After years of housing too many bats, part of UF's bat house collapsed Sunday.
As a result, UF could end up spending about $10,000 on repairs and the campus could see an influx of homeless bats taking up residence in the attics and crevices of its buildings, said Ken Glover, UF's pest management coordinator.
The house, located on Museum Road across from Lake Alice, was home to an estimated 200,000 bats that weighed in at nearly one ton, Glover said.
The structure's roosting fins, a series of plywood boxes attached to the inside of the roof, fell to the ground, killing about 100 bats, he said.
"They just overloaded the roofing structure," he said.
The rest of the bats had already left the house for the night to seek food, he said. No people were injured.
Glover recovered around 80 dead bats Monday afternoon to be examined by the Florida Musuem of Natural History at the museum's request, he said.
It's not clear when it collapsed, but Glover said he was notified around 8:30 p.m. Sunday.
He said the structure can still house about 100,000 bats.
The partial collapse could renew talks of building a new bat house, Glover said.
The colony of bats has grown too large for the house in recent years, which has led bats to form small colonies in on-campus buildings like Larson Hall and the HPNP complex, he said.
A new bat house could cost about $60,000, he said, and might take four to six weeks to build.
If UF decides to build a new bat house, he said, funding will be sought from various sources. The UF Foundation, which handles donations to UF, and the Florida Bat Conservancy are two potential sources of funding, he said.
In the meantime, the money for repairs will likely come from UF's building maintenance budget, he said.
The bat house was built in 1991, at a cost of about $20,000, to relieve the bat infestation at Percy Beard Track. The bats began living in the concrete stands after Johnson Hall, UF's old cafeteria, burned down in 1987, he said. Before the fire, a couple thousand bats had been living in the attic of the building, which was located at the site of the current Academic Advising Center.
For reasons that are still unclear, the bats didn't start living in the structure until 1995.
With the possibility that more bats could migrate to campus buildings, Glover said it is important that people don't try to touch the bats if they see them.
Many bats carry rabies, he said, which can be deadly.
He urged anyone who finds a bat on campus from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. to call UF's pest control at 392-1904. For after-hours bat discoveries, he said, the University Police Department can be notified by calling 392-1111.
Staff writer Andrew Stanfill contributed to this story.
