Welcome to Creature feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show Bats Bats, Bats, Bats, Bat Bats, We're getting scary and spooky, but not really with a special bat episode. Bats may not be the horrible Halloween monster that they're made out to be, but they's still one of my favorite orders of animals in the world. Then, just for more fun, we'll talk about a who's list
of halloweeny critters and why they're so special. Joining me today to talk about the most incredible unusual bat species, as well as separating bat fact from bat. Libel is science journalist and co author of the new book Atlas Obscure Wildlife Karajaimo.
Welcome, Hi Katie. Thanks so much for having me.
I have had you on before, and I'm a big fan, especially for someone who writes the podcast and then also likes to read the news for maybe ideas for my podcast, and I have definitely your articles have definitely inspired me before and writing my episode, and so I feel like we have sort of come full circle now you are here talking about this incredible book that you've written that is such a comprehensive journey through all the weirdest and coolest animals in the world.
Yeah, totally. This book was so fun to work on. I did really feel like I got to take almost everything I've learned in like ten years of chasing down weird creature facts and put it all in one place.
It's so good. I look, I'm not benefiting in any way from promoting this book. I want people to know that I have no financial interest in this, not benefiting at all other than like sucking up to Kara. But like, it is genuinely a beautiful book. Like it's got beautiful, beautiful illustrations and photographs, and the writing is really wonderful. It gives you such a good sort of sense of
all of the most incredible facts about these animals. Today we are going to focus on the spooky ones, namely bats. I don't make my love of bats a secret. They are incredible. I find them all cute, even the ones with the weird sort of maze like faces. But yeah, but before we get into sort of specific bats, I think that it's always good to go through kind of the the bat myths and the bat facts because they're one of these animals that like every culture, every mythology
has bats in it, and usually they're spooky. Not always, but often they're kind of seen as this kind of spooky thing, especially around Halloween, right, I mean, obviously we also love them around Halloween. I just got this these uh, these cookies that were shaped like adorable little bats. So I think that we are becoming as a society more loving of bats. But there are still some sort of old wives tales about bats, and the biggest one, the
number one one, is bats sucking your blood. The whole idea that bats are blood suckers, they're vampires, and they want they would happily suck a human's blood if they landed on you. And so, Kara, is that really true? Like do bats really want to suck up our blood like a bunch of little adorable nose varatus.
I mean, you know, I never want to speak for every single bat. That would be a presumpious, but I do think that most bats do not want to suck blood at all. Bats eat a lot of bugs and insects, They eat a lot of fruit, they eat a lot of nectar. I think there are a few species of they're called vampire bats that drink the blood of mostly like other different mammals that aren't people. That's about you're understanding too.
Absolutely, you're spot on. There's always three species of vampire bats that are still in existence, and none of them really exclusively drink human blood. Two of the species really rely more on bird blood, and one of the species does rely on mammalian blood, But it's usually live stock, pigs, cows, etc. And the only times they do drink human blood, it's kind of just opportunistic. It's kind of a bit of
an accident. It's usually a human who's working in very closet of association with the animals that the vampire bats usually do drink blood from. So maybe a farmer living somewhere really rural, who sleeps near where his chickens are or where the pigs and the cows are, and maybe a vampire bat's gonna slip into his bedroom and get confused and take a little sip of human blood. But
they certainly do not exanguinate anything. They ever drink the blood of an animal, so you know, including humans, but they really don't kill by drinking blood. There's the white winged vampire bat, the hairy leged vampire bat. Those are the two that prefer bird blood mostly, and then there's the common vampire bat that's the one that drinks mammalian blood. And they really don't kill their hosts. They're more of a they're not really predators, they're more like a parasite.
And when they do kill, it is completely accidental. It is through the transmission of disease. And that is kind of a I mean, that's kind of another thing about bats, right, They do sometimes carry rabies, and they can transmit rabies. It's not I don't think it's as common as people believe based on sort of the idea that if bats around you, you're gonna get rabies from this bat.
Yeah. I mean, I'm actually a funny person to talk to about this because I did, when I was young, have a rabbit bat in my house. Oops.
I did have to.
Murder it with the dad so that we could test, and it did have rabies and I had to get the raby shots and everything. But having gone through that, I feel maybe qualified to say most bats are not going to put you through that experience, I think, right, I was looking into it, and it seems like of all the animals. Bats have rabies more than others. Yeah, but not most of them don't. Like the vast vast
majority of them do not have rabies. That's right. Especially if you're encountering them in their own like homes or areas, you don't have to worry about them.
