.
To clearly distinguish returning information, bats must be able to separate their calls from the echoes that they receive. Microbats use two distinct approaches.
Low duty cycle echolocation: Bats can separate their calls and returning echoes by time. Bats that use this approach time their short calls to finish before echoes return. This is important because these bats contract their middle ear muscles when emitting a call, so they can avoid deafening themselves. The time interval between the call and echo allows them to relax these muscles, so they can clearly hear the returning echo. The delay of the returning echoes provides the bat with the ability to estimate the range to their prey.
High duty cycle echolocation: Bats emit a continuous call and separate pulse and echo in frequency. The ears of these bats are sharply tuned to a specific frequency range. They emit calls outside of this range to avoid self-deafening. They then receive echoes back at the finely tuned frequency range by taking advantage of the Doppler shift of their motion in flight. The Doppler shift of the returning echoes yields information relating to the motion and location of the bat's prey. These bats must deal with changes in the Doppler shift due to changes in their flight speed. They have adapted to change their pulse emission frequency in relation to their flight speed so echoes still return in the optimal hearing range.
The new Yinpterochiroptera and Yangochiroptera classification of bats, supported by molecular evidence, suggests two possibilities for the evolution of echolocation. It may have been gained once in a common ancestor of all bats and was then subsequently lost in the Old World fruit bats, only to be regained in the horseshoe bats, or echolocation evolved independently in both the Yinpterochiroptera and Yangochiroptera lineages.
Two groups of moths exploit a bat sense to echolocate: tiger moths produce ultrasonic signals to warn the bats that they (the moths) are chemically protected or aposematic, other moth species produce signals to jam bat echolocation. Many moth species have a hearing organ called a tympanum, which responds to an incoming bat signal by causing the moth's flight muscles to twitch erratically, sending the moth into random evasive maneuvers.
In addition to echolocating prey, bat ears are sensitive to the fluttering of moth wings, the sounds produced by tymbalate insects, and the movement of ground-dwelling prey, such as centipedes, earwigs, etc. The complex geometry of ridges on the inner surface of bat ears helps to sharply focus not only echolocation signals, but also to passively listen for any other sound produced by the prey. These ridges can be regarded as the acoustic equivalent of a Fresnel lens, and may be seen in a large variety of unrelated animals, such as the aye-aye, lesser galago, bat-eared fox, mouse lemur, and others.
By repeated scanning, bats can mentally construct an accurate image of the environment in which they are moving and of their prey item.
OTHER SENSES
Although the eyes of most microbat species are small and poorly developed, leading to poor visual acuity, no species is blind. Microbats use vision to navigate, especially for long distances when beyond the range of echolocation, and species that are gleaners - that is, ones that attempt to swoop down from above to ambush tasty insects like crickets on the ground or moths up a tree - often have eyesight about as good as a rat's. Some species have been shown to be able to detect ultraviolet light, and most cave dwelling species have developed the ability to utilize very dim light. They also have high-quality senses of smell and hearing. Bats hunt at night, reducing competition with birds, minimizing contact with certain predators, and travel large distances (up to 800 km) in their search for food. Megabat species often have excellent eyesight as good as, if not better than, human vision; they need this for the warm climates they live in and the very social world they occupy, where relations and friends need to be distinguished from other bats in the colony. This eyesight is, unlike its microbat relations, adapted to both night and daylight vision and enables the bat to have some colour vision whereas the microbat sees in blurred shades of grey.
BEHAVIOUR
Most microbats are nocturnal and are active at twilight. A large portion of bats migrate hundreds of kilometres to winter hibernation dens, while some pass into torpor in cold weather, rousing and feeding when warm weather allows for insects to be active. Others retreat to caves for winter and hibernate for six months. Bats rarely fly in rain, as the rain interferes with their echolocation, and they are unable to locate their food.
