As temperatures rose to 111.5 degrees Fahrenheit (44.2 degrees Celsius) in Campbelltown in the Australian state of New South Wales, a colony of flying fox bats that lives near the town's train station felt the effects. Volunteers struggled to rescue the heat-stricken bats, according to the Campbelltown-Macarthur Advertiser, but at least 204 individual animals, mostly babies, died.
"They basically boil," Kate Ryan, the colony manager for the Campbelltown bats, told the newspaper. "It affects their brain â their brain just fries and they become incoherent."
Australia is no stranger to extreme heat, but climate change is tilting the odds toward more heat waves, said Gerald Meehl, the head of the climate change research section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
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