{"id":355857,"date":"2026-03-20T09:21:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T09:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/355857\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T09:21:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T09:21:14","slug":"the-smallest-bat-in-the-world-is-the-size-of-a-bumblebee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/355857\/","title":{"rendered":"The Smallest Bat in the World Is the Size of a Bumblebee"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The natural habitat of the bumblebee bat is extremely limited. These tiny bats live in limestone caves along rivers in western Thailand and nearby areas of southeast Myanmar.<\/p>\n<p>Most known colonies occur in caves near the Khwae Noi River in Thailand. A smaller Myanmar population exists across the border, though the groups are separated enough that there is no gene flow between them.<\/p>\n<p>Within these caves, the bats roost high on the walls or on the ceilings of dome-shaped chambers, often far from cave entrances. Colonies are relatively small, usually averaging around 100 individuals.<\/p>\n<p>Because their habitat is restricted to a few cave systems in a small geographic region, scientists consider the species particularly vulnerable to environmental changes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The natural habitat of the bumblebee bat is extremely limited. These tiny bats live in limestone caves along&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":355858,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":["post-355857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/355858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}