The social structure of bats varies, with some leading solitary lives and others living in caves colonized by more than a million bats. The fission-fusion social structure is seen among several species of bats. The term "fusion" refers to a large numbers of bats that congregate in one roosting area, and "fission" refers to breaking up and the mixing of subgroups, with individual bats switching roosts with others and often ending up in different trees and with different roostmates.
Studies also show that bats make all kinds of sounds to communicate with others. Scientists in the field have listened to bats and have been able to associate certain sounds with certain behaviours that bats make after the sounds are made.
Insectivores make up 70% of bat species and locate their prey by means of echolocation. Of the remainder, most feed on fruits. Only three species sustain themselves with blood.
Some species even prey on vertebrates. The leaf-nosed bats (Phyllostomidae) of Central America and South America, and the two bulldog bat (Noctilionidae) species feed on fish. At least two species of bat are known to feed on other bats: the spectral bat, also known as the American false vampire bat, and the ghost bat of Australia. One species, the greater noctule bat, catches and eats small birds in the air.
Predators of bats include bat hawks, bat falcons and even spiders.
REPRODUCTION
Most bats have a breeding season, which is in the spring for species living in a temperate climate. Bats may have one to three litters in a season, depending on the species and on environmental conditions, such as the availability of food and roost sites. Females generally have one offspring at a time, which could be a result of the mother's need to fly to feed while pregnant. Female bats nurse their young until they are nearly adult size, because a young bat cannot forage on its own until its wings are fully developed.
Female bats use a variety of strategies to control the timing of pregnancy and the birth of young, to make delivery coincide with maximum food ability and other ecological factors. Females of some species have delayed fertilization, in which sperm is stored in the reproductive tract for several months after mating. In many such cases, mating occurs in the fall, and fertilization does not occur until the following spring. Other species exhibit delayed implantation, in which the egg is fertilized after mating, but remains free in the reproductive tract until external conditions become favorable for giving birth and caring for the offspring.
In yet another strategy, fertilization and implantation both occur, but development of the fetus is delayed until favorable conditions prevail, during the delayed development the mother still gives the fertilized egg nutrients, and oxygenated blood to keep it alive. However, this process can go for a long period of time, because of the advanced gas exchange system. All of these adaptations result in the pup being born during a time of high local production of fruit or insects.
At birth, the wings are too small to be used for flight. Young microbats become independent at the age of six to eight weeks, while megabats do not until they are four months old.
LIFE EXPECTANCY
A single bat can live over 20 years, but bat population growth is limited by the slow birth rate.
HUNTING, FEEDING AND DRINKING
Newborn bats rely on the milk from their mothers. When they are a few weeks old, bats are expected to fly and hunt on their own. It is up to them to find and catch their prey, along with satisfying their thirst.
HUNTING
Most bats are nocturnal creatures. Their daylight hours are spent grooming and sleeping; they hunt during the night. The means by which bats navigate while finding and catching their prey in the dark was unknown until the 1790s, when Lazzaro Spallanzani conducted a series of experiments on a group of blind bats. These bats were placed in a room in total darkness, with silk threads strung across the room. Even then, the bats were able to navigate their way through the room. Spallanzani concluded the bats were not using their eyes to fly through complete darkness, but something else.
Spallanzani decided the bats were able to catch and find their prey through the use of their ears. To prove this theory, Spallanzani plugged the ears of the bats in his experiment. To his pleasure, he found that the bats with plugged ears were not able to fly with the same amount of skill and precision as they were able to without their ears plugged. Unfortunately for Spallanzani, the twin concepts of sound waves and acoustics would not be understood for another century and he could not explain why specifically the bats were crashing into walls and the threads that he'd strung up around the room, and because of the methodology Spallanzani used, many of his test subjects died.
It was thus well known through the nineteenth century that the chiropteran ability to navigate had something to do with hearing, but how they accomplish this was not proven conclusively until the 1930s, by Donald R. Griffin, a biology student at Harvard University. Using a locally native species, the little brown bat, he discovered that bats use echolocation to locate and catch their prey. When bats fly, they produce a constant stream of high-pitched sounds. When the sound waves produced by these sounds hit an insect or other animal, the echoes bounce back to the bat, and guide them to the source.
