Diet
Short-tailed bats are omnivorous and opportunistic, feeding on whatever food is available in their environments. They forage in areas of dense forest and deep leaf litter, and may travel considerable distances from roosting to foraging sites each night. Their wings have a low aspect ratio and low wing loading, suggesting high manoeuvrability and moderate flight speed, suitable both for long travel and foraging close to the ground. They have been reported to eat insects, especially beetles, flies, and moths, as well as flowers, fruit, nectar, pollen, and fern spores.
The bats may be an important pollinator of the wood rose (Dactylanthus taylorii), a threatened parasitic plant which grows on the roots of trees on the forest floor.
Read more about this topic: New Zealand Lesser Short-tailed Bat
Famous quotes containing the word diet:
“Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated—serious, bulky and blandly worthwhile, like a high-fiber diet set in type.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“The pills are a mother, but better,
every color and as good as sour balls.
I’m on a diet from death.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)