Speaker 1: Oh hi, it's me from the future. It's been two
Speaker 1: years since we made this episode. I still love this ologist.
Speaker 1: We're still friends. He just turned eighty and I actually
Speaker 1: missed his surprise party in August. Jarrett had popped his
Speaker 1: acl and got a small fracture on his femur wasn't
Speaker 1: able to go. But actually, speaking of he just got
Speaker 1: surgery with a knee specialist in San Francisco, so we're
Speaker 1: up taking care of him and taking a few weeks off,
Speaker 1: which is why this is an encore episode. But next week,
Speaker 1: in the week after, we have new Spooktobra episodes you've
Speaker 1: never heard before, so stay tuned for those next week. Also,
Speaker 1: if you need more spooky content, check the link in
Speaker 1: the show notes for the Spooktober episodes. Because there's everything
Speaker 1: from body farms to vultures and evil spirits and changing leaves,
Speaker 1: we have episodes for all of it. So put on
Speaker 1: a scarf and pour something that has some popkin spice
Speaker 1: it in and listen to those. Okay, but now enjoy
Speaker 1: this encore of Chiropterology, one of the best ever episodes
Speaker 1: of ologies with your new favorite scientist for real. Oh hey,
Speaker 1: it's your friend's new baby who looks kind of like
Speaker 1: a turtle, but in the best way. Ali Ward back
Speaker 1: with another episode of Ologies. We're rounding the corner to
Speaker 1: finishing Spookctober, and I meant for this to be the
Speaker 1: last Halloweeny episode, but guess what. I talked to this
Speaker 1: ologist for three frickin hours and I'm making it a
Speaker 1: double so buckle up for bats, because holy guano, it's
Speaker 1: ban out. I loved every second I spent with his
Speaker 1: 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 to perfection, from entropy to order. Somehow,
Speaker 1: this podcast encompasses the sacred, the profane, and the mundane
Speaker 1: 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 thanks,
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. There are over fourteen hundred recognized species
Speaker 1: of bats, and we will cover all of them. No,
Speaker 1: we won't, but we're going to do our best. So
Speaker 1: I heard of this ologist through a CBS Innovation Nation
Speaker 1: story I did about bathouses called bat b and B's.
Speaker 1: And as soon as I heard his name and saw
Speaker 1: a picture of him in the nineteen seventies with a
Speaker 1: pushbrew mustache and a headlamp feeding fruit to a megabat,
Speaker 1: I thought, I need to meet this person. I need
Speaker 1: to befriend them at all costs. And I've been like
Speaker 1: a thirteen year old girl on a mission to meet
Speaker 1: her k pop Idols. I would accept no other bat
Speaker 1: expert for this topic. So he's been working in this
Speaker 1: field for over five decades. Has written several books for
Speaker 1: lay people about bats, including the Secret Lives of Bats,
Speaker 1: and America's neighborhood bats, and I'll link those on my
Speaker 1: website and in the show notes. He has published so
Speaker 1: many academic papers on bats, I wouldn't know where to
Speaker 1: begin listing them. He has lectured all over the world.
Speaker 1: So in September, I got myself to Austin, Texas, and
Speaker 1: I headed to this ologist's home office. Okay, I'm in
Speaker 1: front of Merlin's house. Total residents. This is so exciting. Okay,
Speaker 1: my hotel coffee. I'm sweating. It's a million degrees in Austin.
Speaker 1: I just I look sweaty, so nervous. I met his
Speaker 1: wonderful wife, Paula in the driveway. She led me in him.
Speaker 1: How hard you doctor tittle? It is lovely to I'm
Speaker 1: Ali Ward. This is a dream come true to talk
Speaker 1: to me about bats. I can't even tell you. This
Speaker 1: is far from his first media appearance. This dude is
Speaker 1: America's chiropterology darling, the go to for back questions the
Speaker 1: world over. He's even appeared on David Letterman in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four because of his bat knowledge.
Speaker 2: This is this bat, and you see how small he is.
Speaker 2: This bat is the one that sends thousands of otherwise mature, grown,
Speaker 2: brave men cowering, running in tear. Every year. I know
Speaker 2: of two cases in the last few months in Wisconsin.
Speaker 2: One man broke his leg falling downstairs getting away from
Speaker 2: one of these guys. One broke his arm swinging a
Speaker 2: tennis racket around a door jam.
Speaker 3: How can I you can touch you? I don't want
Speaker 3: to hold him.
Speaker 2: 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 weeks,
Speaker 1: and we cover what is a bat? How big are they?
Speaker 1: How small are they? Will they attack you? Why are
Speaker 1: people so scared of them? How do they evolve to fly?
Speaker 1: How do they sleep upside down? How scary are caves?
Speaker 1: Which ones guzzle blood? How do they protect us from mosquitoes?
Speaker 1: Can you train a bat? Why are they so cute?
