Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's your friend's new baby who looks kind
Speaker 1: of like a turtle, but in the best way. Ali
Speaker 1: Ward back with another episode of Ologies. We're rounding the
Speaker 1: corner to finishing Spookctober, and I meant for this to
Speaker 1: be the last Halloweeny episode, but guess what. I talked
Speaker 1: to this ologist for three frickin hours and I'm making
Speaker 1: it a double so buckle up for bats, because holy guano,
Speaker 1: it's ban out. I loved every second I spent with
Speaker 1: his expert this episode. Next week's episode some of my favorites. Okay,
Speaker 1: but before we get into it, if you thank you uptop,
Speaker 1: including everyone on Patreon, Patreon dot com, slash ologies who
Speaker 1: supports the podcast. Y'all are the foundation of funding for it.
Speaker 1: Thank you to everyone wearing Ologies merch from ologiesmarch dot com.
Speaker 1: Thank you to all who make sure they're subscribed, who
Speaker 1: rate the podcast and keep it up in the charts.
Speaker 1: Of course, you folks who leave reviews for me to
Speaker 1: read like a weird lurking monkey so I can pick
Speaker 1: a new one each week, such as the Narn goddess
Speaker 1: who says from disaster took perfection from entropy to order.
Speaker 1: Somehow this podcast encompasses the sacred, the profane, and the
Speaker 1: mundane in a way that makes us delight in every revelation,
Speaker 1: and finally, at the end of the day, we emerge
Speaker 1: from each episode icky and radiant, like a shiny penny
Speaker 1: barfed up by a hagfish. It's absolutely delightful, as are
Speaker 1: you the narn Goddess. Thank you for that. Also Rory Watts,
Speaker 1: who says imposter syndrome is super real and that they
Speaker 1: love hearing stories of queer scientists and makes their little
Speaker 1: by heart so happy. So anyway, your reviews, I read
Speaker 1: them and I love them and thank you. Okay, now chiropterology,
Speaker 1: are you ready for the best etymology? Maybe? Ever? As
Speaker 1: soon as I saw this word, I was like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to have to start a podcast the word origin.
Speaker 1: I feel like it rivals pharaoh equinology, which was iron
Speaker 1: horses the study of trains as like the best first date,
Speaker 1: awkward dinner party, stuck in an elevator for a few
Speaker 1: hours killing time trivia. Ever? Okay you ready probably not,
Speaker 1: but here we go. So Cairo means hand, So think
Speaker 1: a chiropractor practices with their hands, So cairo hand and
Speaker 1: put terr like pterodactyl means wing, so Chiroptera bats have
Speaker 1: hand wings. They have hand wings. The wings are made
Speaker 1: of hands, so as mammals, these little critters fly around
Speaker 1: on the floppy membranes of webbings between their long ass
Speaker 1: bony fingers. They've been haunting the night for as long
Speaker 1: as sixty million years. They make up twenty percent of
Speaker 1: all mammal species. They're over fourteen hundred recognized species of bats,
Speaker 1: and we will cover all of them. No, we won't,
Speaker 1: but we're going to do our best. So I heard
Speaker 1: of this ologist through a CBS Innovation Nation story I
Speaker 1: did about bathouses called bat B and B's. And as
Speaker 1: soon as I heard his name and saw a picture
Speaker 1: of him in the nineteen seventies with a pushbrew mustache
Speaker 1: and a headlamp feeding fruit to a megabat, I thought,
Speaker 1: I need to meet this person. I need to befriend
Speaker 1: them at all costs. And I've been like a thirteen
Speaker 1: year old girl on a mission to meet her k
Speaker 1: pop idols. I would accept no other bat expert for
Speaker 1: this topic. So he's been working in this field for
Speaker 1: over five decades, has written several books for lay people
Speaker 1: about bats, including the Secret Lives of bats and America's
Speaker 1: Neighborhood bats. And I'll link those on my website and
Speaker 1: in the show notes. He has published so many academic
Speaker 1: papers on bats, I wouldn't know where to begin listing them.
Speaker 1: He has lectured all over the world. So in September,
Speaker 1: I got myself to Austin, Texas, and I headed to
Speaker 1: this ologist's home office. Okay, I'm in front of Merlin's house.
Speaker 1: What's whole residents? This is so exciting. Okay, my hotel coffee.
Speaker 1: I'm sweating. It's a million degrees in Austin.
Speaker 2: I just I look.
Speaker 1: Sweaty, so nervous. I met his wonderful wife, Paula in
Speaker 1: the driveway. She led me in him.
Speaker 3: How hard you title?
Speaker 1: It's lovely to meet you. I'm Ali Ward. This is
Speaker 1: a dream come true to talk to you about bats.
Speaker 1: I can't even tell you. This is far from his
Speaker 1: first media appearance. This dude is America's chiropterology darling, the
Speaker 1: go to for back questions the world over. He's even
Speaker 1: appeared on David Letterman in nineteen eighty four because of
Speaker 1: his bat knowledge.
Speaker 3: This is this bat, and you see how small he is.
Speaker 4: This bat is the one that sends thousands of otherwise mature, grown,
Speaker 4: brave men cowering, running in.
Speaker 3: Tear every year.
Speaker 4: I know of two cases in the last few months
Speaker 4: in Wisconsin. One man broke his leg falling downstairs getting
Speaker 4: away from one of these guys.
Speaker 3: One broke his arm swinging a tennis racket around a
Speaker 3: door jam. How can I You can touch it?
Speaker 4: I don't want to hold him now, you got to admit.
Speaker 1: So I winged it. Oh, I was nervous. We talked
Speaker 1: for three hours. So this episode is broken into two
Speaker 1: weeks and we cover what is a bat? How big
Speaker 1: are they? How small are they? Will they attack? Why
Speaker 1: are people so scared of them? How do they evolve
Speaker 1: to fly? How do they sleep upside down? How scary
Speaker 1: are caves? Which ones guzzle blood? How do they protect
Speaker 1: us from mosquitoes? Can you train a bat? Why are
Speaker 1: they so cute? What's the deal with guano? The latest
Speaker 1: on white nose syndrome, which is not a drug problem.
Speaker 1: What is the best time and place to see bats?
Speaker 1: And how can you help bats by letting them crash
Speaker 1: in your place? Kind of So hang tight for part
Speaker 1: one and get ready to have a new favorite bat
Speaker 1: expert with conservationist explore Icon, National Treasure and chiropterologist doctor
Speaker 1: Merlin Tuttle. Do you make people address you as doctor
Speaker 1: bat Ever?
Speaker 3: No, but there are a lot of people on this
Speaker 3: planet who know me only as the Batman.
Speaker 1: That's not a bad that's not a bad nickname to have.
Speaker 3: When I was working years ago studying bats in the
Speaker 3: backwoods of Tennessee, the hill Billy moonshiners were always watching
Speaker 3: out for revenuers. And when I would drive into the
Speaker 3: final hollow where they had their moonshine, which I pretended
Speaker 3: not to know where it was en route to my
Speaker 3: bat caves, I would hear them yell across the hallow
Speaker 3: to each other, the Batman's are coming. And I don't
Speaker 3: think they ever knew my real name.
Speaker 1: That's pretty appropriate.
Speaker 3: It was funny, you know, these guys, they had a
Speaker 3: coat of ethics among themselves. It was very strict. You know,
Speaker 3: you turn in a fellow to the revenuers or something,
Speaker 3: and you deserve to die on the spot. It was.
Speaker 3: These weren't. These were tough guys, but they the moment
Speaker 3: I started studying bats in a cave near where they
Speaker 3: were making moonshine. They were down trying to figure out
Speaker 3: who I was and what I was doing, and I
Speaker 3: welcomed them and showed them how I put bands on
Speaker 3: the bats and explained that some of them are coming
Speaker 3: all the way from Florida to the Virginia Tennessee border
Speaker 3: to go hibernate in that cave. And they were so excited.
Speaker 3: They ended up bringing their wives down to see me
Speaker 3: ban bats the next night, and I ended up being
Speaker 3: really good friends with them. And the next winter, as
Speaker 3: I was still coming every ten days to trap at
Speaker 3: the entrance, I was leaping out in my car, and
Speaker 3: they became very concerned. You know, I shouldn't be out
Speaker 3: there in the snowy cold, and so they started inviting
Speaker 3: me to come. They're very poor. The home that they
Speaker 3: had was so poor that if you, they said, we
Speaker 3: couldn't more than three of us go in the kitchen
Speaker 3: at the same time that the floor might fall in.
Speaker 3: And I stayed with them a few nights, but then
Speaker 3: I realized that Hugh Kyle, the primary moonshiner among them,
Speaker 3: slept with a sawed off shotgun in his bed in
Speaker 3: case the revenuers came at night. I decided I didn't
Speaker 3: want to sleep in the middle of a possible battle.
Speaker 1: Oh no, Oh my gosh. As the batman, you weren't
Speaker 1: about to do any crime fighting, Oh my gosh. And
Speaker 1: so your work is probably primarily nocturnal when you're out
Speaker 1: doing field work, or how much of it is nocturnal?
Speaker 1: How much of it is.
Speaker 3: A lot of it's nocturnal? More than I would like
Speaker 3: it these days?
Speaker 1: Someone calling the bat line, that's the batphone.
Speaker 3: Huh well, I mean, if it wasn't probably considered unethical
Speaker 3: or illegal, it would be fun for you to listen
Speaker 3: in on one of these calls from somebody who's terrified,
Speaker 3: thinks they're about to dive. Right, he's because the bat
Speaker 3: got near him last night.
Speaker 1: Oh so he unplugged the batphone. And we continued going
Speaker 1: back in your history. You were born in Hawaii, right,
Speaker 1: and now when did you make the move from the
Speaker 1: island to the mainland and did you grow up around
Speaker 1: caves at all?
Speaker 3: I grew up going into lava tubes in Hawaii. My
Speaker 3: father was very interested in exploring the old lava tubes.
Speaker 3: But there aren't any bats in caves in Hawaii. I
Speaker 3: didn't discover bats until I was at least nine years
Speaker 3: old living in California. I really first discovered them when
Speaker 3: a classmate in the fourth grade brought a dead one
Speaker 3: to school. Cool. We were all curious and looked at it,
Speaker 3: and I took it home and made a steady skin
Speaker 3: out of it. At age nine, a mammalogist came to
Speaker 3: my school to speak about his research on small mammals
Speaker 3: in the jungles of Central America, and I am imediately
Speaker 3: I never forget. I thought, Wow, you mean a scientists
Speaker 3: actually get paid to go have fun adventures in the jungle.
Speaker 3: That's what I want to do.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. So you were inspired from just being a
Speaker 1: wei one.
Speaker 3: So from age nine I got acquainted with the scientists
Speaker 3: who lectured at my school. He told me about a
Speaker 3: book I could get that would teach me how to
Speaker 3: be a memologist, and I started preparing study skins and
Speaker 3: trading specimens with museums.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, So even in high school you were
Speaker 1: starting to work on this kind of in an almost
Speaker 1: professional sense, right.
Speaker 3: Well, I actually it was only age of nine when
Speaker 3: I started doing this.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: I started taking accurate field notes and really getting serious. Actually,
Speaker 3: I published my first two or three papers based on
Speaker 3: high school work.
Speaker 1: You're like the Doogie Howser of bats.
Speaker 3: Douglas Doogie Houser is a whiz kid.
Speaker 1: You're like akin like a baby bat genius. Did you
Speaker 1: ever did you ever waiver in terms of what you
Speaker 1: wanted to do? Did you ever say, like, maybe I'll
Speaker 1: go into farming, or maybe I'll be a nurse or
Speaker 1: was it bats from age nine?
Speaker 3: Well, it starts way back before that. I mean, I
Speaker 3: was clearly a nature buff you know, from the beginning,
Speaker 3: from the time I could talk. I mean, when I
Speaker 3: was less than two years old, I knew when a
Speaker 3: bonner butterfly was about to hatch from its pupa. I
Speaker 3: would rear the caterpillars on a plant stuck in water
Speaker 3: in the window, And when a pupa would be about
Speaker 3: to hatch, I'd run around the house telling my parents,
Speaker 3: you know, come quick, come quick, the butterfly is about
Speaker 3: to come out.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: So I mean, and by the time I was five,
Speaker 3: my father was big time interested in seashells and collecting
Speaker 3: and and so by that time I probably knew nearly
Speaker 3: all the scientific names of the seashells of Hawaii and
Speaker 3: then later I got into snakes, and oh man, I
Speaker 3: could tell you stories endlessly about terrorizing my mother and
Speaker 3: all her friends with my snakes getting loose. And then
Speaker 3: I published I think two papers on shrews before I
Speaker 3: did anything on bads.