FEEDING AND DIET
The majority of food consumed by bats includes insects, fruits and flower nectar, vertebrates and blood. Almost three-fourths of the world's bats are insect eaters. Bats consume both aerial and ground-dwelling insects. Each bat is typically able to consume one-third of its body weight in insects each night, and several hundred insects in a few hours. This means that a group of a thousand bats could eat four tons of insects each year. If bats were to become extinct, it has been calculated that the insect population would reach an alarmingly high number.
VITAMIN C
In a test of 34 bat species from six major families of bats, including major insect- and fruit-eating bat families, all were found to have lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C, and this loss may derive from a common bat ancestor, as a single mutation. However, recent results show that there are at least two species of bat, the frugivorous bat (Rousettus leschenaultii) and insectivorous bat (Hipposideros armiger), that have retained their ability to produce vitamin C. In fact, the whole Chiroptera are in the process of losing the ability to synthesize Vc which most of them have already lost.
AERIAL INSECTIVORES
Watching a bat catch and eat an insect is difficult. The action is so fast that all one sees is a bat rapidly change directions, and continue on its way. Scientist Frederick A. Webster discovered how bats catch their prey. In 1960, Webster developed a high-speed camera that was able to take one thousand pictures per second. These photos revealed the fast and precise way in which bats catch insects. Occasionally, a bat will catch an insect in mid-air with its mouth, and eat it in the air. However, more often than not, a bat will use its tail membrane or wings to scoop up the insect and trap it in a sort of "bug net". Then, the bat will take the insect back to its roost. There, the bat will proceed to eat said insect, often using its tail membrane as a kind of napkin, to prevent its meal from falling to the ground. One common insect prey is Helicoverpa zea, a moth that causes major agricultural damage.
FORAGE GLEANERS
These bats typically fly down and grasp their prey off the ground with their teeth, and take it to a nearby perch to eat it. Generally, these bats do not use echolocation to locate their prey. Instead, they rely on the sounds produced by the insects. Some make unique sounds, and almost all make some noise while moving through the environment.
FRUITS AND FLOWER NECTAR
Fruit eating, or frugivory, is a specific habit found in two families of bats. Megachiropterans and microchiropterans both include species of bat that feed on fruits. These bats feed on the juices of sweet fruits, and fulfill the needs of some seeds to be dispersed. The fruits preferred by most fruit-eating bats are fleshy and sweet, but not particularly strong smelling or colorful. To get the juice of these fruits, bats pull the fruit off the trees with their teeth, and fly back to their roosts with the fruit in their mouths. There, the bats will consume the fruit in a specific way. To do this, the bats crush open the fruit and eat the parts that satisfy their hunger. The remainder of the fruit, the seeds and pulp, are spat onto the ground. These seeds take root and begin to grow into new fruit trees. Over 150 types of plants depend on bats in order to reproduce.Some bats prefer the nectar of flowers to insects or other animals. These bats have evolved specifically for this purpose. For example, these bats possess long muzzles and long, extensible tongues covered in fine bristles that aid them in feeding on particular flowers and plants.[68] When they sip the nectar from these flowers, pollen gets stuck to their fur, and is dusted off when the bats take flight, thus pollinating the plants below them. The rainforest is said to be the most benefitted of all the biomes where bats live, because of the large variety of appealing plants. Because of their specific eating habits, nectar-feeding bats are more prone to extinction than any other type of bat. However, bats benefit from eating fruits and nectar just as much as from eating insects.
VERTEBRATES
A small group of carnivorous bats feed on other vertebrates and are considered the top carnivores of the bat world. These bats typically eat a variety of animals, but normally consume frogs, lizards, birds, and sometimes other bats. For example, one vertebrate predator, Trachops cirrhosus, is particularly skilled at catching frogs. These bats locate large groups of frogs by distinguishing their mating calls from other sounds around them. They follow the sounds to the source and pluck them from the surface of the water with their sharp canine teeth. Another example is the greater noctule bat, which is believed to catch birds on the wing.