Speaker 1: What's the deal with guano? The latest on white nose syndrome,
Speaker 1: which is not a drug problem. What is the best
Speaker 1: time and place to see bats? And how can you
Speaker 1: help bats by letting them crash in your place? Kind
Speaker 1: of So hang tight for part one and get ready
Speaker 1: to have a new favorite bat. Expert with conservationist explore
Speaker 1: icon National Treasure and chiropterologist Doctor Merlin Tuttle. Do you
Speaker 1: make people address you as doctor 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 they had
Speaker 3: a coat of ethics among themselves. It was very strict.
Speaker 3: You know, you turn in a fellow to the revenuers
Speaker 3: or something, and you deserved to die on the spot.
Speaker 3: It was. These weren't These were tough guys. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: they the moment I started studying bats in a cave
Speaker 3: near where they were making moonshine, they were down trying
Speaker 3: to figure out who I was and what I was doing,
Speaker 3: and I welcomed them and showed them how I put
Speaker 3: bands on the bats and explained that some of them
Speaker 3: are coming all the way from Florida to the Virginia
Speaker 3: Tennessee border to go hibernate in that cave. And they
Speaker 3: were so excited they ended up bringing their wives down
Speaker 3: to see me ban bats the next night, and I
Speaker 3: ended up being really good friends with them. And the
Speaker 3: next winter, as I was still coming every ten days
Speaker 3: to trap at the entrance, I was leaping out in
Speaker 3: my car, and they became very concerned. You know, I
Speaker 3: shouldn't be out there in the snowy cold, and so
Speaker 3: they start inviting me to come. They're very poor. The
Speaker 3: home that they had was so poor that if you,
Speaker 3: they said, we couldn't more than three of us go
Speaker 3: in the kitchen at the same time or the floor
Speaker 3: might fall in. And I stayed with him a few nights,
Speaker 3: but then I realized that Hugh Kyle, the primary moonshiner
Speaker 3: among them, slept with a sawed off shotgun in his
Speaker 3: bed in case the revenuers came at night. I decided
Speaker 3: I didn't want to sleep in the middle of a
Speaker 3: 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. Huh.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, if it wasn't probably considered unethical or illegal,
Speaker 3: it would be fun for you to listen in on
Speaker 3: one of these calls from somebody who's terrified thinks they're
Speaker 3: about to die of rabies because the bat got near
Speaker 3: 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 old.
Speaker 3: Living in California, I really first discovered them when a
Speaker 3: classmate in the fourth grade brought a dead one to school.
Speaker 1: Cool.
Speaker 3: We were all curious and looked at it, and I
Speaker 3: took it home and made a steady skin out of it.
Speaker 3: At age nine, a mammalogist came to my school to
Speaker 3: speak about his research on small mammals in the jungles
Speaker 3: of Central America, and I immediately I never forget. I thought, Wow,
Speaker 3: you mean a scientists actually get paid to go have
Speaker 3: fun adventures in the jungle.
Speaker 1: That's what I want to do. That's amazing. So you
Speaker 1: were inspired from just being a 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 a wonder kind, like a baby bat genius.
Speaker 1: Did you ever did you ever waiver in terms of
Speaker 1: what you wanted to do? Did you ever say, like,
Speaker 1: maybe I'll go into farming, or maybe I'll be a
Speaker 1: nurse or 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 so by that time I probably knew nearly all
Speaker 3: the scientific names of the seashells of Hawaii.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: And then later I got into snakes and Oh, man,
Speaker 3: I could tell you stories endlessly about terrorizing my mother
Speaker 3: and all her friends with my snakes getting loose. And
Speaker 3: then I published I think two papers on shrews before
Speaker 3: I 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 really, 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 mind, 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 grades.
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 students today is the big job opportunity area will
Speaker 3: probably be glutted five years from now. Pick what you're
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 3: Oh, get your 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 interesting, Oh very Don't worry.
Speaker 1: I have my eye on a shrewd expert, doctor Leslie
Speaker 1: carowainne Oregon. Come coming for you anyway. When it comes
Speaker 1: to mammals, how many really fly? We just have bats
Speaker 1: 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: of it things and had a fascination for them, and
Speaker 3: so it was much easier than for me to understand
Speaker 3: where my animals fit and what their roles were in
Speaker 3: 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 note,
Speaker 1: none of them are blind as a bat. These little
Speaker 1: winged fluff muffins have pretty good eyesight, and microbats use
Speaker 1: incredible echolocation sonar to hunt for bugs. But revered Australian
Speaker 1: neuroscientist and vision researcher Jack Pettigrew, who sadly passed away
Speaker 1: earlier this year, had made an interesting discovery about megabat
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: Neuronal evolution. You don't evolve new thousands of new neuronal
Speaker 3: pathways just overnight. Those are the slowest parts to evolve.
