The faculty at an elementary school in central Taiwan touted the efficacy of their "bat houses" yesterday. The bat houses were first set up on campus several years ago to fight bugs, and the faculty say that thousands of mosquitoes have been eaten each night ever since.
Chang Heng-chia (
Chang, who has the nickname "bat ace" after years of caring for the bats, said they got the idea from books explaining how insect populations can be reduced in a more eco-friendly way.
The first population to move into the bat houses was a group of Japanese house bats (pipistrellus abramus), a common species in East Asia, Chang said. They were later joined by myotis formosus flavus, a species endemic to Taiwan.
"The bats leave during winter and return when the temperature rises," Chang said. "Sometimes, in the summer, there are hundreds of bats inhabiting the houses at the same time. On a rough estimate, a bat can eat several hundred, or even a thousand, bugs every night."
Chang said the "bat method" is an effective and natural means of fighting the pests. In addition, the school's pupils have had a better chance to observe and understand these animals up close.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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