Also, several species of bat feed on fish. These types of bats are found on almost all continents. They use echolocation to detect tiny ripples in the water's surface to locate fish. From there, the bats swoop down low, inches from the water, and use specially enlarged claws on their hind feet to grab the fish out of the water. The bats then take the fish to a feeding roost and consume the animal.
BLOOD
A few species of bats exclusively consume blood as their diet. This type of diet is referred to as hematophagy, and three species of bats exhibit this behavior. These species are the common, the white-winged, and the hairy-legged vampire bats. The common vampire bat typically consumes the blood of mammals, while the hairy-legged and white-winged vampires feed on the blood of birds. These species live only in Mexico, Central, and South America, with a presence also on the Island of Trinidad.
DEFECATION
Bat dung, or guano, is so rich in nutrients that it is mined from caves, bagged, and used by farmers to fertilize their crops. During the U.S. Civil War, guano was used to make gunpowder.
To survive hibernation months, some species build up large reserves of body fat, both as fuel and as insulation.
DRINKING
In 1960, Frederic A. Webster discovered bats' method of drinking water using a high-speed camera and flashgun that could take 1,000 photos per second. Webster's camera captured a bat skimming the surface of a body of water, and lowering its jaw to get just one drop of water. It then skimmed again to get a second drop of water, and so on, until it has had its fill. A bat's precision and control during flight is very fine, and it almost never misses. Other bats, such as the flying fox or fruit bat, gently skim the water's surface, then land nearby to lick water from chest fur.
WIKIPEDIA
This is Bootstrap. He showed up at the church yesterday, and of course ended up at our house. He is a very friendly boy. I don't know if someone dropped him off, or if he just got lost and found us, but I guess we have another mouth to feed unless he moves on. He seems to have homesteaded on our front porch though. I'm surprised that Harley and Tripod haven't run him off. There haven't even been any fights, just some verbal altercations. I posted a flier at the vet today to try to find him a home. We'll see what happens. I call him Bootstrap because the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are my favorite right now. It kind of fits since he has boots.
Finished product for the Davy Jones crew I've been working on. I only have 3 left to finish up and I started on a Davy Jones and a new Bootstrap Bill
Source: wallboat.com/programmers-laptop/
This is a free image you can use it.More free Images @ wallboat.com All images are Public Domain/Free and you can use any where for any purpose without any permission.Even you can use for commercial purpose.
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Where are they headed?
When we last saw Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), Elizabeth (Kiera Knightly) had handcuffed him to the Pearl. He faced the Kracken and an eternity in the no-man's land of Davey Jones's Locker, while the rest of crew made their escape from that unfortunate fate. Luckily, the crew has a conscience and agrees to do whatever it takes to save Jack, and with the help of Tia Dalma (Naomi Harris), Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) returns to navigate their rescue mission.
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End finds the East India Trading Company set on squeezing out the pirate population and achieving world domination. Elizabeth is carrying the burden of guilt for trapping Jack for the Kracken, and its weight is made heavier as she keeps her secret from Will (Orlando Bloom). Will is committed to saving his father, Bootstrap Bill (Stellen Skarsgaard), from the cursed vessel, the Flying Dutchman, but hasn't shared those plans with Elizabeth. Once they find Jack, who has even more screws loose than before, the nine pirate lords who rule the world's seas must convene to figure out how to keep the East India Trading Company from closing in on them. Basically, everyone's got problems. With new colorful characters and unexpected plot twists, everything is miraculously solved in this story and topped with a spectacular stormy finish!
How'd they do that?
