The bats have left the building, but their horrid stench remains.
Last week, a few of the bats on campus likely meandered away from their home in the bat house near Lake Alice and took up residence in one of the classrooms at Weimer Hall.
According to Ken Glover, UF's coordinator for pest management services, the bats do this from time to time, becoming more of a nuisance than an attraction.
But getting them to leave isn't too hard, he said, as the bats were removed before students returned to classes Monday.
"As best we can tell ... there's no sign of the bats anymore," he said. "But we're still dealing with the residual odors."
Mike Foley, a professor of journalism whose office is on the third floor of Weimer, said the smell indicates that the bats haven't left - they've just died in the walls and are rotting.
"In the early days, you could hear them squeaking in the air ducts," he said. "It's unpleasant and I don't know that it's not going to become more unpleasant."
Luckily for the students, the stench has not permeated beyond the the top floor of Weimer.
"It just seems to be in the faculty offices," Foley said. "The classrooms are OK, but the third-floor faculty offices are, yow!"
When they're not terrorizing the nostrils of journalism professors, the bats are usually hanging out in one of their two local houses.
A new bat house near Lake Alice was built to replace the old one, which collapsed under the weight of the more than 100,000 bats that live inside.
According to Glover, a second house, called the bat farm and built right next to the bat house, was necessary to allow the colony to continue to grow.
There are at least three different species of bats in the house: Brazilian free-tailed bats, southeastern mouse-eared bats and evening bats, Glover said.
Many students and Gainesville residents like to visit the bat houses in the early evening to watch them emerge en masse as the sun goes down.
