By Susan Milius
Eight million is a lot of bats to lose, and now a new unpublished study may explain what happened to the possibly lost bats of Carlsbad Cavern.
Short answer: According to a Boston University team, the famous 8 million bats never existed in the first place.
From spring to fall, the cave Carlsbad Cavern in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns National Park still hosts hundreds of thousands of migratory Brazilian free-tailed bats that thrill visitors by boiling out of the cave at dusk for a night’s foraging. All the bats roosting in the cave emerge in a dense plume that streams on and on and on, sometimes for an hour or three.