Plenty of action leads up to the maelstrom at the end of this adventure. While visual effects were used, director Gore Verbinski created that storm as realistically as possible for the actors. "It's a torrential downpour and probably 75 knots of wind in this building," Johnny describes. Lifesize ships were moved into a hanger, and all the actors and extras fought amid the manmade storm. "You have all these plans to act and maybe do it rather elegantly, and then they turn the rain machine on," says Bill Nighy (who plays Captain Davy Jones). "The bad news is that all your ideas go out the window. The good news is that the action is very authentic because you're in a maelstrom!"
While the maelstrom may be the showstopper, this movie is full of other fantastic visual effects. On their way to the end of the world, Barbossa and crew sail through mirror-like waters and frosty seas. They tumble over the edge of a waterfall and eventually capsize their ship on purpose. Having lost his mind on land, Jack is stuck on a crab-infested desert with several other Jacks for company.
Before directing his own movies, Gore Verbinski was an accomplished special effects supervisor and commercial director. "He can see things in a shot that an average director without that technical background wouldn't see, and it ends up making the movie that much better." says Executive Producer Mike Stenson. With more than 2,000 visual effects in this movie, the work required that everyone employed at ILM (the company tasked with creating these effects) to work on this film, something that hasn't happened since Return of the Jedi. That's good company to be in, isn't it? This film earned two well-deserved Oscar nominations, one for visual effects and one for makeup.
I'm on board!
I was thrilled that Geoffrey Rush returned for this third installment of Pirates of the Caribbean! As much as I love Bill Nighy's performance as Captain Davy Jones, I felt Geoffrey Rush was a missing ingredient in the second movie. One of the reasons I tell people Pirates 2 is my least favorite in the trilogy is because Geoffrey Rush's Captain Barbossa isn't there.
A friend told me he thought Pirates 3 has too much talking in it, but I'll take story over action sequences any day. While I admit the story here is all over the place, I liked exploring all the different personalities, and their issues, obstacles, and histories. I also loved that this journey took us to Singapore, where we were introduced to Asian pirates, headed by Captain Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat). Better yet, we meet all kinds of pirates from around the world when they join forces against the East India Trading Company.
Some people say the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are too long, but when you have so many characters and storylines, it takes time to resolve everything. These movies are a package deal, and I like how so much is stuffed in them. You can watch them over and over and always discover new things. This one is a fitting finish to the trilogy. Over the course of these three movies, Elizabeth and Will grew up, and by the end, Elizabeth becomes the strong leading force driving the story--which, as a girl, I appreciate (even if she did handcuff Jack to his sinking ship).
Despite (and maybe because of) his predicament, Johnny is a treat to watch in this movie. He's just one of many characters in this story, all of whom have their own quirks. But since Jack a bit madder than usual, due to his imprisonment, Johnny could do whatever he wanted. As cowriter Ted Elliott says, "We're on our third movie, and we said, 'How can we keep it unexpected? Let's just get weird.'" Captain Jack sees things no one else sees and talks to himself more often these days. It makes for some really imaginative scenes that I won't spoil here. "Johnny's very improvisational," says costar Jack Davenport (who plays Commodore Norrington). "You have a choice: You either freak out or you go with him."
Aside from the Oscar nominations, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End won several other awards for visual effects and production. The cast, too, was a big hit at fan-driven award shows, like the MTV Movie Awards, and the People's, Teen, and Kids' Choice Awards that year. Johnny even won a Rembrandt Award for Best International Actor, voted on by the Dutch public. "I'm sort of amazed that so many people in so many corners of the world have embraced the films and the character," he says. "It's very moving....Nothing like that has ever happened to me." We like our Pirates!
"This is politics."
One of my favorite things about Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is meeting all the other pirates of the world. They are all distinct, extravagant characters. Their meeting to discuss how to conquer the East India Trading Company is just like Congress but more productive and entertaining. When they disagree, they call on Captain Teague (Johnny's rock star hero, making his second cameo appearance in these Pirate movies). As keeper of the Pirate's Code, he straighten them out quickly! Maybe, on some days, Captain Teague should come to D.C. to help out our president. Do you think he would do it? Maybe if Johnny asked him....
