Dirty, ugly, harmful, nasty. All these words may be used by society to describe the only flying mammal: The bat. But in reality bats completely oppose the stereotype that society has granted them. In Mexico 
bats play a very important role in the ecosystem and unfortunately they are becoming extinct due to the negative stereotype which is hard to wipe off.
To be conscious aware of the great damage that a lack of bats would cause to nature, first I would like to tell you some facts about bats. Bats live in every part of the world and they come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. There are 1,000 different classes of bats, which makes them the most varied specie on earth and they are less related to each other than a tiger to a see oter. Only 3 out of these 1,000 are blood-eating, the rest of them are fruit-eating or insectivorous, helping in flower polination or controlling the proliferation of insects. Only half of 1% of the 997 classes of non-blood eating bats carry rabies, and will rarely tansmitt it to humans or other animals due to their insect- or fruit-eating habits. A mother bat can only raise one baby a year. Bats are as clean as cats, they are constantly grooming themselves and their mates. Bats are not blind and use echolocation to detect things as fine as a human hair. Bats are highly intellingent and easily trained. An insect-eating bat can eat up to 500 insects in an hour. A large colony of fruit-eaters can spread on the gound up to 1 ton of seeds in their dropping of one night, within a radius of 50 km. Guano (which is bats' fecal wastes) is one of the chapest and most powerful fertilizers; it only takes someone to pick it up from the caves and it is ready to use.
The blood-eating bats are called vampires and they only exist in Latin America. In México a lot of campesinos have problems with vampire bats, and since they are not well-educated about how to protect against them, they close up, poisson and even mine caves killing millions and millions of the harmless bats. This problem has reach such extent that bats in Mexico have becomed an endangered specie. But what
problems would the extinction of the bat can carry to Mexican nature? First of all bats are a very important link in the ecosystem chain. Bats have more or less the same function as bees, but during the night. Many flowers open during the night and bats are the only ones who can polinate them. Without bats a lot of vegetation would die. Many tropical fruits fully rely on bats for their reproduction. Also without bats a lot of campesinos will suffer of all kinds of insect plagues on their crops. Insects are the most proliferous and bats help control this due to their high capacity to consume them. For example, a large colony of bats can eat up to 1/4 of a million pounds of insects in one night, in weight this equals to 23 Asian elephants!
Bats are being dangerously misunderstood, due to human prejudices. It is up for the new generations, that with their ecological awareness realize how important bats are to nature and human beings, and start killing that groundless stereotype. BATS ARE HARMLESS, BATS ARE CLEAN, BATS ARE EVEN PRETTY. BATS ARE THE WORLD'S MOST NATURALLY GENTLE ANIMAL. BATS ARE LIKE ANY OTHER ANIMAL AND NEED HUMAN PROTECTION.