Speaker 1: Oh so, people, it's okay to like a lot of things.
Speaker 1: Maybe over time you'll realize a common thread between your interests,
Speaker 1: or a way to link them, or do both, or
Speaker 1: you'll just figure out which one you truly love the most.
Speaker 3: By the time I was nine, there was no question
Speaker 3: I was going to be a mammalogist, and so all
Speaker 3: the way through high school I was out. In fact,
Speaker 3: this is an interesting part of my story in well,
Speaker 3: all through college, I barely graduate from college. In fact,
Speaker 3: I was terrified. The last semester of college. I found
Speaker 3: out at the last minute that if I didn't have
Speaker 3: a C average in my miner I couldn't graduate. And
Speaker 3: I was taking biochemistry and I'm about to flunk it,
Speaker 3: And so I stayed around the clock. I'd study for
Speaker 3: like an hour and then take a twenty minute nap,
Speaker 3: and study for an hour and take a twenty minute nap.
Speaker 3: The reason I was terrified I had a job I
Speaker 3: was going to go directly from college to being co
Speaker 3: director of a four hundred thousand dollars field project for
Speaker 3: the Smithsonian.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, all you needed was that, just that
Speaker 1: piece of paper.
Speaker 3: This was based on the fact that while I was
Speaker 3: near flunking out of school, I was becoming a well
Speaker 3: recognized mammalogist, hanging out with leading mammologists in the field,
Speaker 3: learning from them, and skipping classes while I did it.
Speaker 3: Oh no, And so the funny thing was I finally
Speaker 3: did graduate, got my job at the Smithsonian, but I'd
Speaker 3: been warned that I'd never make it into graduate school
Speaker 3: on my lousy grade.
Speaker 1: Merlin got a bachelor's in zoology at Andrews University in Michigan,
Speaker 1: but he was so focused on field studies of bats
Speaker 1: that he said they had to twist some arms to
Speaker 1: get him admitted to graduate school at the University of Kansas.
Speaker 1: He was admitted on academic probation, and his admission was
Speaker 1: so conditional the school said they might not even keep
Speaker 1: him past his masters even if he wanted to. But
Speaker 1: he got his master's sure enough in systematics and ecology,
Speaker 1: studying the zoo geography of Peruvian bats, and then he
Speaker 1: stayed for his PhD in ecology and evolution. His dissertation
Speaker 1: was on gray bats, and he graduated with honors, becoming
Speaker 1: Doctor Merlin Tuttle in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 3: I gave a commencement address this spring at a school
Speaker 3: where I point out that you don't sit around and
Speaker 3: wait for somebody to tell you how you're going to
Speaker 3: get the biggest job opportunities, the most pay that kind
Speaker 3: of thing, because it's always going to change. Whatever everybody's
Speaker 3: telling the students today is the big job opportunity area
Speaker 3: will probably be glutted five years from now. Pick what
Speaker 3: you're passionate about, and if you're passionate about what you've chosen,
Speaker 3: you're probably going to be in the top five percent
Speaker 3: of people doing it, and you'll get a job regardless
Speaker 3: of where the job market goes. If you're really passionate
Speaker 3: about something, you're smart enough to be a success at it.
Speaker 3: It's not about IQ. It's about dedication and endurance and passion.
Speaker 1: Oh you thought this was just about bats. Oh no way, never, No,
Speaker 1: there's so much self help in here. Oh, get your.
Speaker 3: Heart ready, and I've definitely got the passion.
Speaker 1: And now what is it about? Bats. What drew you
Speaker 1: to them? In terms of all the mammals that you
Speaker 1: could study?
Speaker 3: Well, I start out studying small mammals in general, particularly shrew's.
Speaker 3: Shrews are very very interesting, are they? Oh?
Speaker 1: Very Don't worry. I have my eye on a shrewd expert,
Speaker 1: Doctor Leslie carowainne Oregon. Come coming for you anyway. When
Speaker 1: it comes to mammals, how many really fly? We just
Speaker 1: have bats and sort of gliding gliding squirrels.
Speaker 3: Right, Only bats truly fly?
Speaker 1: Okay, that's what I thought, Is that one thing you
Speaker 1: love about them?
Speaker 3: Well, I think I could have studied almost anything that
Speaker 3: happened to get in my way long enough to keep
Speaker 3: me focused for a while. I went through periods when
Speaker 3: I loved snorkeling on coral reefs, and I could have
Speaker 3: easily been a marine ecologist. I went through a phase
Speaker 3: where I'm collected and identified I think one hundred and
Speaker 3: sixty species of mosses and liver warts. I love nature,
Speaker 3: But I think one of the things that's really made
Speaker 3: me much more successful than I could have been otherwise
Speaker 3: studying bats is I first loved the whole picture all
Speaker 3: living things and had a fascination for them, and so
Speaker 3: it was much easier than for me to understand where
Speaker 3: my animals fit and what their roles were in that system.
Speaker 1: Sure, so you understood the whole puzzle, and so every
Speaker 1: piece in a puzzle becomes really interesting and vital.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, I get internally, at least rather
Speaker 3: upset at people who are just focused on a species
Speaker 3: or a group. And you've got to save these and
Speaker 3: doesn't matter how many others you trample on. These have
Speaker 3: got to be saved. And it's not that way. Bats
Speaker 3: aren't safe until all living things are safe. They're all interlocked, interdependent,
Speaker 3: and so are we. We don't get out of that.
Speaker 1: Merlin, come for the bats and stay for the poetic existentialism.
Speaker 1: He's the best speaking of existence. How do bats define themselves?
Speaker 1: What is a bat? How do you define a bat?
Speaker 1: I know that's a stupid question, but.
Speaker 3: Well, they nurse their young. Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy,
Speaker 3: thought that beats were true primates because they had pectorol
Speaker 3: instead of England old brass primates.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is the flying primate hypothesis, and it relates
Speaker 1: to the flying fox, which is a fruit eating megabat
Speaker 1: as opposed to the smaller insect munching microbats. So side
Speaker 1: note none of them are blind as a bat. These
Speaker 1: little winged fluff muffins have pretty good eyesight, and microbats
Speaker 1: use incredible echolocation sonar to hunt for bugs. But revered
Speaker 1: Australian neuroscientist and vision researcher Jack Pettigrew, who sadly passed
Speaker 1: away earlier this year, had made an interesting discovery about
Speaker 1: megabat brains and vision.
Speaker 3: He discovered that all flying foxes have crossing over neurons
Speaker 3: between the eyes and the midbrain. The yeah, thousands of
Speaker 3: neurons that go between your eyes and your midbrain, and
Speaker 3: in primates they cross over between the two sides, and
Speaker 3: in no other mammal do they. So that was the diagnostic.
Speaker 3: You know, if it has crossing over, it's a primate.
Speaker 3: If it doesn't, it's not. That was accepted for most
Speaker 3: of the history of paleontology. And then Jack found that
Speaker 3: all flying foxes had to cross in over neurons like primates,
Speaker 3: and all of a sudden they threw out the rule.
Speaker 3: I had the good fortune of happening to speak with
Speaker 3: Jack about a month before he passed away, and he said, well, moron,
Speaker 3: it's not going to happen while you and I are
Speaker 3: still alive, but it will happen. There'll be a day
Speaker 3: when they finally decide that flying foxes are primates.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I had no idea that they were
Speaker 1: even up for consideration for it. It's just such an
Speaker 1: honor to just be nominated neuronal evolution.
Speaker 3: You don't evolve new thousands of new neuronal pathways just overnight.
Speaker 3: Those are the slowest parts to evolve. Your fingers may
Speaker 3: get longer or shorter, things like that, but your neurons
Speaker 3: are pretty stable. So when you find thousands of neurons
Speaker 3: that are doing the same things they do in primates,
Speaker 3: you should at least take a good look at what
Speaker 3: that might mean.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and now, when it comes to the evolution of bats,
Speaker 1: where what are their ancestors, what are their relatives? What
Speaker 1: are these beautiful, very fuzzy skypuppies as they're called come from.
Speaker 3: That's probably a pretty debatable subject. When I started studying bats,
Speaker 3: we recognize just a little over eight hundred species. Now
Speaker 3: it's almost fourteen hundred.
Speaker 1: There are more and more people maybe going into areas
Speaker 1: that haven't been explored or caves or do we have
Speaker 1: better technology? Why such a jump in the number of species.
Speaker 3: Well, for a very long time, bats weren't very studied.
Speaker 3: I mean, you could go through a whole major in
Speaker 3: biology and all you'd find out about baths was there
Speaker 3: was this order chiropter and they flew and everybody ignored them.
Speaker 3: And bats haven't always been the easiest thing to study,
Speaker 3: even if you wanted to study them. But with modern technology,
Speaker 3: we're coming up with a whole lot more ways of
Speaker 3: looking at bats.
Speaker 1: Okay, So a bat is a mammal covered in fur
Speaker 1: that gives birth, to live young, and makes milk, and
Speaker 1: each one has a little belly button and it's the
Speaker 1: only mammal capable of true flight. Also, you know how
Speaker 1: their wings are really just big webbed hands. So imagine
Speaker 1: if you had a stubby clawed thumb and then your
Speaker 1: fingers got longer and longer until you're pinky was as
Speaker 1: long as your whole body and webbed, and then you
Speaker 1: were like later losers and flew away. How badass? Are you?
Speaker 2: So badass?
Speaker 1: Also, bats used to be classified by their coat color,
Speaker 1: which Merlin says was bunk because some bats are bright
Speaker 1: orange in the wild and brown in captivity. Others change
Speaker 1: color after their weaned. So yes, actually, speaking of let's
Speaker 1: talk about teeny tiny bat babies. Shall we squirmy little
Speaker 1: smush faced, seashell eared fuzzy wigglers? Can you walk me
Speaker 1: through a little bit of a life cycle of a bat?
Speaker 3: Well, it's very different for different kinds of bats. Most
Speaker 3: bass produced just one puppy year, and that's part of
Speaker 3: why they're so easily threatened with extinction. They form the
Speaker 3: largest aggregations of any mammal except Homo sapiens. Oh wow,
Speaker 3: And they not only form these huge aggregations in very
Speaker 3: vulnerable places like caves, but they only produce one puppy
Speaker 3: year per mom. Their program for long life span, forty
Speaker 3: plus year old bats have been found.
Speaker 1: What that's crazy. I didn't know that they could live
Speaker 1: that long.
Speaker 3: They're the longest lived mammals on the planet for their size.
Speaker 1: That's not because normally typically isn't there a metabolism of
Speaker 1: smaller mammals typically shorter and they live they live less time?
Speaker 3: Do they have different heart rodents? Are lucky to get
Speaker 3: in two years?
Speaker 1: Right? Yeah? So how are they doing it? Do you think?
Speaker 3: Well? Bats are just totally different, and it largely centers
Speaker 3: around these long life spans. And if you're going to
Speaker 3: be as sophisticated and live as long as they do,
Speaker 3: you'd better be sophisticated socially. And they have a lot
Speaker 3: of smarts. In fact, when I first banded gray bats,
Speaker 3: I had big time suspitions that they were having friendships
Speaker 3: that you know, like these four or five baths knew
Speaker 3: each other and would travel around each together. Because I
Speaker 3: had groups of up to several baths that I had
Speaker 3: caught all at the same time. Like, let's see, I
Speaker 3: found a little cluster them in a cave and I
Speaker 3: can't put a handnet under them. They dropped in. I
Speaker 3: caught him, and I banded him. Well, I have caught
Speaker 3: some of those groups five ten years later, sometimes hundreds
Speaker 3: of miles away, still together.
Speaker 1: No, they have bat packs.
Speaker 3: I could tell because I banded my baths at known
Speaker 3: ages when they're just learning to fly coming out a
Speaker 3: certain case. I know where they came from, and I
Speaker 3: knew how old they were, and I knew that some
Speaker 3: of these baths weren't just mom, you know, mom, pop
Speaker 3: or brother sister, And so that led me to a
Speaker 3: lot of wondering. But it was only in the last
Speaker 3: few years that there was a paper published done on
Speaker 3: some really good research that could document that kind of thing,
Speaker 3: concluding that bats have social systems strikingly similar to those
Speaker 3: of whales, dolphins, and primates.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, do you think that they can communicate
Speaker 1: with their sonar to each other?
Speaker 3: Well, bats have a much bigger repertoire of communication ability
Speaker 3: certainly than we do.
Speaker 1: Really, how are they communicating?
Speaker 3: They can hear our low frequencies, and they can hear
Speaker 3: extremely high frequencies. They have a much broader range of hearing.
