LA is home to 16 known species of bats. They are pollinators. They provide pest control. And they help keep diseases from spreading by eating lots of mosquitoes. But most of what we know about bats comes from studying them in the wild. Now there’s a large-scale study of bat behaviour in urban and suburban LA called the Backyard Bat Survey.
“That’s really great to see how resilient these species are, even the more sensitive ones. And it gives us hope that bat conservation is possible here in the LA area,” says Miguel Ordeñana, manager of the Community Science Program at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.