To pay tribute to this democracy, some of The Kitties are channeling the nine pirate lords. Here they are gathered with their crews, listening to Captain Jack, Pirate Lord of the Caribbean Sea, as he proposes his strategy against the East India Trading Company: "We must fight....to run away." Among the crowd, The Kitties chose their own parts:
- The Mother Kitty is Mistress Ching (Takayo Fischer), Pirate Lord of the Pacific Ocean.
- Simon is Capitaine Chevalle (Marcel Lures), Pirate Lord of the Mediterranean Sea.
- Norman is Sri Sumbhajee (Marshall Manesh), PIrate Lord of the Indian Ocean.
- Comet is Captain Jocard (Hakeem Kae-Kazim), Pirate Lord of the Atlantic Ocean.
- Ashes is Elizabeth, most recent PIrate Lord of the South China Sea/Pirate King.
- B.J. is Captain Barbossa, Pirate Lord of the Caspian Sea.
Also, in the picture are familiar faces from Jack's crew (Mr. Gibbs, Pintell, and Ragetti) and the dog, who luckily escaped that cannibalistic island he was trapped on at the end of Pirates 2. Having reviewed the Code, Captain Teague monitors the debate from his seat while strumming his guitar. Don't worry, they work it out.
What's next?
The murderous barber Sweeney Todd seeks revenge, singing Sondheim all the way!
To all the Johnny Kitties fans out there, next month's post will be about a week or so late. On September 9th, I'll be amid a vacation in California, away from my computer. I promise to post my Sweeney Todd tribute as soon as I get back. I'll do my best to make it worth your wait.
To see more images from PIrates of the Caribbean: At World's End or more Johnny Kitties, see my original blog post here: melissaconnolly.blogspot.com/2013/08/johnny-kitties-celeb....
Other Name: Finca de Trujilo Alto
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Listed: October 7, 2011
This rural forest-like estate historic district was the residence of Luis Muñoz Marín from the 1940s until his death in 1980. Luis Muñoz Marín was the first Puerto Rican governor elected by the people. Luis Muñoz Marín is also called the “Father of Modern Puerto Rico,” a key figure in the development and implementation of Operation Commonwealth, Operation Bootstrap and Operation Serenity, one of the most revered leaders in Puerto Rico’s history, Luis Muñoz Marín is one of the most important political figures of the Americas in the Twentieth Century.
Previous to his tenure as the first home-rule governor, Muñoz Marín had a distinguished careers in journalism, as both a reporter and director of a newspaper, and political activism. After returning from the United States where he studied as a young man and adult, Muñoz Marín joined the Socialist Party and the Free Federation of Workers of Puerto Rico. Both groups were dedicated to fight against poverty and the inequality suffered by Puerto Ricans, causes that he fervently endorsed. He campaigned across Puerto Rico extensively and participated in workers strikes to better the conditions of workers. During the Great Depression Muñoz Marín and others popular figures effectively convinced President Roosevelt to extend the New Deal and other important efforts into Puerto Rico. All the meanwhile, Muñoz Marín and his associates were taking their political campaign to the next level and established the PPD, the Popular Democratic Party (Partido Popular Democrático), which won twenty-nine out of seventy-six municipalities in the following election. In the 1948 general elections, Luis Muñoz Marín became the first Puerto Rican governor elected by the popular vote. His election as Governor stood up against hunger, injustice, ignorance, sickness and oppression. By the 1950s, after the implementation of Operations Commonwealth and Bootstrap, an “economic miracle” was taking place in Puerto Rico; the Island was now a modern urban-industrial society.
The main house is made mostly of concrete, with the exception of wood doors and windows. One of the most impressive features is an L-shaped balcony accessible from the sizeable living area. The main house and office contain all the furniture, art, books and household items from the time Luis Muñoz Marín and his wife lived on the property.