Speaker 3: In fact, I years ago stuyed froggating bats, and when
Speaker 3: I discovered that a bat eight frogs, the herpetologists all
Speaker 3: laughed and they didn't believe it because they'd never seen
Speaker 3: a bat chasing a frog. And the hearing specialists, the
Speaker 3: foremost hearing physiologists in America, nixed my first grant proposal
Speaker 3: to study it because they said that is impossible for
Speaker 3: a bat to hear the low frequencies of frog calls.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry. They ended up doing research on how they
Speaker 3: did it.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Okay, side note, a research institute just
Speaker 1: called the Bat Lab in Tel Aviv has been analyzing
Speaker 1: fifteen thousand different noises that bats make, and they made
Speaker 1: a recent discovery that a lot of the time they're
Speaker 1: nestled together in colonies, kind of a mix between a
Speaker 1: cuttle party and a rush hour commuter train from New Jersey.
Speaker 1: Those noises are bats bickering. Yep, just bitching at each other,
Speaker 1: like Jesus, Eric over who farted? Who ate a grasshopper
Speaker 1: and farted? So yes, bat squeaking is so much drama
Speaker 1: in a language you can't understand. Holy shit, do I
Speaker 1: wish that nature had subtitles? So do you think that
Speaker 1: they are forming these social associations for survival and just
Speaker 1: psychological well being?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, if you're going to live at forty
Speaker 3: some years and you're going to have a complex lifestyle.
Speaker 3: I mean, look the gray bats that I stayed. For example,
Speaker 3: you'll have a hibernation cave where maybe a half million
Speaker 3: or even a million or more come to hibernate in
Speaker 3: one site. Some of the destination caves, one of them
Speaker 3: had an entrance so small and well concealed that after
Speaker 3: I'd been going there years, I would still sometimes park
Speaker 3: my car and spend twenty minutes looking for the cave entrant.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: And you've got to understand that these bats probably can't
Speaker 3: detect much with their echo location more than maybe thirty
Speaker 3: feet or so in front. That's not a whole long ways.
Speaker 3: They're having to cross terrain that is changing constantly. I mean,
Speaker 3: we're cutting down forests, we're building cities, we're doing everything
Speaker 3: under the sun to change things on them. You've got
Speaker 3: to be pretty damn sophisticated to figure all just your
Speaker 3: travel routes out. You know, there's a pay were published
Speaker 3: a long time ago that showed that there was a
Speaker 3: species of bat that didn't eat frogs, that homed in
Speaker 3: on ponds where frogs were calling, just as an indicator
Speaker 3: of where they would find the most insects.
Speaker 1: Oh god, that's amazing. Merlin says bats are important in
Speaker 1: controlling agricultural past two like the corn earworm moths, and
Speaker 1: on top of that, they are excellent meteorologists. So if
Speaker 1: you see a bat, just kindly stop it and excuse me.
Speaker 1: Pardon me, well, I need an umbrella tomorrow. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you can stop them, well speed demons.
Speaker 3: They can fly thousands of feet above ground catch tailwinds,
Speaker 3: and go one hundred mile close to one hundred miles
Speaker 3: an hour, so that they can really, you know, if
Speaker 3: they can figure out where the storm disturbances or things
Speaker 3: are happening, they know where the insects are happening. And
Speaker 3: we've probably got a lot more to learn about that.
Speaker 3: But just to illustrate how important the bats can be
Speaker 3: to crop protection, the bats just from Bracken Cave alone,
Speaker 3: the cave that I spent twenty years getting protected near
Speaker 3: San Antonio, just those bats tend to twenty million of
Speaker 3: them eat between one hundred and two hundred tons of
Speaker 3: insects in a night, a night, in a night.
Speaker 1: Oh god.
Speaker 3: And now get this, One of those bats, just one
Speaker 3: can eat enough corner worm laws to prevent them from
Speaker 3: laying twenty thousand or more eggs. That's enough to force
Speaker 3: the Texas farmer to spray multiple acres with pesticides at
Speaker 3: a cost of seventy four dollars an acre.
Speaker 1: You said you weren't good at math, but I'm starting
Speaker 1: to doubt that better math you are. That's amazing. So
Speaker 1: the importance of them for pest control.
Speaker 3: Is huge Nationally. It's been conservatively estimated to be worth
Speaker 3: twenty three billion a summer.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3: But the sad thing is that we're just looking at
Speaker 3: the tip of the iceberg of what should be most
Speaker 3: of of America's bats were probably lost before we were born.
Speaker 1: Really, now, what caused that decline? Was it loss of habitat?
Speaker 3: Loss of habitats a big factor. Loss of habitat is what,
Speaker 3: of course happens when people get scared and starts burning
Speaker 3: their caves.
Speaker 1: Marlin told me that two decades ago, in one part
Speaker 1: of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park, he was able to
Speaker 1: convince park officials to remove a concrete door that they'd
Speaker 1: put up at the entrance of a cave and make
Speaker 1: a friendlier to the bats who used to live there.
Speaker 1: And the bats were like, oh shit, wow, okay, thank you, and.
Speaker 3: The parks staff were really proud this time to show
Speaker 3: me that in twenty years we'd gone from right at
Speaker 3: zero to three hundred thousand bats in that cave.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's amazing.
Speaker 3: It's not too late to restore bats. But it's too
Speaker 3: late if we don't change our attitudes. And it all
Speaker 3: gets down to attitudes. People fear most what they understand least.
Speaker 3: We all fear more taken off on a plane than
Speaker 3: riding to the airport in a taxi, and yet the
Speaker 3: taxi is far more dangerous. Yeah, it just seems to
Speaker 3: be the way we are. And it's been very easy
Speaker 3: to scare people about rabies and bats, disease and bats.
Speaker 3: Did you know that you're actually almost twice as likely
Speaker 3: to die of a coke vending machine falling on you
Speaker 3: as you are a bat. Rabies in America, I believe.
Speaker 1: It, same with sharks. Sharks skill like five people a year.
Speaker 1: Relin says, way more people die of food poisoning at picnics,
Speaker 1: from dog attacks, maybe even from falling coconuts. In America,
Speaker 1: your chance of dying by rabies is about two million
Speaker 1: times less likely than your death by diabetes. And no, lie,
Speaker 1: I left over confetti cake for breakfast. I should have
Speaker 1: been terrified of it. I've thrown it at a wall
Speaker 1: and run screaming. Based on those odds.
Speaker 3: If bats were even fractionally as dangerous disease wise as
Speaker 3: they're purported to be, people like me would have been
Speaker 3: dead eons ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Have you ever had a bat by?
Speaker 3: You ever had a bat bite me? I'm probably the
Speaker 3: world's foremost authority on bat bites.
Speaker 1: What is it like when they bite you?
Speaker 3: Now, I'm not a guy to brag about being bit
Speaker 3: I don't want to encourage people to be careless and
Speaker 3: get bit by any animal they don't know, or even
Speaker 3: when they do know. But here's the key. I've never
Speaker 3: been bitten by a bat that wasn't bite in self
Speaker 3: defense because I was handling him and he was frightened.
Speaker 3: I have never been attacked by a bat. I've been
Speaker 3: surrounded by millions at a time, for days at a
Speaker 3: time in their caves. I've personally photographed more than three
Speaker 3: hundred species in every part of the world where they exist,
Speaker 3: and I've still not seen an aggressive bat. And yet
Speaker 3: what you hear in these people whined to Garris because
Speaker 3: there's big money in it. We hear that bats are
Speaker 3: sneaking around buying people in their sleep without them knowing it.
Speaker 1: Merlin and other bat researchers, like veterinarians, have gotten pre
Speaker 1: exposure vaccination against rabies. That just protects them against defensive
Speaker 1: bites from some unfamiliar critters they handle. So unprotected. People
Speaker 1: bitten by any animal, of course, should get advice regarding
Speaker 1: a possible need to be vaccinated and to have the
Speaker 1: animal tested for rabies. Just be safe.
Speaker 3: If I'm trying to scare you into taking your rabies shots,
Speaker 3: I'll tell you that almost every person in America who
Speaker 3: gets rabies gets it from a bat. True, But did
Speaker 3: you know that's only one and a half people a
Speaker 3: year out of the whole US and Canada combined.
Speaker 1: One and a half people a year and.
Speaker 3: One and a half people per year. I mean you risk.
Speaker 3: You put your life greater risk driving one mile in
Speaker 3: a motorized vehicle than your annual risk of rabies in America.
Speaker 3: And the good news is that for anybody who simply
Speaker 3: doesn't handle bats, the odds of contracting rabies or any
Speaker 3: disease from bat are right at zero.
Speaker 1: So we recorded this at Merlin's kitchen table in Austin,
Speaker 1: which is of course known for its caves and bats
Speaker 1: and attractive people in bands.
Speaker 3: Look at the Congress Avenue bridge right here in Austin.
Speaker 3: When hundreds of thousands of baths started moving into that bridge,
Speaker 3: public health people warned that they were rabid, dangerous, would
Speaker 3: attack people. People signed petitions demanding that they'd be eradicated.
Speaker 3: They're right on the verge of doing it when I
Speaker 3: came here and convinced the city that they might be
Speaker 3: better off saving the bats. Today, decades later, we're still
Speaker 3: waiting for the first person to be attacked. We're still
Speaker 3: waiting for the first person to contract a disease. The
Speaker 3: bats are simply eating tons of insects nightly and bring
Speaker 3: in millions of tourist dollars every summer. You can't find
Speaker 3: a better safer neighbor, my neighbor.
Speaker 1: Now, what about people who want to put up bat
Speaker 1: boxes in front of their or you know, on their house.
Speaker 3: Well, it's a great idea if you're going to go
Speaker 3: to all that trouble or expense, so just be sure
Speaker 3: you do it right. If you go to my website,
Speaker 3: there's a resource on my website at Merlin Tuttle dot
Speaker 3: org that tells you how to recognize a good bathouse
Speaker 3: from one that isn't good, and even less several producers
Speaker 3: that make good ones that I have personally tested.
Speaker 1: Okay, side note. A bathouse is a relatively flat, usually wooden,
Speaker 1: structure about the size of a suitcase, and you can
Speaker 1: mount it on your house or barn about twelve to
Speaker 1: twenty feet off the ground so little flying critters can
Speaker 1: nestle up and roost in it like little snugly furry sardines.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm the one that first introduced bad houses to America.
Speaker 1: You did? Was that a hard sell?
Speaker 3: The hard sell was with my colleagues. Really, I had
Speaker 3: several leading colleagues who actually one of them even published
Speaker 3: a scientific paper claiming that bad houses didn't work, and
Speaker 3: it was unfortunate that, without naming me specifically, that some
Speaker 3: people were promoting them to raise money despite the fact
Speaker 3: they didn't work. And all of these people that made
Speaker 3: those kind of claims ended up using them as research
Speaker 3: sites for their students when they worked.
Speaker 1: Did they ever issue a public formal apology? No, if
Speaker 1: I still owe you one. So I didn't want to
Speaker 1: take up too much of Merlin's time, and I thought
Speaker 1: I'd just move on to the Patreon questions. But as
Speaker 1: we have established, Merlin is the best, and he was
Speaker 1: in no hurry to wrap up the bat facts.
Speaker 3: Before we get there, though, let me point out, you
Speaker 3: know that there's a lot of interesting people find out
Speaker 3: that they couldn't have margaritas without bats. Oh really, Mexico's
Speaker 3: tequila and mescal industries, which those products sell for billions
Speaker 3: of dollars annually, could be lost. Without bats to pollinate
Speaker 3: the agavees which produced those products. The whole chewing gum
Speaker 3: industry might never have existed if it wasn't for the
Speaker 3: chicklay tree, that is bat seed dispersed.
Speaker 1: Okay, side note, there was a study done recently in Indonesia,
Speaker 1: which is one of the top three suppliers of cacao beans,
Speaker 1: and researchers found that bats saved farmers nearly eight hundred
Speaker 1: million dollars a year by eating bugs. So every time
Speaker 1: you see chocolate, wink at it and say, hey, bats, thanks,
Speaker 1: you did this. You did this to my mouth, and
Speaker 1: I'm grateful.
Speaker 3: The whole world price of chocolate could go up without bats.
Speaker 1: What areas of the country tend to have more bats
Speaker 1: because I know you're here in Austin where there are
Speaker 1: tons of caves, so bats and spilologists. I imagine our friends.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're We're lucky here in Texas because clear back
Speaker 3: from the Civil War, it was known that bats had
Speaker 3: some value. They mined the guano for saltpeter to make gunpowder.
Speaker 3: In fact, one of the biggest declines ever in American
Speaker 3: bats came during the War of eighteen twelve when extensive
Speaker 3: bat caves were mined for saltpeter for gunpowder.
