Velvety free-tailed bat
Molossus molossus
— Where the name comes from
Molossus, doubled in the binomial, is the dog of the Molossians: the guard and war breed of Epirus that the Romans knew as molossus and from which modern mastiffs descend. The comparison is to the short flattened muzzle and the thick furrowed lips. The Italian common name recalls Peter Simon Pallas, the Prussian naturalist in the service of Catherine the Great, who described the species in 1766.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Bats
- Habitat
- Roofs, eaves, bridges, tree hollows; hunting in open sky
- Range
- From Mexico to Argentina, and the Antilles
- Size
- 5–7 cm of body, 27 cm wingspan, 10–20 g
- Diet
- Insectivore — swarms of insects caught in the first hour after sunset
- Lifespan
- 5–6 years
— Characteristics
- 01
It comes out very early, often while it is still light, and returns after barely an hour.
- 02
It packs almost the whole day’s meal into a single sortie.
- 03
It readily lives in the roofs of houses: it is the urban bat of tropical America.
— What sets it apart
It works one hour a day. It comes out at dusk, when insects rise all together in dense columns, fills its stomach until it weighs nearly a third of its own body and goes home: many individuals do not come out again until the following night. It is a swarm predator’s strategy, staking everything on a short and predictable window instead of spreading the effort across the night — and it stops working on nights when, through rain or wind, that column of insects never forms.