The library/personal office is another concrete building contributing to this historic property listing. The spaces in the library have all the period furniture, books and items of its owner on display just as he left them when he died. The library/personal office was built in 1965 along with an administrative office and archive building used mostly by Mr. Marín’s staff. Both buildings are significant because these were the spaces which Marín used to write his Memoirs and the other where important documents were first stored and organized.
Down a short pathway is the bohío, built in 1948, where the family gathered for activities and important meeting with dignitaries where held. The bohío was expanded by the family many times over the years and even replaced when it was damaged by a fallen tree in 1998. Though the original bohío does not stand, the historical significance of this space is not lost. Today’s version is a rectangular wooden shed supported by five columns wide, six columns in length and two center columns. All beams and rafters are wood, the floor concrete patterns, and the ceiling is built with Palm tree foliage covered in zinc shingles.
NPS Cultural Resources Celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month
Bootstrap DNA" in Kew Gardens
Sculpture by Charles Jencks, 2003 . The plaque by it says "DNA's double helix structure was discovered in 1953. It codes for the genes of all organisms." Thus the sculpture commemorates the half century anniversary of the discovery. "Bootstrap" in the title refers to statistical methods
She's ebony in color, made of soft, pose-able vinyl, has rooted hair and eyelashes, and resembles Mattel's vintage Christie. She's Shindana's first fashion doll, Wanda Career Girl and stands a diminutive 9 inches.
Read more about Wanda Career Girl at the following link: blackdollcollecting.blogspot.com/2011/02/bdht-shindanas-f...
Other Name: Finca de Trujilo Alto
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Listed: October 7, 2011
This rural forest-like estate historic district was the residence of Luis Muñoz Marín from the 1940s until his death in 1980. Luis Muñoz Marín was the first Puerto Rican governor elected by the people. Luis Muñoz Marín is also called the “Father of Modern Puerto Rico,” a key figure in the development and implementation of Operation Commonwealth, Operation Bootstrap and Operation Serenity, one of the most revered leaders in Puerto Rico’s history, Luis Muñoz Marín is one of the most important political figures of the Americas in the Twentieth Century.
Previous to his tenure as the first home-rule governor, Muñoz Marín had a distinguished careers in journalism, as both a reporter and director of a newspaper, and political activism. After returning from the United States where he studied as a young man and adult, Muñoz Marín joined the Socialist Party and the Free Federation of Workers of Puerto Rico. Both groups were dedicated to fight against poverty and the inequality suffered by Puerto Ricans, causes that he fervently endorsed. He campaigned across Puerto Rico extensively and participated in workers strikes to better the conditions of workers. During the Great Depression Muñoz Marín and others popular figures effectively convinced President Roosevelt to extend the New Deal and other important efforts into Puerto Rico. All the meanwhile, Muñoz Marín and his associates were taking their political campaign to the next level and established the PPD, the Popular Democratic Party (Partido Popular Democrático), which won twenty-nine out of seventy-six municipalities in the following election. In the 1948 general elections, Luis Muñoz Marín became the first Puerto Rican governor elected by the popular vote. His election as Governor stood up against hunger, injustice, ignorance, sickness and oppression. By the 1950s, after the implementation of Operations Commonwealth and Bootstrap, an “economic miracle” was taking place in Puerto Rico; the Island was now a modern urban-industrial society.
The main house is made mostly of concrete, with the exception of wood doors and windows. One of the most impressive features is an L-shaped balcony accessible from the sizeable living area. The main house and office contain all the furniture, art, books and household items from the time Luis Muñoz Marín and his wife lived on the property.
The library/personal office is another concrete building contributing to this historic property listing. The spaces in the library have all the period furniture, books and items of its owner on display just as he left them when he died. The library/personal office was built in 1965 along with an administrative office and archive building used mostly by Mr. Marín’s staff. Both buildings are significant because these were the spaces which Marín used to write his Memoirs and the other where important documents were first stored and organized.