Yeah, exactly. I mean the reason that I mean, I'm sorry you had that experience, but one of the reasons that it happens where it's like it seems like so many of them have rabies is the ones that we do encounter, the ones that end up in our homes or that you see on the ground, they're just much more likely to be sick because they don't want to be there. They don't necessarily want to be in your house.
They're scared of you, they want to leave. They're not going to be on the ground normally, that's unless they're I mean, it is true that vampire bats do sometimes hop along the ground to latch on to their host, but in general, a bat's not going to be just lying there waiting for a person to scoop them up.
They're scared, they're they're wary, and they would fly away or try to escape, and if they don't if they're in your house and they're sick, that just you kind of have a biased sample, right, because these are the bats that are sick, these are the ones that are impacted. They're sick enough to you know, get confused, fly into your house and not try to escape. And so that's why.
So like, it is important if you find a bat in your house to uh, you know, try to collect it, turn it into your local animal control so that it can be tested, especially if you think you've been bitten, because yes, it is true they do occasionally carry rabies. It's also important not to handle bats. If you find one, don't pick it up, leave it alone, and the so like, if you do, you know, like, if you do have a bat in your house, the best thing is to
call animal control and follow their instructions. But if you're working with bats, right, Like, people who actually work with bats in the wild, they all get inoculated for various diseases, not only to protect themselves but to protect the bats. They use protective equipment. But like a lot of times, like they'll be working with a bat that's nectivorous, you know, bat that drinks nectar, so it's not even going to bite them. Right, It's just like, whoa, what is happening
to me? I am being held by someone. All I want is to stick my really long tongue in some delicious plants. So yeah, bats are actually really sweet, and even vampire bats who have this terrible reputation, are really really sweet. They live in close proximity with each other. They live in these really tight and it sort of kinship groups, and they will even share blood meals with
each other. By it's a little gross, they'll regurgitate blood into each other's mouths, but they do that with their kin with their families, with their and sometimes even with friends like bats that are unrelated to them, but that with whom they have formed a relationship and mutual trust where it's like, well, you feed me sometimes, so I'm going to feed you sometimes. And it's really important because their metabolism is so so fast that if they miss
a few meals that can be fatal for them. So the fact that they kind of have this social safety net of other bats who will give them blood meals as long as they also reciprocate is is really sweet. It's they definitely makes them seem less scary and evil and more just like they're a bunch of little guys just trying to help each other out.
Yeah, it's friendship goals. I think if you and your friends can't share a blood meal, then you know.
Right right, yeah, I you know, it's like sometimes you got to pick up the tab and sometimes you got to regurgitate a little bit of blood into your friend's mouths. There's another bat myth, the myth that bats want to make nests in your hair, and this is categorically untrue. They do not.
All these myths are like, sorry to interrupt you, Yeah, feel like they're very they're very like us centric. You know, we're just thinking like, oh, bats want to drink our blood, bats want to give us rab these bats want to make nests in our hair. It's not about us.
We should get over ourselves. Yeah, we're not the main characters in these bats lives. Yeah, they don't. They don't care about our hair. They're not going to make nests in our hair. If they ever wind up in someone's hair, it's an accident, or they do see that you've tried to cut your own bangs and they're like, oh honey, no, So they don't really make nests in general, there is a type of bat that definitely doesn't use hair, but it uses leaves to make homes, which you did talk
about in your book. These tint making they are so cute, Kiara, I.
Know, I love them. I actually they're the very first animal in the whole book because I love them so much, and I thought they were really good get like an entryway into what the book is all about. But yeah, they's so I mean, there are lots of different kinds of tent making bats, and they're all so cute and when you see pictures of them, it's just like a
bunch of little marshmallows in a leaf. Yes, but it's cool, Like, yeah, we don't always think about animals in general as having a ton of agency, which is very very silly, because you know, we all built this world together, all the living inhabitants of it. But these bats, they really they show that clearly. They like engineer these leaves to become shelters for themselves. Yeah, so they'll like nibble on the ribs of a leaf until it kind of like collapses
into a certain shape. Different species make different shapes. Some scientists have kind of like taxonomized the different leaf shapes, which I think sounds like a really fun way to spend time a scientists.
But they love, they love care.
But yeah, the leaves they like give the bat shelter. They sort of like rustle if a predator is nearby, which is really useful. They can like collect water for them or protect them from rain. And yeah, mostly just the pictures like go Google tent.
