“Bats are blind”
✓ Actually Every known bat species has functional eyes — even echolocating microbats retain working vision, and fruit bats (megabats) have excellent low-light eyesight, so no bat species is truly blind.
What we found
Are bats actually blind? No, every known bat species has working eyes.
The receipts
Transcript
Bats are blind. Except they're not. Every one of the roughly 1,400 known bat species has functioning eyes. The phrase blind as a bat just isn't true. Microbats — the small insect hunters — do rely mainly on echolocation, bouncing high-pitched clicks off their prey to hunt in total darkness, because sound works better than sight at night. But their eyes still work, sensing light and helping them orient at dusk. Megabats are the big fruit bats of Africa, Asia and Australia. Their eyesight is excellent. Some see about as well as a human does in dim light, which is how they spot fruit after dark. So calling a bat blind gets it backwards. It's built around one of the sharpest senses in nature. Did you grow up believing bats were blind? Let me know in the comments and subscribe for a fact every day.
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