Speaker 3: Your fingers may get longer or shorter, things like that,
Speaker 3: but your neurons are pretty stable. So when you find
Speaker 3: thousands of neurons are doing the same things they do
Speaker 3: in primates, you should at least take a good look
Speaker 3: at what 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 start studying bats,
Speaker 3: we recognize just a little over eight hundred species. Now
Speaker 3: it's almost fourteen hundred.
Speaker 1: Now 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 your 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 1: So badass? Also, bats used to be classified by their
Speaker 1: coat color, which Merlin says was bunk because some bats
Speaker 1: are bright orange in the wild and brown in captivity.
Speaker 1: Others change color after they're weaned. So yes. Actually, speaking
Speaker 1: of let's talk about teeny tiny bat babies. Shall we
Speaker 1: squirmy little smush faced, seashell eared fuzzy wigglers. Can you
Speaker 1: walk me through a little bit of a life cycle
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: And they not only form these huge aggregations in very
Speaker 3: places like caves, but they only produce one puppy year
Speaker 3: per mom. Their program for long life span, forty plus
Speaker 3: 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 1: Do they have different hearts?
Speaker 3: Rodents are lucky to get in two years?
Speaker 1: Right? Yeah, So how are they doing it? Do you think? Well?
Speaker 3: Bats are just totally different, and it largely centers around
Speaker 3: these long life spans, and if you're going to be
Speaker 3: as sophisticated and live as long as they do, you'd
Speaker 3: better be sophisticated socially. And they have a lot of smarts.
Speaker 3: In fact, when I first banded gray bats, I had
Speaker 3: big time suspicions that they were were having friendships that
Speaker 3: you know, like these four or five baths knew each
Speaker 3: other and would travel around each together. Because I had
Speaker 3: groups of up to several baths that I had caught
Speaker 3: all at the same time. Like, let's see, I found
Speaker 3: a little cluster them in a cave and I can't
Speaker 3: put a handnet under them. They dropped in. I caught him,
Speaker 3: and I banded him. Well, I have caught some of
Speaker 3: those groups five ten years later, sometimes hundreds of miles away,
Speaker 3: 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 stayed 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 it is impossible
Speaker 3: for to hear the low frequencies of rog calls.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, said.
Speaker 3: They ended up doing research on how they 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 3: Oh my god, And You've got to understand that these
Speaker 3: bats probably can't detect much with their echo location more
Speaker 3: than maybe thirty feet or so in front. That's not
Speaker 3: a whole long ways. They're having to cross terrain that
Speaker 3: is changing constantly. I mean, we're cutting down forests, we're
Speaker 3: building cities, we're doing everything under the sun to change
Speaker 3: things on them. You've got to be pretty damn sophisticated
Speaker 3: to figure all just your travel routes out. You know,
Speaker 3: there's a paper published a long time ago that showed
Speaker 3: that there was a species of bat that didn't eat frogs,
Speaker 3: that homed in on ponds where frogs were calling, just
Speaker 3: as an indicator 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. I think you better at math. You are.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. So 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 it would be.
Speaker 3: Most of of America's bats were probably lost before we
Speaker 3: were born.
Speaker 1: Really now, is what caused that decline? Was it loss
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: And the parks staff were really proud this time to
Speaker 3: show me that in twenty years we'd gone from right
Speaker 3: at 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 Lee,
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 it.
Speaker 1: I have same with sharks. Sharks kill like five people
Speaker 1: a year. Relin says, way more people die of food
Speaker 1: poisoning at picnics, from dog attacks, maybe even from falling coconuts.
Speaker 1: In America. Your chance of dying by rabies is about
Speaker 1: two million times less likely than your death by diabetes.
Speaker 1: And no, lie, I left over confetti cake for breakfast.
Speaker 1: I should have been terrified of it and thrown it
Speaker 1: at a wall 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 wind is scar us
Speaker 3: because there's big money in it. We hear that bats
Speaker 3: are sneaking around buying people in their sleep without them
Speaker 3: 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 bat. True, but did you
Speaker 3: know that's only one and a half people a year
Speaker 3: 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 at greater risk driving one mile
Speaker 3: in a motorized vehicle then your annual risk of rabies
Speaker 3: in America. And the good news is that for anybody
Speaker 3: who simply doesn't handle bats, the odds of contracting rabies
Speaker 3: or any 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, I
Speaker 1: still owe you one. So I didn't want to take
Speaker 1: up too much of Merlin's time, and I thought I'd
Speaker 1: just move on to the Patreon questions. But as we
Speaker 1: have established, Merlin is the best, and he was in
Speaker 1: 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 interest in people find
Speaker 3: out that they couldn't have margaritas without bats. Oh really,
Speaker 3: Mexico's tequila and mescal industries, which those products sell for
Speaker 3: billions of dollars annually could be lost. Without bats to
Speaker 3: pollinate the agavees which produced those products, the whole chewing
Speaker 3: gum industry might never have existed if it wasn't for
Speaker 3: the 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: And now what areas of the country we tend to
Speaker 1: have more bats because I know you're here in Austin
Speaker 1: where there are tons of caves, so bats and spilologists
Speaker 1: 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 studied done bracking cave. I think there was
Speaker 3: at least a thousand species and maybe a couple hundred
Speaker 3: genera of bacteria and a tablespoonful of guano from there,
Speaker 3: and most of them weren't known from any place else.