Speaker 1: Who's taking care of the guano in the caves? Like
Speaker 1: you've got let's say a million bats in a cave.
Speaker 1: There's some droppings, what's normally digesting that? Where's that?
Speaker 3: Well, now you've come to a whole new area. We
Speaker 3: could have spent most of our time talking about bats
Speaker 3: are the primary producers of energy in a cave ecosystem,
Speaker 3: no less than plants are on the surface. Oh wow,
Speaker 3: And there are thousands and thousands of different kinds of
Speaker 3: microorganisms a studiedne bracking cave. I think there was at
Speaker 3: least a thousand species and maybe a couple hundred genera
Speaker 3: of bacteria and a tablespoonful of guano from there, and
Speaker 3: most of them weren't known from any place else. And
Speaker 3: among those they found a whole bunch of them that
Speaker 3: had biotechnological significance. See, when they theyremestic insects in that
Speaker 3: cave feed on the bat droppings, their poop ends up
Speaker 3: creating a lot of ammonia, And they found enzymes that
Speaker 3: are breaking down ammonia feeding on ammonia, and they could
Speaker 3: be used to detoxify some of the worst chemical waste
Speaker 3: of industry in America. They also found bacteria that were
Speaker 3: feeding on kiten, which leads to a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: interesting possibilities. If you're feeding on kiten, would be used
Speaker 3: to convert seafood waste by products, you know, the shels
Speaker 3: of lobsters and shrimp and things like that. You could
Speaker 3: convert that using these bacteria to gas a hole.
Speaker 1: What ps What is gas a hall? I had to
Speaker 1: look this up and it's a blend of gasoline and ethanol. Boom,
Speaker 1: kind of like if your gas tank took some shots
Speaker 1: of everclear that was made from usually leftover agricultural starches,
Speaker 1: and this fuel may offer lower levels of certain emissions.
Speaker 1: Ever Clear into your own personal gas tank of your
Speaker 1: stomach does increase emissions of three am pizza barth, so
Speaker 1: watch out for that. But anyway, bats and caves and
Speaker 1: science in the future.
Speaker 3: But it wouldn't be terribly surprising a someday someone found
Speaker 3: that they had the billion dollar bug from a cave
Speaker 3: system where it wasn't found anywhere else and wouldn't have
Speaker 3: been if it hadn't been for the bats still being there.
Speaker 1: Now, what is it like to do field work in caves?
Speaker 1: And what is that? What does the night of fieldwork
Speaker 1: look like to you? And did you ever feel claustrophobic?
Speaker 3: Hi? You kidding? Well? The day that I made a
Speaker 3: wrong turn and crawled down a real tight squeezed for
Speaker 3: one hundred feet, I felt very claustrophobic. I'd been told
Speaker 3: that there was one hundred thousand bats in this place
Speaker 3: where they'd escape noticed by people. And to get there, oh,
Speaker 3: it was horrible. There was a little passage so small
Speaker 3: you had to lie on your belly or your back
Speaker 3: with your arms either going down along your sides or
Speaker 3: up ahead pinned and squeeze through. And you had to
Speaker 3: siphon water out of the tunnel before you could go in.
Speaker 3: Oh god, and it was forty three degree temperature blowing
Speaker 3: through this. And back then we didn't have wet suits
Speaker 3: or anything. So I'm going through just dressed with long
Speaker 3: John's and jumpsuit on. And so I get good and
Speaker 3: soak and wet. I come out the other side and
Speaker 3: the cavers have told me there's a real tight squeeze
Speaker 3: on the other side, but don't worry. It opens up
Speaker 3: on the other side where the bats are. I'm going in,
Speaker 3: so I go into the real tight squeeze. Don't worry,
Speaker 3: it opens up on the other side where the bats are.
Speaker 3: But I missed the tight squeeze that they found. I
Speaker 3: found another one, and my tight squeeze didn't have any end.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, and I ended up. I don't know
Speaker 3: how long I was in that thing, but back in
Speaker 3: those days, we had six folk batteries that I would
Speaker 3: hang in a pistol off a pistol belt on my side.
Speaker 3: As I crawled down this and my arms pinned up
Speaker 3: in front of me, I couldn't even reach back to
Speaker 3: do anything about my battery. Once I got in there
Speaker 3: and realized that it wasn't going to I wasn't going
Speaker 3: to come out on the other side. And a few
Speaker 3: feet I caught my bat in a tight spot and
Speaker 3: pulled it loose from my head lights, so I didn't
Speaker 3: even have a light. And then I'm squeezing through places
Speaker 3: so tight I'm practically breaking ribs, and I know that
Speaker 3: there's no way I'm going to come out alive if
Speaker 3: I don't find a place to turn around. So I
Speaker 3: have to keep going ahead and I went ahead for
Speaker 3: like about one hundred feet it seemed like a mile,
Speaker 3: and finally found a place where if I had, I swear,
Speaker 3: if I'd been one inch taller, I wouldn't have been
Speaker 3: able to turn around. Oh my god, Oh man, I'm
Speaker 3: freaking out.
Speaker 1: I'm having an anxiety attack listening to this.
Speaker 3: That made me much more careful about what I crawl into.
Speaker 1: How when you got through, when you were able to,
Speaker 1: thank God, turn around and get through, because then you
Speaker 1: had to do the tight squeeze again.
Speaker 3: I wasn't even sure I could get back through it all.
Speaker 1: Oh my god? What was it like when you got out?
Speaker 3: And by the time I got out, Remember by that
Speaker 3: time I would have been hypothermic, I you know, just
Speaker 3: absolutely teeth chattering, and.
Speaker 1: Oh man, what was that like when you got out?
Speaker 1: How did you celebrate that night? Did you just go
Speaker 1: straight home? I would go I'd have been like I'm
Speaker 1: done for the day.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: Or did you go through the next tight squeeze to
Speaker 1: where the bats were?
Speaker 3: I actually did go see where the baths were lived unstoppable.
Speaker 3: Well I wasn't going to go through all that misery
Speaker 3: not find out if the baths were actually there.
Speaker 1: Oh now, how was that tight squeeze? Was that easy?
Speaker 3: Well, it was a tight squeeze for about four feet,
Speaker 3: like they said, and then it opened up.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. So you went through twenty five times
Speaker 1: what you needed to, really fifty times that you needed
Speaker 1: to because you had to come all the way back.
Speaker 1: How are the bats?
Speaker 3: Well, I have found a lot of undiscovered parts of
Speaker 3: caves by looking for bats, because a lot of our
Speaker 3: bats nowadays only survive where people can't find them. And
Speaker 3: so by sometimes following where you see bats disappearing, you
Speaker 3: can find caves that nobody knew about.
Speaker 1: So they're kind of like the tour guides into unknown caves.
Speaker 1: Come follow me.
Speaker 3: We started earlier to talk about what's happened to American bats.
Speaker 3: What the cause of decline is a major major cause
Speaker 3: of decline is loss of hibernation caves. The Mammoth Cave
Speaker 3: system alone had millions, probably tens of millions of bats
Speaker 3: hibernating in Early visitors reported that you could go for
Speaker 3: miles and the walls were solidly covered with bats in
Speaker 3: the winter.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: And they've lost those resources and now they have to
Speaker 3: travel much farther to find a place over winter. When
Speaker 3: they get there, it's often too warm or too cold
Speaker 3: and stresses amount so they have to wait squander energy
Speaker 3: faster than they should. All this makes them vulnerable to
Speaker 3: what else may happen. That's a threat. You know. It's
Speaker 3: like you've got a pie here, and every time you
Speaker 3: take a piece out of it, you got that much
Speaker 3: less energy left for survival. So you know, it's my
Speaker 3: opinion that many of the deaths that have occurred in
Speaker 3: recent years from the fungus that causes white nose syndrome
Speaker 3: may very well not have occurred had the bats not
Speaker 3: lost key hibernation sites and were already suffering at the
Speaker 3: edge of their energy limits right now.
Speaker 1: And that was a question I was going to get
Speaker 1: to you, which I'm glad you brought it up. But
Speaker 1: what is exactly white nose syndrome. This is a fungal infection.
Speaker 3: It's a fungal infection that appears to have been inadvertently
Speaker 3: introduced from Europe. It's found all across Europe in Asia.
Speaker 3: The bats in Europe and Asia rarely are harmed by it.
Speaker 3: They may have been harmed by it a long time ago,
Speaker 3: but they've evolved unity And it's been said that some
Speaker 3: human undoubtedly brought it who went to a cave in
Speaker 3: Europe and then went to a cave in America. But truthfully,
Speaker 3: we don't know how it got here. I think it's
Speaker 3: more probable that a bat came across from Europe and
Speaker 3: a shipping container. They're published records of quite a few
Speaker 3: bats have ended up in the US or UK just
Speaker 3: because they got in a crevice and a shipping container.
Speaker 3: The next thing they knew, they were waking up out
Speaker 3: and see where they couldn't get off, and then they
Speaker 3: ended up in a new country.
Speaker 1: Everybody, Oh my gosh. And so maybe one that was
Speaker 1: infected with it spread it to a cave. Do they
Speaker 1: know the actual area where they first kind of identified
Speaker 1: it on this continent.
Speaker 3: Yes, it was a commercial cave in New York, and
Speaker 3: it's been said that that proved that it was human born.
Speaker 3: But if a new fungus came to a state, where
Speaker 3: would you expect it to be seen first in a
Speaker 3: commercial cave where people are going every day. It doesn't
Speaker 3: mean that people started it there. It just means that
Speaker 3: it was more likely to be found there, right.
Speaker 1: Correlation, of course, is not causation, so more peepers on
Speaker 1: bat noses could just have helped identify it faster. We
Speaker 1: don't know.
Speaker 3: There's been a huge focus on stopping it spread by
Speaker 3: telling people that they couldn't go in caves anymore, and
Speaker 3: that hasn't even slowed the spread because bats are far
Speaker 3: more effective spreaders. Just bats that I banded in one
Speaker 3: cave in northern Alabama ended up being found almost all
Speaker 3: the way into the state of Kansas, into Missouri, into Oklahoma,
Speaker 3: into Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina.
Speaker 1: They're like truckers. They really make the bat around. And
Speaker 1: now are they finding a place to sleep? Every night
Speaker 1: or rather every day? Typically? Are most bats nocturnal? Are
Speaker 1: they sleeping like on a daily schedule?
Speaker 3: The only truly diurnal or at least partially diurnal bats
Speaker 3: are on remote islands where there are very few birds
Speaker 3: of prey. Okay, a bat in the daytime is pretty
Speaker 3: easy prey for a hawk.
Speaker 1: When are they sleeping, like, let's say that they are
Speaker 1: out and about are they returning to the same cave
Speaker 1: unless it's a hibernation period or a migration period.
Speaker 3: Bats are very loyal to specific areas. If you have
Speaker 3: four or five caves fairly close together, they may very
Speaker 3: well move among those. In my study, I banded forty
Speaker 3: some thousand gray bats and track them for twenty years,
Speaker 3: so I got pretty good date on what the bats
Speaker 3: are doing. They were very loyal to a home, what
Speaker 3: I'd call a home. They'd have a nursery cave that
Speaker 3: was center focus. Then they'd usually have a few ba
Speaker 3: I call bachelor caves within a few kilometers around that one.
Speaker 1: Bachelor caves were they mostly dudes. Okay, quick, before the dudes,
Speaker 1: let's divert to some lady batfax. So Merlin says that
Speaker 1: before a female gray bat can breed, for example, she
Speaker 1: has to have access to some insect rich territories, but
Speaker 1: those are usually guarded by the older females who probably
Speaker 1: chatter at them things like back off, Mikayla, this is
Speaker 1: Denise's mosquito patch. She will cut you. So Michaela will
Speaker 1: have to wait before breeding. But in populations that have declined,
Speaker 1: those turf wars don't happen. So lady bats can breed
Speaker 1: easier and earlier if they have access to food stores,
Speaker 1: kind of like if you had a sizzler all to yourself.
Speaker 1: You'd be like, look at all these croutcheons, might as
Speaker 1: well have some kids.
Speaker 3: But most gray bats wait a year or so before
Speaker 3: they act. They'll breed, they'll mate the first fall. But
Speaker 3: my belief is that probably they just if they don't
Speaker 3: get enough energy the next spring to produce a feed
Speaker 3: as they resorb it, which is known to occur in bats.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, they have wonderful birth control methods that they
Speaker 3: don't waste anything. You know, they resort the embryo.
Speaker 1: Wow, they can recycle it if they're like, not a
Speaker 1: good time.
Speaker 3: I don't know whether gray bats resorb or not, but
Speaker 3: some bats do. I know that.
Speaker 1: I'ms it, Daisy, let me just recycle those molecules.
