14 DAY TRIAL // News from Australia says that, a few days ago, a fairly odd incident occurred in this country. Long story short, some 100,000 bats fell from the sky and died.
While some might be tempted to yell “Hallelujah” should they find themselves in a situation where it is raining men, people in Queensland were not at all happy about having thousands of dead or dying bats descend upon them.
“Don't touch them, they're stressed. If they do break your skin you can get a vaccination,” Bat Rescue spokesman told the public shortly after the first bats landed on the ground.
Despite this warning, Mirror says that some 16 people needed medical attention and were administered anti-viral treatment after they came a tad too close to some of these animals and got scratched by them.
Specialists explain that, as far as they could tell, the death of these bats was caused by the heatwave that recently hit Australia.
Specifically, the animals were killed by the over 43 degrees Celsius (109 degrees Fahrenheit) temperatures recorded in said state.
“The heatwave was basically a catastrophe for all the bat colonies in southeast Queensland,” said Michael Beatty, a spokesperson for the RSPCA [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals], as cited by Huffington Post.
“That's obviously going to have a pretty disturbing impact on those colonies and those colonies are vital to our ecosystem,” he went on to explain.
All in all, about 25 colonies of bats are estimated to have been badly hit be the heatwave.
Up until now, wildlife services and trash collectors have managed to remove thousands of bats’ carcasses from several parts of Queensland. However, it appears that they still have quite a lot of work to do cleaning up the state.
Despite the fact that the animals' bodies do not exactly smell pleasant, ordinary folks have been asked not to remove them themselves and instead wait for trained staff to do so.