Bats Are Worth at Least $3 Billion Per Year

[n2doc]

By Brandon Keim April 1, 2011 | 7:00 am | Categories: Animals


Insect-eating bats are worth at least $3 billion — perhaps as much as $54 billion — per year to U.S. agriculture alone, say biologists who evaluated their ecological contributions.

With bats threatened by careless wind-turbine development in major flyways and, more pressingly, by the new and dreadful White Nose Syndrome, protecting them isn’t just ethical. It makes bottom-line sense.

If bat mortality “continues unabated, we can expect noticeable economic losses to North American agriculture in the next four to five years,” wrote the researchers, whose study was published online March 31 by Science. “A wait-and-see approach to the issue of widespread declines of bat populations is not an option.”

The estimates are an informed, back-of-the-envelope calculation based on earlier research by study co-author Tom Kunz, a Boston University bat specialist who in 2006 published the most detailed look ever at the relationship of bats to insects and agriculture.

more
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/bat-value/

[meow mix]

1. They Have Guano!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoZWsSvwjTg

:rofl:

[stuntcat]

2. yes, ty. k & r

.

[abqmufc]

3. I wish...

I wish I lived in a world where the economic value of bats was actually factored in when deciding the risk of a petro-based chemical made by Monsanto, DuPont or Dow was put on the market (for example). I wish that risk was not dismissed as "acceptable risk" in a Cost-Benefit Analysis. And if the animal was an endangered species, the animal, along with all critical habitat was protected.