Speaker 3: I did not know that, but any rate, I knew
Speaker 3: one place where a banded female own the same territory
Speaker 3: for at least four consecutive years, and she probably was
Speaker 3: allowing her offspring special access to her territory.
Speaker 1: So it's almost like a dynasty or a legacy territory.
Speaker 3: Well, they know each other, that's so cool.
Speaker 1: I love it. I love that they think that, like
Speaker 1: Han Kamer, four or five of us were friends. They
Speaker 1: come come check out my territory. Some of my insects like, no,
Speaker 1: go for it, go for it. We're good, we're friends.
Speaker 3: Now you asked about you know, are these old dudes
Speaker 3: at the bachelor's caps. No, they're dudes and gals that
Speaker 3: haven't yet can see far enough to produce an offspring.
Speaker 1: Now, do they tend to have the same mate year
Speaker 1: after year?
Speaker 2: Not?
Speaker 3: Gray bats? Oh, gray bats might offend a few people's tastes.
Speaker 3: They have what appears to be a grand old orgy
Speaker 3: every fall. But there are bats that are monogamous really
Speaker 3: and apparently stick together for long periods of time. One
Speaker 3: will stay with the pup in babysit, and the other
Speaker 3: will go out and hunt and bring rats and things back,
Speaker 3: and for the one that's babysitting.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Now, what is the biggest bat in
Speaker 1: the small.
Speaker 3: You've got everything from giant flying foxes with almost six
Speaker 3: foot wingspans.
Speaker 1: Six foot wingspans. Yeah, that's bigger than this table. I
Speaker 1: had no idea they were that big. Yeah, oh my god. Wow. Okay,
Speaker 1: so they're.
Speaker 3: Huge all the way down to tiny little bumblebee bats,
Speaker 3: which actually I'm leading a trip in November to show
Speaker 3: members of Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation. These bats, We're going
Speaker 3: to look at the flying foxes and the bumblebee bats
Speaker 3: on the same trip.
Speaker 1: What where are they?
Speaker 3: Thailand?
Speaker 1: They're both in Thailand. Uh huh my god, that's an
Speaker 1: amazing trip. I might just have to piggyback on that trip.
Speaker 1: Look at that about So in mid November, Merlin is
Speaker 1: leading a group through Thailand to see painted bats, flying foxes,
Speaker 1: we little bumblebee bats and more so is this man
Speaker 1: living his dream or what the answer is? Yes? Also,
Speaker 1: it should be noted that Merlin is an incredible bat photographer.
Speaker 1: In his thousands of bat photos are kind of like
Speaker 1: if bats had a glamour shot studio set up in
Speaker 1: the jungle. He has photos of huge eared bats and
Speaker 1: scrunch face bats and dog looking flying foxes and bright
Speaker 1: orange fuzzy little pups by the bye. Why do some
Speaker 1: bats have long noses like an Irish setter dog and
Speaker 1: others have a face that looks like they pressed a
Speaker 1: vagina against glass and it stayed that way. Well. In general,
Speaker 1: microbats with the squish face eat bugs, and they rely
Speaker 1: on echolocation that comes from and bounces off their mouth
Speaker 1: and their nose leaf, and yeah, that things called a
Speaker 1: nose leaf anyway. Flying fox type megabats, by contrast, tend
Speaker 1: to eat fruit, which they don't have to hunt because
Speaker 1: fruit tends not to fly around innovate them, so they
Speaker 1: don't have all of those nose leaves. Also, is now
Speaker 1: an okay time to list off some of my favorite
Speaker 1: bat names. Okay, good, Just listen to these. The little
Speaker 1: golden mantled flying fox, Patresa's triedent leaf nose bat, eastern sma,
Speaker 1: all footed miotis a mountain tube nosed fruit bat, a
Speaker 1: dragon tube nosed trout bat, demonic tube nosed fruit bat,
Speaker 1: Saint Egen's trumpet eared bat, hoary wattled bat, pungent pipistrelle,
Speaker 1: white bellied yellow bat, wrinkle lipped free tailed bat, cinnamon
Speaker 1: dog faced bat, naked rumped pouch bat, hammer headed fruit bat. Well,
Speaker 1: by the way, the last of which, the hammerhead has
Speaker 1: a face kind of like a warped horse. It looks
Speaker 1: like if you shrunk a moose tiny and then gave
Speaker 1: it wings. If it were a Star Wars creature, people
Speaker 1: would be like, h this is too much. And that
Speaker 1: fills my heart with warm rays of golden sunshine. One
Speaker 1: thing I find so interesting about bats is that their
Speaker 1: head shapes very so so much like that. Isn't there
Speaker 1: a hammerhead bat that just looks like a balloon kind
Speaker 1: of Oh?
Speaker 3: I love those big male hammerhead bats. I never worked
Speaker 3: so hard in my life trying to get a picture
Speaker 3: of a bat. I caught the dos of hammerhead bats,
Speaker 3: but I never got an alpha male.
Speaker 1: I know that the alphas have bigger heads.
Speaker 3: They have bigger heads. Well, they're older and they're more developed.
Speaker 3: Mm hm uh. I've I definitely have the world's most
Speaker 3: nearly complete collection of bat photos.
Speaker 1: Yeah, your bat photos are amazing.
Speaker 3: But I still don't have a fully. Now. I've got
Speaker 3: some pretty nice males, but not the not the gorgeous
Speaker 3: one that I want.
Speaker 1: So you've seen ones that you just haven't been able
Speaker 1: to photograph.
Speaker 3: The reason I don't have the gorgeous one, those alpha
Speaker 3: males are usually way the highest up in the safest
Speaker 3: place courting, and they're not coming down to feed where
Speaker 3: I can catch them. Very much. People are catching those
Speaker 3: are putting nets way up in the canopy of the forest.
Speaker 3: And back when I was trying to catch mine, we
Speaker 3: didn't yet have triple what we call triple high nets
Speaker 3: that we could raise up to where they are.
Speaker 1: And so there are probably unphotographed like alpha male hammerhead
Speaker 1: bats out there.
Speaker 3: Well, people looking for ebola in them have photographed them.
Speaker 3: And that's another sore point with me. You'd think nowadays
Speaker 3: that it had been documented clearly that bats are the
Speaker 3: source of ebola, and yet that's not true at all.
Speaker 3: After all these years of speculating that came from bats
Speaker 3: and spending millions of dollars trying to prove it came
Speaker 3: from bats, Still, in my opinion, the best evidence doesn't
Speaker 3: go to bats.
Speaker 1: Really, where do you think it came from?
Speaker 3: Well, we hadn't don't have any proof yet. Okay. The
Speaker 3: last time they said they had real good evidence that
Speaker 3: ebola might come from bats, they found a piece of
Speaker 3: RNA virus in a insectivorous bat's mouth in a mouth swab.
Speaker 3: They said this was related to ebola, you know it was.
Speaker 3: They couldn't prove it, but it was a genetic fragment
Speaker 3: that could be. But another virologist himself pointed out that
Speaker 3: that could just as easily come from the bat eating
Speaker 3: a mosquito or something that was carrying ebola, making the
Speaker 3: bat a controller instead of a vector.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: What I point out is that even sick bats rarely
Speaker 3: become aggressive. It is so rare that in sixty years
Speaker 3: of studying bats all over the world, hundreds of species,
Speaker 3: I have yet to see an aggressive batter to document
Speaker 3: one actually going out and attacking somebody. I mean a
Speaker 3: vampire bat in Latin America. Yes, may sneak up and
Speaker 3: try and get a nip at night and a bike.
Speaker 3: That's not what we're talking about in the rest of
Speaker 3: the world. Our bats simply if I that's all a
Speaker 3: bath that looked aggressive, I would assume immediately that it
Speaker 3: had rabies. I wouldn't no joking about it, and I'd
Speaker 3: have be treated or have somebody treated if it seemed
Speaker 3: to bitten anybody. But even touching a rabbit bat is
Speaker 3: not an exposure if you're not bitten or exposed to
Speaker 3: an open wound.
Speaker 1: Rabi's side note is a virus that can be transmitted
Speaker 1: from animals to humans, and it is potentially fatal if
Speaker 1: it's not treated. But Merlin says that a fear of
Speaker 1: rabies is very lucrative, so post treatment for rabies, which
Speaker 1: people have been known to get needlessly in a panic,
Speaker 1: without even being bitten by or touching a bat, just
Speaker 1: seeing one. That treatment will run you forty eight thousand
Speaker 1: dollars in some American emergency rooms. Dogs, coyotes, foxes, skunks,
Speaker 1: raccoons can also all carry rabies, but bats are out
Speaker 1: there taking the heat.
Speaker 3: Let me make one point abundantly clear for anybody who
Speaker 3: simply doesn't handle baths, the odds of contracting anty disease
Speaker 3: from any bat are very close to zero.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh, I believe it.
Speaker 3: We hear so much about baths, But did you know
Speaker 3: that worldwide dogs count for ninety nine percent of human rabies,
Speaker 3: about sixty thousand a year, as opposed to probably ten
Speaker 3: a year worldwide from baths. You know, we're kind of
Speaker 3: naturally a little bit frightened of anything we don't know about.
Speaker 3: We don't know much about baths. We only see a
Speaker 3: bat when he's in trouble, dying, or you know, being defensive.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, can I ask you listener questions?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, they have good questions. Okay, before we get
Speaker 1: to your questions. There were almost three hundred and fifty submitted,
Speaker 1: the most for any episode to date. But first, a
Speaker 1: word about some sponsors who make it possible to donate
Speaker 1: to a cause each week. This one was easy. The
Speaker 1: Merlin title Back Conservation. It's an organization that relies on
Speaker 1: a powerful combination of science, field knowledge and photography to
Speaker 1: help save million of bats, to protect public health economies
Speaker 1: and worldwide ecosystems by teaching people to live harmoniously with bats.
Speaker 1: And the founder's a pretty dang cool guy. So a
Speaker 1: donation went directly to that nonprofit at Merlin tuttle dot org.
Speaker 1: And now you may hear some words from sponsors who
Speaker 1: made that possible. Okay, back to the first half of
Speaker 1: your questions, and next week a follow up episode with
Speaker 1: the remainder of your questions and more field adventures from Merlin. Okay,
Speaker 1: First up, Claire Meyer and Heather Densmore asked a similar
Speaker 1: question to this first one. Sarah Ayinucci wants to know
Speaker 1: can bats be trained?
Speaker 3: Absolutely?
Speaker 1: Really?
Speaker 3: Go to my website at Merlin tuttle dot org. Go
Speaker 3: to videos, and you will see a bat training.
Speaker 1: Me training you.
Speaker 3: This bat weighs just four grams that's less than a
Speaker 3: US nickel, so small that I was convinced that there
Speaker 3: was no way you could have trained him. He couldn't
Speaker 3: be smart enough be trained. And yet the first one
Speaker 3: I got, I put it in my walk in studio
Speaker 3: because I was going to photograph it there, and I
Speaker 3: fed it mealworms, hand fed it while I held it
Speaker 3: when I first took it in after I'd caught it,
Speaker 3: and then I left it over the night, came back
Speaker 3: the next day to do some photography. As soon as
Speaker 3: I walked into my studio, the bat flew down and
Speaker 3: started bumping me in the nose, flying up and bumping
Speaker 3: me in the nose. And I wouldn't tell this story
Speaker 3: if I didn't have proof recording. This bat is bumping
Speaker 3: me in the nose time after time. In fact, he
Speaker 3: did it so many times that my wife had time
Speaker 3: to go run and grab another camera and say, oh,
Speaker 3: I got to get this here. Put your shirt on.
Speaker 3: You know, it was really hot and I was without
Speaker 3: a shirt on. Said this is going to be interesting.
Speaker 3: Put your shirt on. And the bat's still doing it,
Speaker 3: and so I finally go. I realized that the bat
Speaker 3: was trying to get my attention. He wasn't attacking me.
Speaker 3: So I got a meal worm. As soon as I
Speaker 3: held the meal worm up to him, he flew right
Speaker 3: up and took the meal worm out of my hand.
Speaker 3: Now here's an animal weighs less than nickel. Never seen
Speaker 3: a human only hours before, never saw meal worm hours before,
Speaker 3: never caught a non flying insect, probably in his life.
Speaker 3: And now he all of a sudden remembers from the
Speaker 3: night before that I'm good for food, and that it's
Speaker 3: better to come bump me in the nose. If he
Speaker 3: wants to get my attention, why is he not bumping
Speaker 3: my shoulder, or my knee, or my hand, you know,
Speaker 3: someplace else. And if this seems almost unbelievable, three years later,
Speaker 3: we went to Taiwan and they caught a bat of
Speaker 3: that same genus, a wooly bat that hadn't been named yet.
