Ever thought about buying or building a bat box to help bats? Think carefully about the design and where you put it, University of Illinois researchers say.
Here's why: Bats and their pups can overheat and die in poorly designed or placed bat boxes, and in a warming climate, it could happen more often.
Illinois bat ecologists Joy O'Keefe and Reed Crawford recently synthesized the available data on bat boxes, also known as bat houses or artificial roosts, to raise awareness of the issue and motivate change in bat box design, marketing, and consumer education. Their recommendations are published in Conservation Science and Practice.
"Conservation practitioners and homeowners are well-intentioned; they want to help bats. Inevitably, the first thing they do is go online and buy a bat house," says Crawford, a doctoral student in the Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology at Illinois. "But unfortunately, a lot of bat houses on the market are small and painted dark colors, and they get hot really quickly. They're likely to hurt bats if they're installed in the wrong spot.
"We're trying to highlight that there's a lot of misleading information out there. We want to steer people away from putting up bat boxes as a first course of action, to instead consider the risks and ask if there is anything we can do that's going to be more beneficial for bats."
Crawford has read just about every study that's ever been done on bat boxes, and he and O'Keefe have conducted their fair share of studies, as well. They and other members of the bat research community have identified a critical temperature threshold—104 degrees Fahrenheit or 40 Celsius—above which most bat species are significantly heat-stressed.
Although very few studies have documented temperatures inside the countless bat boxes currently in use across the world, researchers have recorded temperatures as high as 142 degrees Fahrenheit in artificial roosts. And they've observed bats in natural roosts moving to avoid temperatures above 97 degrees.
In many bat boxes, bats can't move around to avoid hot spots. The most common design is a small, flat-panel box with vertical slats creating one to four chambers. The boxes are often painted or stained dark colors, and that can be a big part of the problem.
Love bats? Think twice about that bat box, experts say
Here's why: Bats and their pups can overheat and die in poorly designed or placed bat boxes, and in a warming climate, it could happen more often.
Illinois bat ecologists Joy O'Keefe and Reed Crawford recently synthesized the available data on bat boxes, also known as bat houses or artificial roosts, to raise awareness of the issue and motivate change in bat box design, marketing, and consumer education. Their recommendations are published in Conservation Science and Practice.
"Conservation practitioners and homeowners are well-intentioned; they want to help bats. Inevitably, the first thing they do is go online and buy a bat house," says Crawford, a doctoral student in the Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology at Illinois. "But unfortunately, a lot of bat houses on the market are small and painted dark colors, and they get hot really quickly. They're likely to hurt bats if they're installed in the wrong spot.
"We're trying to highlight that there's a lot of misleading information out there. We want to steer people away from putting up bat boxes as a first course of action, to instead consider the risks and ask if there is anything we can do that's going to be more beneficial for bats."
Crawford has read just about every study that's ever been done on bat boxes, and he and O'Keefe have conducted their fair share of studies, as well. They and other members of the bat research community have identified a critical temperature threshold—104 degrees Fahrenheit or 40 Celsius—above which most bat species are significantly heat-stressed.
Although very few studies have documented temperatures inside the countless bat boxes currently in use across the world, researchers have recorded temperatures as high as 142 degrees Fahrenheit in artificial roosts. And they've observed bats in natural roosts moving to avoid temperatures above 97 degrees.
In many bat boxes, bats can't move around to avoid hot spots. The most common design is a small, flat-panel box with vertical slats creating one to four chambers. The boxes are often painted or stained dark colors, and that can be a big part of the problem.
Love bats? Think twice about that bat box, experts say
