IN recent columns I have written about disasters affecting our oceans. Well, at last I have some good news and it’s about those wonderful birds, albatrosses.
Tens of thousands of these extraordinary birds are killed every year because of the fishing industry. They become enmeshed in trawl nets and cables as they follow the deep-sea trawlers going about their business.
There has been a dramatic improvement in the situation, however, following a seven-year study by Birdlife South Africa* and the introduction of a special device now used by South African fishing trawlers.
It’s a 30m rope that is ‘flown’ behind the boat, with hanging streamers every couple of metres that flap in the breeze (a device at the end of the rope keeps it airborne) and keep the seabirds, including albatrosses, off the working nets and cables.
The tori lines (they were invented by a Japanese) have reduced albatross deaths by an estimated 99 percent and are now compulsory on South African fishing trawlers. Good news indeed.
Now for some terrestrial flyers, bats. I was given a most interesting book the other day, Bats of Southern and Central Africa**. It is not your average bedtime reading book, but a highly scientific work that deals with bats in a most serious way.
I was interested to go through it because we have bats in the Hide, banana bats that come in after the insects when we are sitting here with sundowners. I know we have various fruit bats down here as well, but we have never seen them.
Anyway, the book covers far more than the lower South Coast, however, going right up to the lower half of the so-called Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mozambique.
Here are just a few of the bat facts I found interesting: the oldest known fossil bat is from 52-million years ago; there are at least 1,115 recognised species of bats in the world, a fifth of all mammalian species; there are 117 species of bats in the zone covered by the book, and the book covers 116 of them; the 117th was a bat recorded in Port Natal in the 1830s or 40s which may or may not have been an unwilling immigrant from Reunion; bats occur worldwide, except in extreme polar or desert conditions; the world’s smallest bat is from Thailand and it weighs in at 2gms (that’s five carats, the measurement for diamonds); the world’s biggest is the fearsome Pteropus vampyrus which chips in at 1.2kg and has a wingspan of 1.8m (now you know why this is not bedtime reading!).
Finally, a single bat can eat 500 insects a night and at least 250-million people around the world are affected by malaria, carried by mosquitoes, so, welcome little banana bat. Cheers!
*Birdlife South Africa newsletter and Melanie Gosling in the Cape Times.
**Bats of Southern Africa and Central Africa, A Biogeographic and Taxonomic Synthesis, Ara Monadjem, Peter John Taylor, E.P.D. Cotterill and Corrie Schoeman, Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2001.
