What’s the News: Bats are an economic boon worth approximately $23 billion per year, and possibly up to $54 billion, to U.S. agriculture, a study in today’s issue of Science estimates. Their voracious appetite for insects—a colony of 150 brown bats eats about 1.3 million pesky, crop-chomping bugs each year—means that bats function as effective, and free, natural pesticides.

How the Heck:

A previous study found that bats saved farmers an average of $74 an acre in pesticides (ranging from $12 to $174 an acre), across eight cotton-growing counties in southeastern Texas.
Using that figure as a jumping-off point, the researchers extrapolated how much the disappearance of bats across the nation would cost per year. They came up with the yearly cost of $3.7 billion to $54 billion, putting their own estimate at $22.9 billion.
That estimate, they point out, just includes money saved purchasing pesticides; it doesn’t take into account secondary costs, like the impact of pesticides on the environment.

What’s the Context:

Unfortunately, bats are dying at an alarming rate. The mysterious, as-yet-incurable white-nose syndrome has killed over a million bats in the U.S. and Canada since 2006.
Nor is white-nose syndrome ...