The smallest mammal

Bumblebee bat is world’s smallest

It’s a hummingbird… it’s a bumblebee… it’s Kitti’s hog-nosed bat. Yes, seriously, look at it: it’s a bat. A teensy, tiny, teeny, weeny bat.

Kitti’s hog-nosed bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai) is debatably the world’s smallest mammal and most definitely the world’s smallest bat. Informally known as the bumblebee bat, Kitti’s hog-nosed bat is about the size of a large bumblebee, weighing in at just two grams — about the weight of two Skittles. Again, seriously. It’s also just one of around 440 bat species found in Asia — a continent that houses more than one third of the world’s 1,200 bat species.

“It is [an] incredibly tiny creature — even smaller than my thumb (though I have small hands already),” researcher Pipat Soisook told Mongabay.

 A well-known bat expert (a chiropterologist), Soisook is the mammal curator at the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Natural History Museum in Thailand, one of only two countries where Kitti’s hog-nosed bat, or the bumblebee bat, lives. Myanmar is the other.

Soisook has had the pleasure of seeing many bumblebee bats in the wild, where they generally live in small colonies; they refrain from crowding together like many other bat species. When you see the bats in a cave, he said, these miniature mammals “just look like black spots on the cave wall, and you may not realize they are actually bats without going in close enough.”

The world’s tiniest bat, the bumblebee bat, rests on a researcher’s finger. Credit: Yushi Osawa / Bat Conservation International

The world’s tiniest bat, the bumblebee bat, rests on a researcher’s finger. Photo by Yushi Osawa / Bat Conservation International

Even museum specimens of the species impress. Emma Teeling, with University College Dublin, said that when she has examined species specimens she “was blown away by its perfection and small size.”

The bumblebee bat is important for another reason: it’s utterly unique. This single species alone represents an entire family of bats, the Craseonycteridae, which split from the rest some 33 million years ago.