Creature Feature: The Hawaiian Hoary Bat (‘ōpe‘ape‘a) is Hawaii’s Only Native Terrestrial Mammal
by Bob Janiskee
[nota bene: This gives another spin on the way bats can possibly travel.]
When the first humans arrived in the Hawaiian Islands around 1,700 years ago, they soon learned that they weren’t the only land-dwelling mammals there. Hoary bats had already colonized the place. Since the islands were born as fiery volcanoes, have never been attached to a larger land mass, and are situated some 2,300 miles from the nearest mainland habitat, the tiny creatures who first carved out a niche in this faraway place had to have made their way across vast stretches of open sea.
Exactly how and when they pulled off this amazing feat remains a mystery. Bats don’t migrate thousands of miles nonstop like some birds do. Scientists suspect that storms might have delivered wind-blown bats to the Hawaiian archipelago, but they can’t know for sure that the pioneers weren’t delivered by some other rare happenstance, such as a tree that drifted out to sea with bats aboard and eventually arrived on a Hawaiian shore. Lacking fossil evidence for the hoary bat, they can’t even pin down the time of the initial colonization, which could have been anywhere from 10,000 to several million years ago. One thing that biologists do know for sure is that the hoary bat is the only extant terrestrial mammal native to the Hawaiian Islands.
Continued on Nat'l Parks Traveler