Speaker 3: It was a new species.
Speaker 1: Side note, wooly bats look like if you shrunk a
Speaker 1: buffalo and washed and conditioned and blowed rit its hair
Speaker 1: and then stuck huge beige cone ears on it, just
Speaker 1: the fuzziest.
Speaker 3: And they brought it to me to show them how
Speaker 3: to photograph a back catching flying insects, which is a
Speaker 3: real challenge, and so it was. They didn't. It rained
Speaker 3: a lot, and they didn't catch this bat until like
Speaker 3: two nights before I had to leave the country, and
Speaker 3: I figured, God help me, I'll never be able to
Speaker 3: train this bat and do these things in that time.
Speaker 3: And so I decided though I'd go through the motions
Speaker 3: had to. So I take the bat into my studio
Speaker 3: and I came get him to eat meal worms out
Speaker 3: of my hand. He will have nothing to do with
Speaker 3: cooperating at all. So I finally let him go in there.
Speaker 3: But I knew I couldn't keep a small animal like
Speaker 3: that without him having food or he'd die. I mean,
Speaker 3: it'd be very embarrassing to be a leading conservationist killing
Speaker 3: a new species before it got described. God, So I
Speaker 3: released some aws to fly around in there with him.
Speaker 3: Came back a little while later to see if he'd
Speaker 3: eaten any of them. I saw wings on the floor,
Speaker 3: so I said, okay, I can keep him n till
Speaker 3: tomorrow night. Anyway, m the next evening, I come walking in,
Speaker 3: knowing that there was no way I was going to
Speaker 3: photograph this bat because he's a total non cooperator. I
Speaker 3: unzipped the corner and start to come in, and then
Speaker 3: when I came in, he started bumping me in the nose,
Speaker 3: just like the one in Barneo had done. Oh my god, different,
Speaker 3: you know, totally different locality, totally different species.
Speaker 1: I wonder if that's how they nursed. Do you think
Speaker 1: that that's maybe how they get their mother's attention.
Speaker 3: I have no idea, But how would I relate to
Speaker 3: his mother?
Speaker 1: Tell me about your mother?
Speaker 3: His mother? His mother wasn't as big as my nose.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. So they can be trained, and they
Speaker 1: can train you.
Speaker 3: I have trained quite a few bats. I can train
Speaker 3: them to go where I point. And primatologists tell me
Speaker 3: that they haven't eve been able to train primates to
Speaker 3: do that. They've been able to train domestic dogs to
Speaker 3: go where you point, but not primates.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: And so when I was talking to a primatologist one time,
Speaker 3: she was really excited when when I said that I
Speaker 3: could train baths to go where I pointed. In fact,
Speaker 3: I've trained them to a point where I wanted them
Speaker 3: to come, catch pray, take my hand back, and then
Speaker 3: a camera film crew would start with a high speed camera,
Speaker 3: and the bat would wait and wouldn't come until I
Speaker 3: heard the high speed camera come, and then he would come.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, that's better than most actors in LA
Speaker 1: can hit a mark on time.
Speaker 3: I mean, I had one of those baths that just
Speaker 3: new field assistant overtamed. I told him how important it
Speaker 3: was to get these baths over their fear of us
Speaker 3: and everything, and he just overdid it. So the next night,
Speaker 3: my colleague Mike Ryan and I went out to do experiments,
Speaker 3: and we couldn't do experiments because the bat wanted to
Speaker 3: come sit on our shoulders and wait to be fed.
Speaker 3: I finally just gave up. Didn't want to rough the
Speaker 3: bat up, just gave up and went and turned it.
Speaker 3: Our lab was in the jungle, so I just went
Speaker 3: and turned it loose back in the jungle. And at
Speaker 3: least half an hour, maybe forty five minutes later, I
Speaker 3: don't remember exactly, we had come out of the forest,
Speaker 3: walked back to where I was staying, and we're standing
Speaker 3: under a floodlight talking and this bat came back and
Speaker 3: started coming for my hand and I actually, for a
Speaker 3: second thought I was seeing my first bet attack. I
Speaker 3: couldn't believe this thing had followed us back out of
Speaker 3: the jungle and was just wanting another hand out.
Speaker 1: Did you have anything to feed it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we had some leftover minos and and my assistant
Speaker 3: had kind of become better acquainted with that bath than
Speaker 3: I had. The bat had had one. They have big ears,
Speaker 3: this species does, and one of his ears half of
Speaker 3: it was missing. So my assistant noticed that and said, oh,
Speaker 3: that's a bat. We just turned loose.
Speaker 1: Do you ever miss bats when you have to leave
Speaker 1: a certain field site? Are you like I'm going to
Speaker 1: miss that? Bet?
Speaker 3: I have at times practically died of curiosity wondering what
Speaker 3: would have happened if I'd have had another week or
Speaker 3: another month or something to work with that bat. How
Speaker 3: smart would it have turned out to be? M h?
Speaker 3: I mean I normally don't work with the same bat.
Speaker 3: A week would be a long time for me to
Speaker 3: work with one. Bet.
Speaker 1: So Yes, bats can be trained, Boy, howdy can they? So?
Speaker 1: Sarah I and Ichi who asked this question had no
Speaker 1: idea how much I thought that that was going to
Speaker 1: be a big no, I had no idea. Oh that
Speaker 1: was a great question then, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3: And after all these years of study in baths, I
Speaker 3: am still discovering really cool, neat new things about their intelligence.
Speaker 3: I am amazed at their intelligence.
Speaker 1: Oh and quick aside, in the wild bats can use
Speaker 1: echolocation at precise angles to detect insects hiding still in leaves.
Speaker 1: And also they'll spy on other species to see where
Speaker 1: they get their food sources. Also, per our discussion earlier,
Speaker 1: they talk. They talk to each other. They're talking to
Speaker 1: each other and they're bitches and I love it. I
Speaker 1: have another question from Catherine Hatcher, who herself is an ologist.
Speaker 1: She's a first time question asker. She said, I want
Speaker 1: to know all about bat babies. How are they born,
Speaker 1: what does bat birth like? Can they fly? Right away?
Speaker 1: Tell me all the bat baby facts, depending.
Speaker 3: On whether you're a species that bears twins or singletons.
Speaker 3: Twins are born much smaller than singletons. But most bass
Speaker 3: produced just one puppy year, and that one pup is
Speaker 3: about a third mother's white. That'd be like a thirty
Speaker 3: or forty pound baby born by human mother.
Speaker 1: That's the big one.
Speaker 3: Where I've watched them in caves here in Texas, and
Speaker 3: I might say normally I would be very upset if
Speaker 3: somebody told me they were going in watching mothers give
Speaker 3: birth in a cave, because that would be very disturbing
Speaker 3: to the mother's and probably cause mortality. But our freetail
Speaker 3: bats here in Texas live in such a heavy duty
Speaker 3: ammonia environment in the caves that most people wouldn't think
Speaker 3: of going in. And when I went in for long
Speaker 3: periods and photographed them, I had to wear an ammonia
Speaker 3: respirator and at one point it leaked and I was
Speaker 3: hospitalized for eleven days with thirty five percent lung capacity left.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: So these bats are kind of like animals on the
Speaker 3: Galopagos Islands. They're not very frightened of people because people
Speaker 3: don't usually come in and bug with them. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: so I, over a period of a week or so,
Speaker 3: would get bats along one wall accustomed to my presence.
Speaker 3: I could walk back and forth and photograph them without
Speaker 3: them panicking and dropping their young or anything. And it
Speaker 3: was really cool. The pup when it's first born, has
Speaker 3: what appears to be like a safety line, like an
Speaker 3: astronaut getting out of a vehicle in space. The placenta
Speaker 3: acts as its anchor to its mother.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: And the umbilical cord is like a leash, so if
Speaker 3: he falls, he can't really go very far, and so
Speaker 3: he stays attached for a fair while. I don't know exactly,
Speaker 3: it's probably not exactly the same for each bat, but
Speaker 3: they stay attached for a fairwhile, and then the mother
Speaker 3: and the young quickly learn each other's sent and voice.
Speaker 3: And after that, this pup joins a cluster of up
Speaker 3: to five hundred pups in a square foot and there
Speaker 3: are thousands of square feet covered by pups in a
Speaker 3: cave like bracking cave. Oh my god, can you imagine
Speaker 3: being a mom trying to find your baby.
Speaker 1: This is like like a music festival like Coachella, but
Speaker 1: it's like sixty thousand babies and you'd have to find
Speaker 1: your baby, right, that's a nightmare.
Speaker 3: Well, and you got all these other pups calling saying,
Speaker 3: you know, calling their moms, and all these moms calling
Speaker 3: back to their pups. I mean, when I was watching
Speaker 3: these things happen, there would be thousands of adults flying by,
Speaker 3: and all of a sudden, you'd see one puff rear
Speaker 3: up and vocalize, and then you'd see one of the
Speaker 3: adults turn and come back and come back to that one. Wow.
Speaker 1: I know you want to know what a retail bat
Speaker 1: sounds like. So also, Merlin says that they produce more
Speaker 1: milk for their size than a Jersey cow would because
Speaker 1: the pups need to grow fast, and they're burning up
Speaker 1: so much energy linging to a cold cave wall when
Speaker 1: their moms are out munch and mosquitoes. Can you imagine
Speaker 1: having a forty pound baby and then the next day
Speaker 1: that baby was able to cling to a rock face, Well,
Speaker 1: you maneuvered like a fighter pilot in the sky using
Speaker 1: only your hands. Bats make humans look like earth bound,
Speaker 1: leaky bags of garbage. How long does it take a
Speaker 1: bat to learn how to fly?
Speaker 3: Well, it's believed that I know for gray bats they
Speaker 3: can probably start flying in within nineteen days or so.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, But the free tail bats have longer, narrower wings.
Speaker 3: They're more like little jets. As I point out, they
Speaker 3: can go cruise at one hundred nearly one hundred miles
Speaker 3: an hour with tail winds. So with those jet like
Speaker 3: narrow wings, it undeadly takes longer to learn to fly.
Speaker 3: But just imagine the problems faced by young bat as
Speaker 3: it learns to fly. You're down in a pitch dark cave.
Speaker 3: There are thousands, probably tens of thousands of other bats
Speaker 3: flying at the same time. Many of those are beginners
Speaker 3: like you. How would you like to go out to
Speaker 3: the airport and learn to fly with a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of other beginner pilots trying to take practice takeoffs and landings.
Speaker 1: Is that why they say bad out of hell? Just
Speaker 1: to give me out of that?
Speaker 3: And here's the thing. A pilot gets to practice on
Speaker 3: a nice long horizontal runway where you know if even
Speaker 3: if he's one hundred yards off, he's probably still okay
Speaker 3: these bats. From the moment a pup first drops from
Speaker 3: the ceiling to practice its first flight, it's going to
Speaker 3: be moving at ten to thirty feet per second gravity
Speaker 3: SS In that first flight, the cave is only about
Speaker 3: sixty feet wide, so within a couple of seconds he's
Speaker 3: on a direct collision course with proverbial wall is poor
Speaker 3: little pups, and he has to make that flight while
Speaker 3: avoiding multiple potentially fataled collisions per second. He has to
Speaker 3: do a perfectly tying barrel roll and with millimeter split
Speaker 3: second precision, get his feet out front to grab the
Speaker 3: wall and not bash his head on the wall.
Speaker 1: That brings me to a question a lot of listeners had.
Speaker 1: Do they sleep upside down? How do they sleep wall
Speaker 1: clinging to things? Chut Kenny one, Pedro Martinez, Amber Cooper,
Speaker 1: Heather Circle, and Laura Dosbobeck all wanted to know about
Speaker 1: this hanging from the feet situation.
Speaker 3: They have a real cool system where the tendons lock
Speaker 3: when you pull down on the claws hanging to the ceiling.
Speaker 3: That tends to lock the tendons, so they don't use
Speaker 3: any energy hanging on Wow.
Speaker 1: So it takes energy for the bat to open, and
Speaker 1: it's talent, so it opens them, finds the spot to grip,
Speaker 1: and then when it relaxes hanging by its own weight,
Speaker 1: clamps those talents closed, and then it's upside down night
Speaker 1: night for the sky fuzzies. So it's kind of like
Speaker 1: putting a remember those things you put on your car
Speaker 1: steering wheel of the club, You just like lock it
Speaker 1: on and there it is. I didn't. I always wondered
Speaker 1: that because it always seems like once you relaxed and slept,
Speaker 1: you just go well.
Speaker 3: And people also ask a lot why doesn't the blood
Speaker 3: all rush to their heads?
Speaker 1: Yeah, why doesn't it?