Speaker 3: And among those they found a whole bunch of them
Speaker 3: that had biotechnological significance. That See, when they domestic insects
Speaker 3: in that cave feed on the bat droppings, their poop
Speaker 3: ends up creating a lot of ammonia. And they found
Speaker 3: enzymes that are breaking down ammonia feeding on ammonia, and
Speaker 3: they could be used to detoxify some of the worst
Speaker 3: chemical waste of industry in America. They also found bacteria
Speaker 3: that were feeding on kiten, which leads to a whole
Speaker 3: bunch of interesting possibilities. If you're feeding on kiten, be
Speaker 3: used to convert seafood waste by products, you know, the
Speaker 3: shels of lobsters and shrimp and things like that. You
Speaker 3: could 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, like to do field work in caves and what
Speaker 1: is that? What does the night of fieldwork look like
Speaker 1: 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 wetsuits or anything.
Speaker 3: So I'm going through just dressed with long John's and
Speaker 3: a jumpsuit on. And so I get good and soak
Speaker 3: and wet. I come out the other side, and the
Speaker 3: cavers have told me there's a real tight squeeze on
Speaker 3: the other side, but don't worry. It opens up on
Speaker 3: 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 gonna I wasn't going to
Speaker 3: come out on the other side. And a few feet
Speaker 3: I caught my battery in a tight spot and pulled
Speaker 3: it loose from my head lights, so I didn't even
Speaker 3: have a light. And then I'm squeezing through places so tired,
Speaker 3: I'm practically breaking ribs, and I know that there's no
Speaker 3: way I'm going to come out alive if I don't
Speaker 3: find a place to turn around, so I have to
Speaker 3: keep going ahead. And I went ahead for like about
Speaker 3: one hundred feet it seemed like a mile and finally
Speaker 3: found a place where if I had, I swear, if
Speaker 3: I'd been one inch taller, I wouldn't have been able
Speaker 3: to turn around.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Oh man, I'm freaking out. I'm having
Speaker 1: 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 time,
Speaker 3: I would have in hypothermic, you know, just 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've been like I'm done
Speaker 1: for the day.
Speaker 2: 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. Well,
Speaker 3: I wasn't going to go through all that misery not
Speaker 3: 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 to.
Speaker 1: You had to come all the way back. How are
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It's like you've got a pie here, and every time
Speaker 3: you take a piece out of it, you got that
Speaker 3: much less energy left for survival. So you know, it's
Speaker 3: my opinion that many of the deaths that have occurred
Speaker 3: in recent years from the fungus that causes white nose
Speaker 3: syndrome may very well not have occurred had the bats
Speaker 3: not lost key hibernation sites and were already suffering at
Speaker 3: the 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 no 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 immunity. 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 on 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 in and around. And now
Speaker 1: are they finding a place to sleep? Every night or
Speaker 1: rather every day? Typically? Our most bats nocturnal. Are they
Speaker 1: 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 area. They'd have a nurse cave
Speaker 3: that was center focus. Then they'd usually have a few
Speaker 3: ba I call bachelor caves within a few kilometers around that.
Speaker 1: One bachelor caves were they mostly dudes. Okay, quick, before
Speaker 1: the dudes, let's divert to some lady batfax. So Merlin
Speaker 1: says that before a female gray bat can breed, for example,
Speaker 1: she has to have access to some insect rich territories,
Speaker 1: but those are usually guarded by the older females who
Speaker 1: probably chatter at them things like back off, Mikayla, this
Speaker 1: is Denise's mosquito patch. She will cut you. So Michaela
Speaker 1: will have to wait before breeding. But in populations that
Speaker 1: have declined, those turf wars don't happen, so lady bats
Speaker 1: can breed easier and earlier if they have access to
Speaker 1: food stores. Kind of like if you had a sizzler
Speaker 1: all to yourself, you'd be like look at all these croutcheons.
Speaker 1: Might as 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 not.
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 loved I love that they think that, like Han Kamer,
Speaker 1: four or five of us were friends. They come come
Speaker 1: 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 and 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 smallest bat You've.
Speaker 3: Got every thing 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 Tttle's bat conservation. These bats, We're gonna
Speaker 3: look at the flying foxes and the bumblebee bats on
Speaker 3: 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 Bats 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 orange,
Speaker 1: fuzzy little pups by the bye. Why do some bats
Speaker 1: have long noses like an Irish setter dog and others
Speaker 1: have a face that looks like they pressed a vagina
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 1: small footed myotis a mountain tube nosed fruit bat, a
Speaker 1: dragon tube nosed froot 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 bat 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 of?
