Gould's Wattled Bat

Fascinating facts about the Gould's Wattled Bat

• A bat the size of a thumb can hunt 600 insects in a single night — each one plucked from the air mid-flight. Gould's wattled bat does this using echolocation calls so high-pitched only other bats and some rodents can hear them, bouncing sound waves off prey no larger than a grain of rice to calculate exact distance, speed, and trajectory in real time.
• Those fleshy lumps hanging from its face aren't decoration — they're acoustic spotlights. The wattles (flaps of skin below the chin) funnel echolocation clicks like a megaphone, sharpening the bat's sound beam to laser precision. Remove them and the bat becomes nearly blind in the dark, proving evolution shaped every wrinkle on this creature's face for one job: hunting invisible prey.
• In summer across Australia, Gould's wattled bats roost in colonies of up to 10,000 individuals, turning caves, mines, and tree hollows into biological sonar chambers where thousands of clicking calls overlap into a deafening wall of sound — yet each bat filters its own echo from the chaos, tracking multiple moths simultaneously in total darkness.
• Female Gould's wattled bats give birth in synchrony — most pregnancies align so pups arrive within weeks of each other across the colony. This creates a nursery wave where all mothers lactate together, allowing them to leave babies unattended while they hunt. A single pup weighs just 2 grams at birth; its mother carries it in flight until it can hunt alone at 6 weeks old.
• Across southern Australia, Gould's wattled bats migrate between summer breeding caves and winter hibernation sites up to 300 kilometres away — a journey timed to the emergence of mass insect hatches. They navigate using landmarks and an internal compass, returning to the same roosts year after year, sometimes to the exact spot where they were born decades earlier.

At a glance

About the Gould's Wattled Bat

As the sun dips below the Australian horizon, the Gould's Wattled Bat stirs, its delicate wings unfolding like a dark, leathery cloak as it takes to the evening skies. With a fluttering, erratic flight, this diminutive creature dances through the twilight, its high-pitched calls echoing through the trees as it pursues the insects that will sustain it through the night. In this fleeting, crepuscular world, the Gould's Wattled Bat is a master of the margins, its very existence a testament to the beauty and resilience of life in the shadows.

Discover more wildlife