Speaker 3: The better case is why doesn't the brood the rush
Speaker 3: to our feet?
Speaker 1: That's a good question.
Speaker 3: What happens when all of a sudden you feel faint?
Speaker 3: Get your head down right? So so we're the ones
Speaker 3: that ought to be explaining what the problem is.
Speaker 1: That that's very good. Yeah. And when you lose enough
Speaker 1: blood to your head, such as, for example, by being
Speaker 1: spun in a giant centrifuge, your noggin is like, yeah, nope,
Speaker 1: I can't brain right now, and things oh dark. But
Speaker 1: bats are like watch this, I have so much blood
Speaker 1: and my smash face right now, I'm headed to dreamtown
Speaker 1: to get some z's with four hundred thousand of my
Speaker 1: closest friends farting grasshoppers on me. Speaking of large populations,
Speaker 1: a few of you, including ab seven point zero, wanted
Speaker 1: to know how big these pajama parties get. Bailey Good
Speaker 1: wants to know where in the world is the largest
Speaker 1: population of bats.
Speaker 3: The largest remaining known population is it Bracken Cave, just
Speaker 3: twenty miles from the center of San Antonio.
Speaker 1: Oh So, Texas.
Speaker 3: And I'm very proud to report that, after some twenty
Speaker 3: years of working with many others to do it, I
Speaker 3: managed to laid the charge that got that cave protected
Speaker 3: with hundreds of actually several thousand acres around it as
Speaker 3: a nature reserve.
Speaker 1: That is amazing to think that there are so many
Speaker 1: bats in existence, that wouldn't be here without you.
Speaker 3: It's still one of my all time favorite places on
Speaker 3: the planet. It is just an incredible experience to see
Speaker 3: that many bats come out of anything.
Speaker 1: I mean how many bats. Some estimates are around fifteen
Speaker 1: million bats. That's like the population of humans in Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: all in one cave system, and when they emerge at
Speaker 1: night to feed, it's like a winged commute hour on
Speaker 1: the four h five, but flappier, way more beautiful and
Speaker 1: no honking. Speaking of what about urban bats, oj Carrosco,
Speaker 1: Brin Bell Joyceki liv and Michelle L. Pagraham all asked
Speaker 1: how bats live in cities, and a bunch of Austin based,
Speaker 1: or at least Austin loving folks such as Anna Thompson,
Speaker 1: Nathan Wilgaroth, Jonathan Hard and Ruby Ostrich, Chelsea Craft, Courtney Ross,
Speaker 1: Brian Wharton, Jackie and Ian friend to bats, Derek Allen
Speaker 1: High first time question Samitter, Gail Rosen, Michelle Lee and
Speaker 1: Sarah Hewitt wanted to know about the Congress Bridge and
Speaker 1: why it's so great for batwatching, particularly in the spring
Speaker 1: and the late summer.
Speaker 3: It's really spectacular. Just come to our bridge is Congress
Speaker 3: Avenue Bridge.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Julie Noble, who I believe Julie Noble said, OMG,
Speaker 1: talk about the batbridge. Please that us all.
Speaker 3: If you go to the Congress, if you go to
Speaker 3: my website again Merlin Tuttle dot org. Go to my
Speaker 3: photo gallery. It's divide into catching prey, rearing young, all
Speaker 3: those kind of things. Go to the subsection called emergencies
Speaker 3: and you'll see some of my pictures of the huge
Speaker 3: numbers coming out of the Congress a new bridge, and
Speaker 3: how close they are to people without anybody ever being harmed.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons Austin is known as the largest
Speaker 1: urban batcolony is because of Merlin Tuttle. Because of Merlin.
Speaker 1: So when the Congress Avenue Bridge was reconstructed in nineteen eighty,
Speaker 1: the underside happened to be perfect for roosting, but the
Speaker 1: city was not into having millions of bats in its
Speaker 1: midst and Merlin, who was a founder of Bat Conservation
Speaker 1: International until his retirement, thought that Austin was perfect for
Speaker 1: a perceptual makeover of the b leaguered bat. Now over
Speaker 1: a million, maybe up to a million and a half
Speaker 1: Mexican freetail bats emerge from the bridge. During peak bat season,
Speaker 1: they eat ten to thirty thousand insects a day. They
Speaker 1: bring in millions of dollars a year from bat tourism.
Speaker 1: Merlin Tuttle, Ladies and gents, Merlin Tuttle. One kid brings
Speaker 1: a dead back to school and the world is forever changed. Now.
Speaker 1: This next question was asked by my pal, doctor Johanson
Speaker 1: of PBS fame. Doctor Johnson wanted to know about the Chiropdorium.
Speaker 3: Yes, David Bamberger built that out toward Johnson City in Texas.
Speaker 3: He was a rancher who uh joined my board directors
Speaker 3: years ago when I first got involved in that conservation,
Speaker 3: and he worked helping us with protect Bracken Cave. And
Speaker 3: one day he said, marillly, you know, I don't have
Speaker 3: any caves on my ranch, but I'd sure like to
Speaker 3: have something, you know, where I could show people baths
Speaker 3: on my ranch. You think we could build a cave
Speaker 3: or something that baths would come to. And I said yeah.
Speaker 3: I said, you know, there are abandoned mines and railroad
Speaker 3: tunnels and things all across America that big bat colonies
Speaker 3: had moved into. If we build it right to come
Speaker 3: up with a proper range of temperature, the baths will
Speaker 3: probably come.
Speaker 1: If you build it, he will come.
Speaker 3: So he hired a really good engineer architect whatever the
Speaker 3: combo should be, and I designed what it should be
Speaker 3: like to get the right temperature and darkness for the baths,
Speaker 3: and the engineer architect designed something that wouldn't fall down,
Speaker 3: and so then he named it the car Uptorium. And
Speaker 3: it's interesting. I told him to watch out that when
Speaker 3: the baths first came, don't go run in to see
Speaker 3: them because they might give you a bad report and
Speaker 3: not come back for a while, because those persons will
Speaker 3: be scouts. Well, he ran in to see them and
Speaker 3: they left, didn't come back for a while.
Speaker 1: To be side, it turned out okay.
Speaker 3: But he now has between half a million and a
Speaker 3: million baths there and that it's totally artificial cave.
Speaker 1: Wow does he get to claim them as dependents on
Speaker 1: his taxes or pets?
Speaker 3: I'll tell you what he does do now. He goes
Speaker 3: in once one At least last time I talked to him,
Speaker 3: he was going to start this, going in once a
Speaker 3: year with a front endloader on a uh small tractor
Speaker 3: and harvesting the guano and using it on his ranch.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so a ton of people had questions about that. Okay,
Speaker 1: So when it came to bats, a lot of folks
Speaker 1: on Patreon wanted to talk shit and but that I mean,
Speaker 1: they had guano questions, such as Julie Bear, who brought
Speaker 1: it to my attention that back guano is used as
Speaker 1: a sculptural medium. Thank you, juliber Wow okay wow. Also
Speaker 1: there were other questions about guano's safety and uses, asked
Speaker 1: by Squirk, Teresa Bassanova and Valerie Tarren Hawk, Devin Robertson,
Speaker 1: Aaron Ryan Morgan Shulty, and Emmanuel Sanchez wants to know
Speaker 1: how dirty and unsafe is guano really? And is that
Speaker 1: a myth that guano is unsafe?
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know that anything can be said to
Speaker 3: be safe, right. For example, I point out when people
Speaker 3: tell me how dangerous bats are, because one and a
Speaker 3: half people persons a year in the US and Canada
Speaker 3: combined die of bat ray And I point out that
Speaker 3: twenty to forty times that number die of dog attacks
Speaker 3: every year. And then I say, but before anybody thinks
Speaker 3: I'm prejudiceding advocating against dogs, let me just point out
Speaker 3: that we still love our wives and spouses. But our
Speaker 3: spouses kill us off at the rate of over a
Speaker 3: thousand times. What die of bat rabies?
Speaker 1: Oh man, that's a good point.
Speaker 3: So I mean anything we do has some risk. Probably
Speaker 3: the biggest risk we all take every day is getting
Speaker 3: in our car and driving to work, but we don't
Speaker 3: think of it as a risk because we do it
Speaker 3: every day. And so if you ask if something you
Speaker 3: know has any risk, I have a hard time with
Speaker 3: that because there's nothing that doesn't have a risk. What
Speaker 3: I can say is, I personally have more than once
Speaker 3: sat and ate and lunch on an old ride up
Speaker 3: guanopile in a cave in the in a winter cave.
Speaker 3: That's the warmest place to seat yourself because it insulates
Speaker 3: you from the hard rock that's colder.
Speaker 1: Would Indiana Jones be tough enough to sit on a guanopile?
Speaker 1: No freaking way.
Speaker 3: I rarely think about needing to take extra precautions to
Speaker 3: sterilize my hands when I come out of a bat cave.
Speaker 3: But I can tell you I'm almost religious about coming
Speaker 3: home and washing my hands carefully after I've been to
Speaker 3: see a doctor in a hospital. Yeah, I mean, the
Speaker 3: most dangerous animal on this planet for you to meet
Speaker 3: and get a disease from is another.
Speaker 1: Human going on a date is probably way more dangerous
Speaker 1: than sitting on a pile of dried one What about
Speaker 1: what kind of boots do you need if you're mucking
Speaker 1: through caves? What kind of boots? You must have? A
Speaker 1: favor kind?
Speaker 3: No, not just any sturdy hiking boot.
Speaker 1: All right, I figured you'd need some kind of need
Speaker 1: high rubber waiters.
Speaker 3: Now, if I'm going in bracking cave or one like
Speaker 3: that that has millions of free tail bats living near
Speaker 3: the entrance where they attract ormested beetles, then I'll wear
Speaker 3: rubber almost almost knee high boots to keep the domestic
Speaker 3: insects from climbing up and buying me.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's talk about bats inside your house, which was
Speaker 1: on a lot of your minds Lauren Kelly, first time
Speaker 1: question asker Evan Jude Donis, Sue Oregonian, Wesley Winks, Enrique Sarmiento,
Speaker 1: and Julie Noble who side note Julie Noble dressed as
Speaker 1: me for Halloween week at her office and carried a
Speaker 1: number one dad mug and I saw a picture and
Speaker 1: it made my whole damn day. Anyway, this is a
Speaker 1: hot topic, bats inside your house. Michelle Lee and a
Speaker 1: few other people had this question, which was so great. Recently,
Speaker 1: a bat found its way into a friend's living room
Speaker 1: and a lot of time was spent trying to chase
Speaker 1: it out of door window. My question, what is the
Speaker 1: best way to guide a bat outside without hurting it?
Speaker 1: Jesus suit.
Speaker 2: Catch him.
Speaker 3: There's two minutes, I guess. The first thing I'd suggest,
Speaker 3: if it's not too difficult, would be to open the
Speaker 3: doors and windows to the outside and shut off all
Speaker 3: doors to the rest of the house. Lower the lights
Speaker 3: to a level where it's not real bright, but don't
Speaker 3: turn them out where you can't see the bat. One
Speaker 3: of the worst mistakes people make. I can't tell you
Speaker 3: how many times I've had this call where somebody calls
Speaker 3: me in and they saw a bat and they fled
Speaker 3: the house to go get out. They come back and
Speaker 3: nobody can find the bat, so they have no idea
Speaker 3: if it left on its own, they have no idea
Speaker 3: if it's still there. And I've seen people you know,
Speaker 3: move out of their house for a week because they
Speaker 3: didn't know if the bat was still there. The bat
Speaker 3: is not going to attack you. If you're in the
Speaker 3: room with a bat, you will have the feeling that
Speaker 3: it might be trying to attack you.
Speaker 1: Because here's why aeronautics nerds open your big bat ears,
Speaker 1: because this is some good stuff.
Speaker 3: Picture yourself is piloting a small aircraft and you fly
Speaker 3: up to a dead end corner. You have to turn
Speaker 3: around to you turn to get out of it. When
Speaker 3: you do that, you drop your airspeed to just about
Speaker 3: zero and you start falling. So you have to swoop
Speaker 3: down at a fairly sharp angle to regain flight speed
Speaker 3: and be able to continue flying. So if you're in
Speaker 3: the middle of that room and the bat's going back
Speaker 3: and forth the corners trying to find a way out,
Speaker 3: and he's swooping down each time to regain flight speed,
Speaker 3: you know this happens in a room like that. It
Speaker 3: happens with mosquitoes and things. Let's say you're outside. Used
Speaker 3: to happen here in Austin. People used to report all
Speaker 3: the time about being attacked and barely escaping a bat.
