The Bats of Bracken Cave Current Event # 2

Nadia Tokovic

6B

03.10.2011

http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/stories/animalsnature/bat-cave/

Amazing Bats of Bracken Cave

If you ever see a lot of bats in the sky you might think it was a miracle but at Bracken Cave it happens every night. If you stand in front of Bracken Cave in the evening you will see millions of bats pouring out of cracks in the cave to hunt in the night. They hunt for insects and bring them to the cave to feed their children. In the winter the cave is a quiet place because bats migrate up to a thousand miles south (to Mexico) but when they come back in spring the cave is full of noise again. After coming back to the cave female bat raise their young bats. But if there is so many bats (about 20 million) in the cave how do the small bats find their parents. Well, the answer is that the parent bats remember the smell of their little bats and follow it to know where their children are. In conclusion, I think this article was really interesting for me because I learned about the bats of Bracken Cave but what fascinated me was that in one night these bats can eat up to a ton of insects and mosquitoes which helps farmers a lot. 

This article connects to the unit we are studying because in class we did an experiment when we dropped raisins in fizzy water and the forces what kept the raisins floating and making them sink were gravity and buoyancy and the forces that make bats and generally birds fly is gravity and volatility. I think this article is good for our society because the bats of Bracken Cave eat a lot of insects which helps farmers to grow more good harvest. I chose this article because I like learning about animal lives and how animals impact the world. I found this article because I really like the National Geographic Kids magazines so I found their website and I decided to use an article from there for science. I think it came from a really reliable resource because the National Geographic Kids magazines are published all over the world and are really popular. I learned about bats lives reading this article but now I want to learn more because I think that bats are really interesting because: they can fly with a speed of 97 km per hour, fly as high a an airplane and even fly in colonies with up to 20 million bats in them. I did not even know that bats migrate in the winter! I find it really interesting how bats live. I agree with the author that bats are really interesting to learn about and that they are not scary at all. I felt amazed when I was reading this article because I did not know that there can live up to 20 million bats in a cave!