Speaker 2: 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 dozens of hammerhead bats, but
Speaker 3: 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, but.
Speaker 3: I still don't have a fully Now. I've got some
Speaker 3: pretty nice males, but not the not the gorgeous one
Speaker 3: 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. The people are catching
Speaker 3: those are putting nets way up in the canopy of
Speaker 3: the forest, And back when I was trying to catch mine,
Speaker 3: we didn't yet have triple what we call triple high
Speaker 3: nets that we could raise up to where they.
Speaker 1: Are, and so there are probably unphotographed like alpha male
Speaker 1: hammerhead 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 an 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 bat or to
Speaker 3: document one actually going out and attacking somebody. I mean
Speaker 3: a vampire bat in Latin America. Yes, may sneak up
Speaker 3: and try to 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. Yeah, our bats. Simply if I saw a
Speaker 3: bat that looked aggress 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: Raby'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 bats, 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: bout 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 millions of bats to pre tech, public health
Speaker 1: economies and worldwide ecosystems by teaching people to live harmoniously
Speaker 1: with bats. And the founder's a pretty dang cool guy.
Speaker 1: So a donation went directly to that nonprofit at Merlin
Speaker 1: tuttle dot org. And now you may hear some words
Speaker 1: from sponsors who made that possible. Okay, back to the
Speaker 1: first half of your questions, and next week a follow
Speaker 1: up episode with the remainder of your questions and more
Speaker 1: field adventures from Merlin. Okay, First up, Claire Meyer and
Speaker 1: Heather Densmore asked a similar question to this first one.
Speaker 1: Sarah Ayinucci wants to know 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 me
Speaker 3: training you.
Speaker 1: This bat.
Speaker 3: Weighs just four grams, that's less than a US nickel
Speaker 3: small that I was convinced that there was no way
Speaker 3: you could have trained him. He couldn't be smart enough
Speaker 3: to be trained. And yet the first one I got,
Speaker 3: I put it in my walk in studio because I
Speaker 3: was going to photograph it there, and I fed it mealworms,
Speaker 3: hand fed it while I held it when I first
Speaker 3: took it in after I'd caught it, and then I
Speaker 3: left it over the night, came back the next day
Speaker 3: to do some photography. As soon as I walked into
Speaker 3: my studio, the bat flew down and started bumping me
Speaker 3: in the nose, flying up and bumping me in the nose.
Speaker 3: And I wouldn't tell this story if I didn't have
Speaker 3: proof recording. This bat is bumping me in the nose
Speaker 3: time after time. In fact, he did it so many
Speaker 3: times that my wife had time to go run and
Speaker 3: grab another camera and say, oh, I got to get
Speaker 3: this here. Put your shirt on. You know, it was
Speaker 3: really hot and I was without a shirt on. Said
Speaker 3: this is going to be interesting. Put your shirt on.
Speaker 3: And the bat's still doing it, and so I finally go.
Speaker 3: I realized that the bat was trying to get my attention.
Speaker 3: He wasn't attacking me, So I got a meal worm.
Speaker 3: As soon as I held the meal worm up to him,
Speaker 3: he flew right up and took the meal worm out
Speaker 3: of my hand. Now here's an animal weighs less than nickel.
Speaker 3: Never seen a human only hours before, never saw meal
Speaker 3: worm hours before, never caught a non flying insect, probably
Speaker 3: in his life. And now he all of a sudden
Speaker 3: remembers from the night before that I'm good for food,
Speaker 3: and that it's better to come bump me in the nose.
Speaker 3: If he wants to get my attention, why is he
Speaker 3: not bumping my shoulder or my knee, or my hand,
Speaker 3: you know, someplace else. And if this seems almost unbelievable,
Speaker 3: three years later, we went to Taiwan and they caught
Speaker 3: a bat of that same genus, a wooly bat that
Speaker 3: hadn't been named yet. It was a new species.
Speaker 1: Side note, wooly bats looked 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 on me
Speaker 3: in It'd be very embarrassing to be a leading conservation
Speaker 3: is killing a new species before it got described. God,
Speaker 3: So I released some aws to fly around in there
Speaker 3: with him. Came back a little while later to see
Speaker 3: if he'd eaten any of them. I saw wings on
Speaker 3: the floor, so I said, okay, I can keep him
Speaker 3: n till tomorrow night. Anyway, hmm. The next evening, I
Speaker 3: come walking in, knowing that there was no way I
Speaker 3: was going to photograph this bat because he's a total
Speaker 3: non cooperator. I unzipped the corner and start to come in,
Speaker 3: and then when I came in, he started bumping me
Speaker 3: in the nose, just like the one in Barneo had done.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, different, you know, totally different locality, totally
Speaker 3: 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? Tell me about your mother his His mother
Speaker 3: wasn't as big as my nose.
