Minding the Life Web

Forgive us the pun, but it seems the bridge builders in Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Works have gone batty. In addition to worrying about load factors, engineers replacing an old timber bridge in Topanga are figuring out how to make the new concrete span the kind of place bat colonies will want to call home.

Bats, it turns out, don’t much care for the streamlined designs of most bridges, preferring instead to spend their days hanging upside down from the nooks and crannies of old-fashioned wood bridges. So the California Department of Transportation borrowed plans from Texas and helped design a bat-friendly bridge with lots of crevices. Plus, the project is timed to minimize impact on the bats’ gestational cycle and has been delayed a year to find temporary homes for the bats.

Why all the fuss over a bunch of flying mammals? Bats play a critical role in the tightly knit web that holds life together. They are voracious insect eaters. And heading into summer after a wet winter, experts predict a big bug season. Accommodating the bats accounts for just 1% of the bridge project’s $300,000 budget--small change, really. And a small price to keep the web intact.