Down a short pathway is the bohío, built in 1948, where the family gathered for activities and important meeting with dignitaries where held. The bohío was expanded by the family many times over the years and even replaced when it was damaged by a fallen tree in 1998. Though the original bohío does not stand, the historical significance of this space is not lost. Today’s version is a rectangular wooden shed supported by five columns wide, six columns in length and two center columns. All beams and rafters are wood, the floor concrete patterns, and the ceiling is built with Palm tree foliage covered in zinc shingles.
NPS Cultural Resources Celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month
Multi-curve HJM modelling for risk management. Sabelli, Pioppi, Sitzia, Bormetti arxiv.org/abs/1411.3977 #q-fin
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A powerful Drupal theme to power your education-oriented site.
Ideal for universities & university departments, schools, seminars and online courses.
Other Name: Finca de Trujilo Alto
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Listed: October 7, 2011
This rural forest-like estate historic district was the residence of Luis Muñoz Marín from the 1940s until his death in 1980. Luis Muñoz Marín was the first Puerto Rican governor elected by the people. Luis Muñoz Marín is also called the “Father of Modern Puerto Rico,” a key figure in the development and implementation of Operation Commonwealth, Operation Bootstrap and Operation Serenity, one of the most revered leaders in Puerto Rico’s history, Luis Muñoz Marín is one of the most important political figures of the Americas in the Twentieth Century.
Previous to his tenure as the first home-rule governor, Muñoz Marín had a distinguished careers in journalism, as both a reporter and director of a newspaper, and political activism. After returning from the United States where he studied as a young man and adult, Muñoz Marín joined the Socialist Party and the Free Federation of Workers of Puerto Rico. Both groups were dedicated to fight against poverty and the inequality suffered by Puerto Ricans, causes that he fervently endorsed. He campaigned across Puerto Rico extensively and participated in workers strikes to better the conditions of workers. During the Great Depression Muñoz Marín and others popular figures effectively convinced President Roosevelt to extend the New Deal and other important efforts into Puerto Rico. All the meanwhile, Muñoz Marín and his associates were taking their political campaign to the next level and established the PPD, the Popular Democratic Party (Partido Popular Democrático), which won twenty-nine out of seventy-six municipalities in the following election. In the 1948 general elections, Luis Muñoz Marín became the first Puerto Rican governor elected by the popular vote. His election as Governor stood up against hunger, injustice, ignorance, sickness and oppression. By the 1950s, after the implementation of Operations Commonwealth and Bootstrap, an “economic miracle” was taking place in Puerto Rico; the Island was now a modern urban-industrial society.
The main house is made mostly of concrete, with the exception of wood doors and windows. One of the most impressive features is an L-shaped balcony accessible from the sizeable living area. The main house and office contain all the furniture, art, books and household items from the time Luis Muñoz Marín and his wife lived on the property.
The library/personal office is another concrete building contributing to this historic property listing. The spaces in the library have all the period furniture, books and items of its owner on display just as he left them when he died. The library/personal office was built in 1965 along with an administrative office and archive building used mostly by Mr. Marín’s staff. Both buildings are significant because these were the spaces which Marín used to write his Memoirs and the other where important documents were first stored and organized.
Down a short pathway is the bohío, built in 1948, where the family gathered for activities and important meeting with dignitaries where held. The bohío was expanded by the family many times over the years and even replaced when it was damaged by a fallen tree in 1998. Though the original bohío does not stand, the historical significance of this space is not lost. Today’s version is a rectangular wooden shed supported by five columns wide, six columns in length and two center columns. All beams and rafters are wood, the floor concrete patterns, and the ceiling is built with Palm tree foliage covered in zinc shingles.
NPS Cultural Resources Celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month
A powerful Drupal theme to power your education-oriented site.
Ideal for universities & university departments, schools, seminars and online courses.
A powerful Drupal theme to power your education-oriented site.
Ideal for universities & university departments, schools, seminars and online courses.