Speaker 1: Oh god. So they can be trained, and they can
Speaker 1: 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 even 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 primatologists 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 wait to be fed. I
Speaker 3: finally just gave up, didn't want to rough the bat up,
Speaker 3: just gave up and went and turned it. Our lab
Speaker 3: was in the jungle, so I just went turned it
Speaker 3: loose back in the jungle, and at least half an hour,
Speaker 3: maybe forty five minutes later, I don't remember exactly, we
Speaker 3: had come out of the forest, walked back to where
Speaker 3: I was staying, and we're standing under a floodlight talking
Speaker 3: and this bat came back and started coming for my hand,
Speaker 3: and I actually, for a second thought I was seeing
Speaker 3: my first bet attack. I couldn't believe this thing had
Speaker 3: followed us back out of the jungle and was just
Speaker 3: wanting another hand out.
Speaker 1: Did you have anything to feed it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we had some leftover minnows 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? I mean,
Speaker 3: I normally don't work with the same bat. A week
Speaker 3: would be a long time for me to 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 studying bats, I am
Speaker 3: 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 a 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 a custom 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. Oh wow, And
Speaker 3: the umbilical cord is like a leash, so if he falls,
Speaker 3: he can't really go very far, and so he stays
Speaker 3: attached for a fair while. I don't know exactly, it's
Speaker 3: probably not exactly the same for each bat, but they
Speaker 3: stay attached for a fairwhile, and then the mother and
Speaker 3: the young quickly learn each other's sent and voice. And
Speaker 3: after that, this pup joins a cluster of up to
Speaker 3: five hundred pups in a square foot and there are
Speaker 3: thousands of square feet covered by pups in a cave
Speaker 3: like bracking cave.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: Now you can you imagine being a mom trying to
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: Wow. I know, you want to know what a f
Speaker 1: retail bat sounds like. So also, Merlin says that they
Speaker 1: produce more milk for their size than a Jersey cow
Speaker 1: would because the pups need to grow fast, and they're
Speaker 1: burning up so much energy clinging to a coal cave
Speaker 1: wall when their moms are out munching mosquitoes. Can you
Speaker 1: imagine having a forty pound baby and then the next
Speaker 1: day 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 earthbound, leaky
Speaker 1: bags of garbage. How long does it take a bat
Speaker 1: 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 a young bat
Speaker 3: as it learns to fly. You're down in a pitch
Speaker 3: dark cave. There are thousands, probably tens of thousands of
Speaker 3: other bats flying at the same time. Many of those
Speaker 3: are beginners like you. How would you like to go
Speaker 3: out to the airport and learn to fly with a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of other beginner pilots trying to take practice
Speaker 3: takeoffs and landings.
Speaker 1: Is that why they say bad out of hell? Just
Speaker 1: to get 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: sucks 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 a proverbial brick wall.
Speaker 1: Is poor little.
Speaker 3: Pups, and he has to make that flight while avoiding
Speaker 3: multiple potentially fatal collisions per second. He has to do
Speaker 3: a perfectly tying barrel roll and with millimeter split second precision,
Speaker 3: get his feet out front to grab the wall and
Speaker 3: 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? Chet 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.
Speaker 1: On Wow, So it takes energy for the bat to
Speaker 1: open its talent, so 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 goho.
Speaker 3: Well, and people also ask a lot why doesn't the
Speaker 3: blood 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 go dark. But
Speaker 1: that's like watch this. I have so much blood and
Speaker 1: my smash face. Right now, I'm headed to dreamtown to
Speaker 1: get some z's with four hundred thousand of my closest
Speaker 1: friends farting grasshoppers on me. Speaking of large populations, a
Speaker 1: few of you, including ab seven point zero, wanted to
Speaker 1: know how big these pajama parties get. Bailey Good wants
Speaker 1: to know where in the world is the largest population
Speaker 1: 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, Joyce, Ski, liv and Michelle L. Pagraham all
Speaker 1: asked how bats live in cities, and a bunch of
Speaker 1: Austin based, or at least Austin loving folks such as
Speaker 1: Anna Thompson, Nathan Wilgaroth, Jonathan Hard and Ruby Ostrich, Chelsea Craft,
Speaker 1: Courtney Ross, Brian Wharton, Jackie and Ian friend to bats
Speaker 1: Derek Allen High first time question Samitter, Gail Rosen, Michelle
Speaker 1: Lee and Sarah Hewitt wanted to know about the Congress
Speaker 1: Bridge and why it's so great for bat watching, particularly
Speaker 1: in the spring and the late summer.
Speaker 3: It's really spectacular. Just come to our bridge if Congress
Speaker 3: Avenue Bridge.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Julie Noble, who I believe Julie Noble said, OMG,
Speaker 1: talk about the bat bridge. 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 1: He was.
