Bat Benefits
How bats can improve your garden
Florida’s native bats are essential for ecosystem health, providing benefits of natural pest control and enriching the soil with organic fertilizer. With a few bat-friendly features, you can welcome native bats into your landscape.
In Florida, bats are insectivores and rely on a diet of large quantities of insects to fuel their high energy needs and metabolism. Their diets serve a dual purpose: they not only meet their nutritional demands but also help reduce crop damage by controlling insect pests that threaten agriculture.
“Bats are the major predator of night-flying insects, having a huge impact, especially with agriculture,” said Shelly Johnson, a state-specialized agent in natural resources with UF/IFAS Extension.
This can be seen across the United States, with bats eating the pecan-nut moth in Georgia, leafhoppers in the Midwest, and corn earworm moth in Texas. In Florida, they eat pests such as fall armyworm, lesser cornstalk borer, tobacco budworm, and black cutworm. They also consume beetles and flies. The southeastern bat (Myotis austroriparius) is the top consumer of mosquitoes in Florida, eating more than any other bat in the state. Welcoming bats into your garden can reduce the number of insects nearby, with insects avoiding areas where they hear bat calls.
Bats are also an important environmental factor, creating organic fertilizer from their excrement, called guano. Natural fertilizer is made from bat guano and works as a natural fungicide, enriches the soil, and improves the quality of crops.
“This has been used as a fertilizer for centuries, and the balance of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium is very effective,” said Johnson.
In some cases, guano is mixed with compost because it is an activator that speeds up the decomposition process. Another way it can be used is to create liquid fertilizer, also known as “bat guano tea.” Benefits of this type of fertilizer include improving the soil’s texture, structure, fertility aeration and water-holding capacity.
Attracting bats to your garden can be done by evaluating your landscape compared to the needs of bats. “One of the first things bats do when they wake up in the evening is look for open water. They will dip down and drink on the wing,” Johnson said. A flat-water area, such as a pond or other open body of water, can entice bats to visit your garden.
Providing a habitat for bats is important to encourage residence. Native Florida bats are nocturnal and roost nightly in natural or man-made structures. The hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus) and the Seminole bat (Lasiurus seminolus) prefer natural roosts such as vegetation, snags (dead trees), peeling bark on pine trees, moss, and dead palm fronds. Bat houses can be placed in your landscape, providing an additional option for bats, like the Brazilian free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis) and the Florida bonneted bat (Eumops floridanus), to inhabit.
Bats play a crucial, yet overlooked, role in gardens. Embracing bats as natural allies in the garden is a step towards more sustainable gardening practices and can allow for lasting benefits.
“They’re overwhelmingly beneficial ecologically, eating things humans have a conflict with and transforming it into high-quality fertilizer,” Johnson said.
Also on Gardening Solutions
More from UF/IFAS
- Bats of Florida
- Insect Pest Management Services Provided by Bats
- More publications about bats at Ask IFAS