Protectors of Agriculture, Digital Collage, 2022

By eating insects, bats save U.S. agriculture billions of dollars per year in pest control. Some studies have estimated that service to be worth over 3.7 billion dollars per year, and possibly as much as 53 billion dollars per year. 
This value does not, however, take into account the volume of insects eaten by bats in forest ecosystems and the degree to which that benefits industries like lumber. It also doesn’t take into account the critical importance of bats as plant and crop pollinators. So the actual monetary worth of bats is far greater than 3.7 billion dollars per year. (1)

Photo Credit: Ann Froschauer/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

(1) Why Are Bats Important? | U.S. Geological Survey. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/why-are-bats-important.


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