Bats which perform the vital ecological roles of pollinating flowers, and controlling pests, but now have become a menace in eastern Tanzania’s region of Morogoro.
Magoha is one of the affected villages with bats in Kilombero District, nearly 400 kilometers from Tanzania’s commercial capital, Dar es Salaam.
Villagers in the area expressed concern over the increasing number of bats which have destroyed their crops as the flying mammals leave claw marks on crops, making these unfit for human consumption.
Abbas Jumanne is one of the villagers in the area who said in recent months they have started experiencing a large number of bats in the area.
He said that bats have been destroying coconuts and backyard gardens in the village.
“These animals give us difficult time. I ask the government to chip in and address the mammals, which pose a serious challenge on vegetables, and fruits grown in this area,” Jumanne said.
“This is a disaster…bats are everywhere, we fail even to plant new plants in our farms. They have destroyed our coconut trees,” a woman in the area Chalote Oswald complained.
She noted: “We grow vegetables here, but we cannot take to the market as they are being contaminated with waste from the flying animals.”
James Kiwepu, a local leader in the area said that the increasing number of bats threaten even people’s health as they are everywhere.
“We have been contacting authorities and they have been sending rangers who just chase them once in a while then the number of bats keeps on increasing,” he said, urging a wildlife authority to take serious steps to reduce the number of the flying mammals of the order Chiroptera whose forelimbs form webbed wings, making them the only mammals naturally capable of true and sustained flight.
Natural resources officer in Morogoro Region, Joseph Chuya said that the government was aware of the challenge “and we have started working with other departments and experts from Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) on how to remove the animals from the village.”
He admitted that having a large number of bats in one area poses a health risk to people as the mammals need to be kept away from people’s homes.
Experts have it that bats 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.
However, bats are listed as vulnerable on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.
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 percent 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 percent of bat species are insectivores. Most of the rest are frugivores or fruit eaters. A few species, such as the fish-eating bat, feed on animals other than insects, with the vampire bats being hematophagous, or feeding on blood. Enditem
Source: Xinhua/NewsGhana.com.gh
