It's a bad time to be a bat.
This may seem like good news for people who fear them, but the wind-farm mortality rate is an example of how harnessing natural energy can lead to disruptions in the cycle of life - and the cycle of cost. When bat populations go down, bug populations go up, leaving farmers with bigger bills for pesticides and crops.
Wind-industry executives are shelling out millions of dollars on possible solutions, even as Pennsylvania wind farms are collaborating with the Game Commission to count dead bats.
Bats consume as many as 500 insects in an hour, or nearly 3,000 in a night, said Miguel Saviroff, agricultural financial manager at the Penn State Cooperative Extension in Somerset County.
"A colony of just 100 little brown bats may consume a quarter of a million mosquitoes and other small insects in a night," he said. "That benefits neighbors and reduces the insect problem with crops."
Bats save farmers as much as $74 per acre, according to an April report in Science magazine that calculated bats' economic value county by county. In Pennsylvania, the study put yearly savings in rural Somerset County at $6.7 million. Lancaster County? You owe bats $22 million. Statewide, bats saved farmers an estimated $277.9 million.
Initially, the "Economic Importance of Bats in Agriculture" article was meant to attract attention to the white-nose fungus virus, which is wiping out bat colonies across the country.
"We were getting a lot of questions about why we should care about white-nose syndrome," said author Justin Boyles, a postdoctoral fellow in bat research at the University of Tennessee. "Really, it's the economic impact that makes people listen."
