How Fast Are Bats? Faster Than You Even Know

[Narrator] Whoa!

What are we looking at here?

Ah, there we are.

Bats.

Countless bats.

Brazilian free-tailed bats, to be precise.

Bats are famous for a lot of things.

Like sucking blood,

and seeing with sound for Pete's sake,

and eating all those idiot mosquitoes.

Yet, they aren't exactly celebrated for their super speed.

But with the help of a thermal camera,

biologist Laura Kloepper is proving bats

are far faster than you ever realized.

Outside caves in the southwestern US,

she's been clocking bats hitting incredible speeds.

Like a 60 miles per hour kind of incredible.

At dusk, when the bats leave the cave en masse,

they're flapping their wings 10 times a second.

But the real hotdoggin' happens when the bats

return home at dawn.

They plummet out of the sky.

Tucking in their wings to reduce drag.

Building up speed until they're traveling

as fast as cars on a highway.

So, what's all the rush about?

Kloepper thinks it's a rather pressing possibility of death.

All around the cave are plenty of raptors

that would love nothing more than

to put a bat in its place.

But the bats have another strategy,

swarming.

By sticking together, individuals lower their

chances of the raptors picking them off.

Yet, the bats still swarm even in the darkness,

which is odd both because the raptors are gone,

and because bats navigate with sonar.

So, how could all the bats be firing out sounds

to map their environment,

and position themselves in the swarm,

and not get totally confused by the cacophony?

It's a mystery Kloepper is hoping to unravel.

But one thing is for sure,

bats are totally magic.

(lively violin music)