Speaker 3: And my first question, did he actually get you? No? No,
Speaker 3: I was real lucky. Well, how do you know he
Speaker 3: wasn't chasing a mosquito? And you flew before, and you
Speaker 3: ran away before you found out that he wasn't after you. Oh,
Speaker 3: could that be possible? And I've even investigated cases where
Speaker 3: they got scratched on a rose bush on the way
Speaker 3: to their house fleeing the bat, and then went and
Speaker 3: got their raby shots because the bat actually got them.
Speaker 3: Oh no, I've investigated maulings.
Speaker 1: Get ready for the story. Oh, my word, on my word.
Speaker 3: A Tennessee Valley Authority dam in Alabama shut down one
Speaker 3: time because the workers wouldn't go to work because the
Speaker 3: guy had been mauled by a bat in the dam mauled.
Speaker 3: They called, and I had a consulting contract with him
Speaker 3: at the time. They insisted on me coming down and
Speaker 3: settling problems, and I said, there's no need for me
Speaker 3: to come down. It's inconceivable that this guy got mauled
Speaker 3: by a bat. Conceivable. You know, there's another explanation. You
Speaker 3: don't need me to come up with that. Oh no, No,
Speaker 3: nobody's going to believe this until we get somebody, an
Speaker 3: expert down here. So I get down there and the
Speaker 3: guy has very little real skin left from about his
Speaker 3: elbow halfway to his wrist down his arm. I mean
Speaker 3: it's just almost raw flesh. Is really a mess. Obvious
Speaker 3: something did a bad, hell of a job on him.
Speaker 3: But at a glance, I knew there was no bat
Speaker 3: in the world could or would have done that. So
Speaker 3: I wanted to get somebody to take me down to
Speaker 3: show me the scene of the crime. And oh god,
Speaker 3: it was terrible trying to get somebody to volunteer to
Speaker 3: go with, even me, But finally we went down. What happens.
Speaker 3: They had lockers and when they come to work, they'd
Speaker 3: put their private things in a locker. Well, this guy
Speaker 3: had left his locker open while he didn't hang in
Speaker 3: during the night. The bat ended up going into finding
Speaker 3: the locker and going to sleep in there. The guy
Speaker 3: comes in the morning, reaches in to do something. The
Speaker 3: bat panics and tries to fly out. The guy thinks
Speaker 3: he's being attacked, yanks his arm out, and the top
Speaker 3: of that locker looked like a damn saw blade. It
Speaker 3: hadn't been finished properly, and you can still see his
Speaker 3: skin hanging on the on the top of the locker. No,
Speaker 3: and the funny thing was, after all that, you know,
Speaker 3: at first they had to practically restrain him. He's so
Speaker 3: mad he was going to attack me for dying his story,
Speaker 3: and then when it was even clear to him what
Speaker 3: had happened, then he was really blankety blanked off, and
Speaker 3: his medical doctor for being so stupid as to believe
Speaker 3: his story and give him rabies shots.
Speaker 1: Did they finish his locker properly, put some duct tape
Speaker 1: on it or something?
Speaker 3: Well? I left at that point, I'd solve the immediate
Speaker 3: problem Batman out.
Speaker 1: One question was understandably echoed over and over by folks
Speaker 1: such as had their Circle, Elizabeth Illian, Elizabeth McLachlan, Amanda Rivera,
Speaker 1: Deep Nervisen, Raymond J. Deutsche, Hail Holings, Bob Clark, Georgia,
Speaker 1: Hattie Stootion, Karina Peterson, Gwenn Bode, Melissa Cowen, Tangi Goat,
Speaker 1: Erica Smith, and Katie Thronberg, who asked variations of why
Speaker 1: on Earth are they so darn cute? Why are bats
Speaker 1: so stink and cute? Are bats not the cutest? Why
Speaker 1: are bats so darn cute? Why are they so dang cute?
Speaker 1: And Katie's question, why do they look so cute in diapers?
Speaker 1: Slash little blanket burritos? Bats? You want to know whether
Speaker 1: they're cute. It's a great question. A few people ask
Speaker 1: why they look so cute when they're wearing little blanket burritos,
Speaker 1: and just why in general bats are so cute.
Speaker 3: Well, the bats are thinking, look so cute. Those are
Speaker 3: baby flying foxes. And remember we talked about whether fly
Speaker 3: whether some bats might be primates or not. Flying foxes
Speaker 3: have faces that look just like lemiers that are primates.
Speaker 3: In fact, leading experts have before mistaken bat flying fox
Speaker 3: skulls for lamier skulls.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, So we're seeing baby primates and we're
Speaker 1: identifying with.
Speaker 3: That, and they've got big eyes and fox like faces,
Speaker 3: and you know, most most flying fox post mind, they're
Speaker 3: just about as cute as anybody thinks they're not cute,
Speaker 3: just as a hard time seeing cuteness. I mean, they're
Speaker 3: as cute as any panda gotta be. But they wrap
Speaker 3: those in little towels because they're more comfortable that way.
Speaker 3: Their mama normally keeps them wrapped in her wing, and
Speaker 3: they actually feel more comfortable when they're wrapped in a
Speaker 3: towel like that, and so that's the way they keep
Speaker 3: them burritos.
Speaker 1: Polity Seman's that a great question is there any evidence
Speaker 1: in our modern technological environment with its noise electromagnetism radar
Speaker 1: is messing with the bat's ability to navigate.
Speaker 3: We don't know. There are so many things we don't
Speaker 3: know that it's just absolutely terrifying, and some of them
Speaker 3: pertain equally or more to us. One thing that hasn't
Speaker 3: come up here is what we don't know about what's
Speaker 3: happening with all the pesticides were spraying on the world,
Speaker 3: because we're losing bats and other insectivorous animals that once
Speaker 3: kept insects in check. In the United States alone, we
Speaker 3: now use approximately a billion tons of pesticides annually. That's
Speaker 3: all coming back into our food and water. And I
Speaker 3: tell people, you know, it's start paying a lot more
Speaker 3: attention to natural controls like bats. If you don't want
Speaker 3: to spend a whole lot more risk on pesticides killing.
Speaker 1: You will people having bat boxes in their backyard or
Speaker 1: in their you know, the top of their house. Will
Speaker 1: that help the bat population at all?
Speaker 3: Yes, it will. In fact, where we mentioned the fungus
Speaker 3: whitens that causes white no syndrome, where that has already
Speaker 3: passed through and killed off a large number of bats,
Speaker 3: several states are using relying on people's backyard bad houses
Speaker 3: to monitor recovery of the species.
Speaker 1: Oh wow. And so if you have that, you know,
Speaker 1: as a hospitable measure, then researchers can come and take
Speaker 1: a look and see how many people are, how many
Speaker 1: little bats are nesting in there.
Speaker 3: I mean, I personally help monitor a site in New
Speaker 3: York where we know that for like five or ten
Speaker 3: years at least they this family had at least twelve
Speaker 3: hundred bats every year in their bad houses, and then
Speaker 3: as after white nose syndrome passed, they only had forty.
Speaker 3: Oh wow. But now they're abuilding, and I believe I
Speaker 3: can't remember this year they're up toward two hundred.
Speaker 1: I bet. And now what about someone who wanted to
Speaker 1: go see a bat or go bat scooping, or what's
Speaker 1: the best time to see a bat and just enjoy
Speaker 1: about what kind of what kind of good binoculars or
Speaker 1: night vision? Or where should you sit? How do you?
Speaker 1: And my mom and dad have some bats. They've named
Speaker 1: them flad. They call them all blad. But they come
Speaker 1: out at dusk and they wait and watch on the porch,
Speaker 1: and they're so excited to see them when they come out.
Speaker 1: But if maybe you don't even realize your neighborhood has
Speaker 1: bats because you think they're night sparrows, Like, how do
Speaker 1: you see a bat?
Speaker 3: I have spoken to so many people who will tell
Speaker 3: me with amazement. You know, I've lived in my neighborhood
Speaker 3: for twenty years and I've never seen a bat. And
Speaker 3: then I heard you speak the other night, and now
Speaker 3: I see bat. Sometimes it's just a matter of looking
Speaker 3: at the right time. Give me a break. I got
Speaker 3: to run to the door.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, no worries. Thank you so much for
Speaker 1: talking to me. I love that. Okay, okay, So at
Speaker 1: this point two hours in, we both needed a little intermission,
Speaker 1: a bathroom break, a sip of water. So I figured
Speaker 1: this is a good time to stop and make you
Speaker 1: wait a week for more Merlin. In the meanwhile, ask
Speaker 1: the smartest people the stupidest question. Not only will you
Speaker 1: know more about what's snoozing in crevices and fluttering overhead,
Speaker 1: he'll also come away with some pretty boss life advice. Now,
Speaker 1: this conversation was so great it warranted a follow up,
Speaker 1: and so next week we will continue Part two of
Speaker 1: Chiropterology with Merlin Tuttle. I swear he has more stories
Speaker 1: from the field that will boggle you and dazzle you. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: you can find him at Merlin Tuttle dot org. He
Speaker 1: is on Instagram, he is on Twitter. The links will
Speaker 1: be in the show notes. Follow him immediately. He is
Speaker 1: one of my favorite presences on social media. Bats for
Speaker 1: days and literally the best pictures that anyone has ever
Speaker 1: captured of them. Okay, links in the show notes now.
Speaker 1: If you need any Ologies merch you can find it
Speaker 1: at aliword dot com. Thank you Shannon Feltis and Bonnie
Speaker 1: Dutch for helping manage that, and do check out their
Speaker 1: comedy podcast You Are That. I am their guest this
Speaker 1: week talking all things Halloween, making some confessions I'll probably regret,
Speaker 1: so that is You Are That. Also another wonderful podcast
Speaker 1: started by an ologist is sports and performance psychologist doctor
Speaker 1: Sari Shepherd's brand new Manage the Moment podcast, which you
Speaker 1: can find anywhere you get podcasts. I'll be her guest
Speaker 1: on November twenty five, so subscribe to that now. Thank
Speaker 1: you to Aaron Talbert and Hinalippo who admin the Facebook
Speaker 1: Ologies podcast group. Hello to the non Facebook folk sub
Speaker 1: editors out there. Thank you to Emily White and all
Speaker 1: the ologies transcribers and that Facebook group helping to make
Speaker 1: transcripts available. Those are at aliward dot com slash ologies
Speaker 1: dash extras link in the show notes. Thank you to
Speaker 1: Jared Sleeper for all the assistant editing, and of course
Speaker 1: to the human equivalent of About Burrito, Stephen Ray Morris,
Speaker 1: who puts all the pieces together Each week. Nick Thorburn
Speaker 1: wrote and performed the theme music, and stay tuned next
Speaker 1: week for more Adventures in Bats with Doctor Merlin Tuttle.
Speaker 1: You know, if you stick around to the end of
Speaker 1: the episode, though, I tell you a secret, and this
Speaker 1: week the secret is I was once dating this musician
Speaker 1: who had like long musician hair, and we were hanging
Speaker 1: out at dusk near a lake, just admiring the view.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, this huge butterfly flew close to
Speaker 1: his long musician hair and he was like, whoa, that
Speaker 1: was the big ass butterfly and I was like, bro,
Speaker 1: that was bat. And he did not like that information.
Speaker 1: But bats in general are not trying to eat anyone's hair.
Speaker 1: There was probably just a bug over his head. But anyway,
Speaker 1: later on, this boyfriend didn't like that at parties, I
Speaker 1: would bounce around and say hello to various friends. And
Speaker 1: so once we were in a fight, and he wrote
Speaker 1: a scathing song about me called social Bat because I
Speaker 1: was like a social butterfly, but larger because I talked
Speaker 1: to too many people at parties. Anyway, I think he
Speaker 1: wanted me to be offended, but you know, jokes on
Speaker 1: him because bats are cool as hell. Anyway, we're still buddies.
Speaker 1: He's a wonderful person, and I maybe I'll work on
Speaker 1: getting you a clip for next week's part two of
Speaker 1: Chiropterology with Merlin Tuttle. Maybe I can throw it a
Speaker 1: little social bat in there. Anyway. I will also be
Speaker 1: in Austin this coming week again on Sunday and Monday,
Speaker 1: shooting a story for CBS for Innovation Nation. Per I
Speaker 1: don't know where we're staying, but perhaps I could meet
Speaker 1: y'all on a bridge. I have no idea. Maybe stay tuned.
Speaker 1: You can follow along at Instagram, dot com slash ologies
Speaker 1: and I will probably post something there or on theologies Twitter.
Speaker 1: All right, Okay, stay tuned for next week. It's so good,
Speaker 1: all right? For Bride Packaderman College Bambiology crypto Zoology lithology, Yeah, Technology, meteorology, beatology, tethnology, seriology, seminology.
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