From the NYTimes:
“….bats are … essential to ecosystems. As pollinators and agricultural pest-eaters, they’re valued at $3 billion a year for U.S. farmers. In New York City, where nine species of bats are known to migrate during the summer, a single little brown bat is capable of devouring up to 100 percent of its body weight in insects, a diet that includes mosquitoes…
Cropped -CreditMichelle V. Agins/The New York Times
….an abundance of Eastern red, big brown and silver-haired bats ….
Bat research is beginning to mobilize beyond Staten Island. At New York City Audubon, the ecologist Kaitlyn Parkins uses full-spectrum acoustic recorders to survey bat activity on green roofs across the city, including the one at Manhattan’s Javits Center, one of the largest green roofs in the country. “We definitely find more bat foraging activity on these roofs versus traditional ones,” she says. “The plants seem to provide habitat for the right kind of arthropods.”
….a small but important addition to a body of bat knowledge that is growing only now, as the fatal white nose syndrome threatens bat populations across North America. With nearly seven million bats dead since the disease emerged from a cave in upstate New York 2005, the scale of mortality is unprecedented among wildlife disease outbreaks, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service….Little brown bats have been particularly devastated. Once one of the most common bat species in the U.S., they have virtually vanished from New York and other eastern states.