Speaker 3: A rancher who joined my board directors years ago when
Speaker 3: I first got involved in conservation, and he worked helping
Speaker 3: us with protect Bracken Cave. And one day he said, Marily,
Speaker 3: you know I don't have any caves on my ranch,
Speaker 3: but I'd sure like to have something, you know, where
Speaker 3: I could show people baths on my ranch. You think
Speaker 3: we could build a cave or something that baths would
Speaker 3: come to. And I said yeah. I said, you know,
Speaker 3: there are abandoned mines and railroad tunnels and things all
Speaker 3: across America that big bat colonies had moved into. If
Speaker 3: we build it right, to come up with a proper
Speaker 3: range of temperature the baths will 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 be scouts. Well,
Speaker 3: he ran in to see them and they left, didn't
Speaker 3: 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 guada on 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 Patrion wanted to talk shit and but that I
Speaker 1: mean they had guano questions, such as Julie Bear, who
Speaker 1: brought it to my attention that back guano is used
Speaker 1: as a sculptural medium. Thank you, juliber Wow okay wow.
Speaker 1: Also there were other questions about guano's safety and uses
Speaker 1: asked 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 rabies, I point out that twenty
Speaker 3: to forty times that number die of dog attacks every year.
Speaker 3: And then I say, but before anybody thinks I'm prejudiced
Speaker 3: and advocating against dogs, let me just point out that
Speaker 3: we still love our wives and spouses, but our spouses
Speaker 3: kill us off at the rate of over a thousand times.
Speaker 3: 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 for 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 Dright, 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 donas 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 3: Jesus, 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 move out
Speaker 3: of their house for a week because they didn't know
Speaker 3: if the bat was still there. The bat is not
Speaker 3: going to attack you if you're in the room with
Speaker 3: a bat, you will have the feeling that it might
Speaker 3: 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 a U turn to get out of it.
Speaker 3: When you do that, you drop your airspeed to just
Speaker 3: about zero and you start falling. So you have to
Speaker 3: swoop down at a fairly sharp angle to regain flight
Speaker 3: speed and be able to continue flying. So if you're
Speaker 3: in the middle of that room and the bat's going
Speaker 3: back 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?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: No, I was real lucky. Well, how do you know
Speaker 3: he wasn't chasing a mosquito? And you flew before and
Speaker 3: you ran away before you found out that he wasn't
Speaker 3: after you. Oh, could that be possible? And I've even
Speaker 3: investigated cases where they got scratched on a rose bush
Speaker 3: on the way to their house fleeing the bat, and
Speaker 3: then went and got their raby shots because the bat
Speaker 3: actually got them. 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 DAMN 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.
Speaker 1: Conceivable.
Speaker 3: You know, there's another explanation. You don't need me to
Speaker 3: come up with that. Oh no, no, nobody's going to
Speaker 3: believe this until we get somebody, an expert down here.
Speaker 3: So I get down there and the guy has very
Speaker 3: little real skin left from about his elbow halfway to
Speaker 3: his wrist down his arm. I mean, it's just almost
Speaker 3: raw flesh. Is really a mess. Obvious something did a
Speaker 3: bad hell of a job on him. But at a
Speaker 3: glance I knew there was no bat in the world
Speaker 3: could or would have done that. So I wanted to
Speaker 3: get somebody to take me down to show me the
Speaker 3: scene of the crime. And oh god, it was terrible
Speaker 3: trying to get somebody to volunteer to go with, even me,
Speaker 3: But finally we went down. What happens. They had lockers
Speaker 3: and when they come to work, they'd put their private
Speaker 3: things in a locker. Well, this guy had left his
Speaker 3: locker open while he didn't hang in during the night.
Speaker 3: The bat ended up going into finding the locker and
Speaker 3: going to sleep in there. The guy comes in the morning,
Speaker 3: reaches in to do something. The bat panics and tries
Speaker 3: to fly out. The guy thinks he's being attacked, yanks
Speaker 3: his arm out, and the top of that locker looked
Speaker 3: like a damn saw blade. It hadn't been finished properly,
Speaker 3: and you could still see his again, hanging on the
Speaker 3: on the top of the locker. No, and the funny
Speaker 3: thing was, after all that, you know, at first they
Speaker 3: had to practically restrain him. He's so mad he was
Speaker 3: going to attack me for dying his story, and then
Speaker 3: when it was even clear to him what had happened,
Speaker 3: then he was really blankety blanked off and his medical
Speaker 3: doctor for being so stupid as to believe his story
Speaker 3: and give him rabies shots.
Speaker 1: Did they finish his locker properly, put some duct tape
Speaker 1: on it or something? Well?
Speaker 3: I left at that point, I'd solve the immediate.
Speaker 1: Problem Batman out. One question was understandably echoed over and
Speaker 1: over by folks such as had Their Circle, Elizabeth Illian,
Speaker 1: Elizabeth McLachlan, Amanda Rivera, Deep Nervisen, Raymond J. Deutsche, Hail Holings,
Speaker 1: Bob Clark, Georgia, Hattie Stouschnoff, Karina Peterson, Gwenn Bode, Melissa Cowen,
Speaker 1: Tangi Goat, Erica Smith, and Katie Thronberg, who asked variations
Speaker 1: of why on Earth are they so darn cute? Why
Speaker 1: are bats so stink and cute? Are bats not the cutest?
