The Dollars and Cents of Bats and Farming Published: April 4,
2011 Putting a dollar value on nature and the services it
provides isn’t easy. Such numbers can show how much our human
economy depends on nature’s indiscernible economy. Take bats. A
study in Science magazine reveals just how important they are to
American agriculture. Every day, a bat eats much of its body
weight in insects, many of them harmful to crops. A group of
scientists led by Thomas Kunz at Boston University calculated
how much more money cotton farmers in one region of Texas would
spend on pesticides if bats weren’t present. Extrapolating from
those numbers, they estimated that bats save American farmers
somewhere between $3.7 billion and $54 billion a year, most
likely about $22.9 billion. This is a huge savings no one
notices as long as bats flourish. But bat populations are
severely threatened, especially the commonest species, the
little brown bat, which is being decimated by a fungal disease
called white-nose syndrome. The disease h