Speaker 1: Why are bats so darn cute? Why are they so
Speaker 1: dang cute? And Katie's question, why do they look so
Speaker 1: cute in diapers? Slash little blanket burritos? Bats? You want
Speaker 1: to know whether they're cute? It's a great question. A
Speaker 1: few people ask why they look so cute when they're
Speaker 1: wearing little blanket burritos, and just why in general bats
Speaker 1: 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 it before mistaken bat flying
Speaker 3: fox skulls for lamier skulls.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh. So we're seeing baby primates and we're
Speaker 1: identifying with.
Speaker 3: Them, 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's
Speaker 3: cute as any panda gotta be. But they wrap those
Speaker 3: in little towels because they're more comfortable that way. Their
Speaker 3: mama normally keeps them wrapped in her wing, and they
Speaker 3: actually feel more comfortable when they're wrapped in a towel
Speaker 3: like that, and so that's the way they keep them.
Speaker 1: That baby burritos. Polity Semon's that a great question. Is
Speaker 1: there any evidence in our modern technological environment with its noise, electromagnetism,
Speaker 1: radar 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 pest is sides were spraying on
Speaker 3: the world because we're losing bats and other insectivorous animals
Speaker 3: that once kept insects in check. In the United States alone,
Speaker 3: we now use approximately a billion tons of pesticides annually.
Speaker 3: That's all coming back into our food and water. And
Speaker 3: I tell people, you know, it's start paying a lot
Speaker 3: more attention to natural controls like bats. If you don't
Speaker 3: want to spend a whole lot more risk on pesticides
Speaker 3: killing you.
Speaker 1: Will people having bat boxes in their backyard or in
Speaker 1: their you know, the top of their house. Will that
Speaker 1: help the bat population at all?
Speaker 3: Yes, it will. In fact, where we mentioned the fungus
Speaker 3: whiteness 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 bath houses
Speaker 3: tom under 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 bath houses, and then
Speaker 3: as after white nose syndrome passed, they only had forty.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: But now they're abuilding, and I believe I can't remember
Speaker 3: 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: a bat? What kind of what kind of good binoculars
Speaker 1: or 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 they're so excited to see them. When they
Speaker 1: come out. But if maybe you don't even realize your
Speaker 1: neighborhood has bats because you think they're night sparrows, Like,
Speaker 1: how do 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 questions. 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 Aliward 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 anologist is sports and performance psychologist doctor Sari
Speaker 1: Shepherd's brand new Manage the Moment podcast, which you can
Speaker 1: find anywhere you get podcasts. I'll be her guest on
Speaker 1: November twenty fifth, so subscribe to that now. Thank you
Speaker 1: to Aaron Talbert, who admin the Facebook Ologies podcast group.
Speaker 1: Hello to the non Facebook folk sub editors out there.
Speaker 1: Thank you to Emily white and all the ologies transcribers
Speaker 1: and that Facebook group helping to make transcripts available. Those
Speaker 1: are at aliward dot com slash ologies dash extras link
Speaker 1: in the show notes. Thank you to Jared Sleeper for
Speaker 1: all the assistant editing, and of course to the human
Speaker 1: equivalent of a batt burrito, Stephen Ray Morris, who puts
Speaker 1: all the pieces together Each week. Nick Thorburn wrote and
Speaker 1: performed the theme music, and stay tuned next week for
Speaker 1: more Adventures in Bats with Doctor Merlin Tuttle. You know,
Speaker 1: if you stick around to the end of the episode, though,
Speaker 1: I tell you a secret, and this week the secret
Speaker 1: is I was once dating this musician who had like
Speaker 1: long musician hair, and we were hanging out at dusk
Speaker 1: near a lake, just admiring the view. All this sudden,
Speaker 1: this huge butterfly flew close to his long musician hair
Speaker 1: and he was like, whoa, that was the big ass butterfly.
Speaker 1: And I was like, bro, that was bat. And he
Speaker 1: did not like that information. But bats in general are
Speaker 1: not trying to eat anyone's hair. There was probably just
Speaker 1: a bug over his head. But anyway, later on this
Speaker 1: boyfriend didn't like that. At parties, I would bounce around
Speaker 1: and say hello to various friends. And so once we
Speaker 1: were in a fight, and he wrote a scathing song
Speaker 1: about me called social Bat, because I was like a
Speaker 1: social butterfly, but larger because I talked to too many
Speaker 1: people at parties. Anyway, I think he wanted me to
Speaker 1: be offended, but you know, jokes on him, because bats
Speaker 1: are cool as hell. All right, Okay, stay tuned for
Speaker 1: next week. It's so good, all right, by bye. Pacaderman
Speaker 1: College Homeology, crypto zoology, lithology and Technology, meteorology, batology, athology,