Making bats so cute, so cute. There's the I think one is called the Honduran leaf nosed bat, and it is so adorable. It like when you said marshmallow. They do literally look like little marshmallows because they have this white fur and they're like these little puffballs. You look in and they're all kind of all get nestled together like a bunch of hamsters inside these leaves, and it is adorable. So onto the third bat, big bat. Myth it is that bats are blind. They are not blind.
They do have functional vision. Some rely on their vision and hearing, and some also rely on echolocation, which is a form of sonar. Essentially, like they send out in a pulse a very high pitch squeak, and then when it comes back to them, it bounces off various obstacles, prey hits those huge ears and then they use those returning sounds to be able to navigate. But generally speaking, their eyes also function, so they're not blind. They might not use their site too much, perhaps at night, but
they can use that echolocation. In species that have the echolocation to navigate really really well. And one reason I think people think that they're blind is that they can fly sort of erratically, But that's not because they don't know where they're going. They're in this delicate dance where they are locating the precise position of their prey. So you have say a moth or a mosquito, it's flying around, going every which way, and this bat is sort of
narrowing in on it. It's more like a panther kind of like stalking its prey, but it's doing so in like three dimensions, right, So that's why it looks really erratic. It's kind of like flying. It looks kind of disorganized, but really it is trying to hone in on this prey. And they eat in these the species of bats that are insectivores, they're incredible. They eat so many mosquitoes, so many insects that are actually quite dangerous to US humans.
Yeah, I learned something really cool the other day reading up on the recent bat literature. There was a study that came out, I think actually by an economist that figured out that in regions of the US where white nose syndrome, which we haven't talked about yet, but it's this very bad bat disease that makes bats really sick, yes,
often kills them. In regions of the US where bats have white no disease, and where there is white nos disease and therefore fewer bats, infant mortality is higher, potentially because farmers have to use more pesticides to kill insecting because the bats are not eating the insects, and the
pesticides are bad for people, especially babies. So it's just this really amazing attempt to quantify all the things that bats actually do positively for us, even though, like you said, sometimes people can get a little sidetracked by these ideas of the negative aspects of bats that may or may not even be true, but they're actually so helpful to human society.
This is great news, and it's wonderful to see. Well, it's not good news that bats are dying of white nose, and then that hurts babies. That's not what I'm talking about. It's great news that this is a study written by an economist. Because my husband is an economist, and for the longest time I have been trying to convince him
that bats are cute. And now that we have an actual economic study that's shows how beneficial bats are, maybe I can finally convince them, Like, look, even economists agree that bats are great and adorable and wonderful.
Ten out of ten economists agree, yes that we need bats. I'm going to send you the study. Yeah, I was super psych you. It was the coolest study I've read in a long time.
Thank you. Definitely. I'm definitely like just scooting that over during during dinner, going like, well, here you go. This is this is my proof that that bats are great and you should love them. Yeah, I mean that is
really incredible. I think that it is to use sort of like another I guess sort of economics terms, there are trade offs, right, Like, bats do potentially present an issue when it comes to disease, but they also prevent a ton of disease, prevent a ton of uh sort of transmission of say, like you know, mosquito born disease, and help help us with things like pollination, with insect control.
Uh So it is you know when when we kind of look at something in just one dimension of like, oh, well some of them have rabies, it's like, yes, that's true, and you should be careful. But that doesn't mean that the species itself is a negative for humans or for the environment. In fact, they're very much a net positive.
Yes, I totally agree.
And I mean I think, you know, obviously, I think people's awareness of zoonotic diseases has increased for some reason. But it is true that bats can be vectors for novel zoonotic diseases. It is not because bats are uniquely dirty, aggressive, or anything like that. It is due to some characteristics of bats that are actually pretty cool and make them quite amazing and sympathetic. One is that they have incredible
immune systems to fight off pathogens. There's a lot of theories about why they seem to be able to live with sort of relatively high viral loads and not seem to get sick. One of them is that because flight requires so much energy, so such a high metabolism, that somehow they have evolved this trade off where their their passive immune system is really strong. And then they're also able to just kind of be in this kind of truce almost with pathogens where the pathogen lives in their
bodies but doesn't make them sick. But this means that they can carry diseases without dying, which could also mean that a pathogen could mutate inside them and that could be the origin point for a new zoonotic disease. Another theory for why they may be more likely to generate these zoonotic diseases is that they hibernate for incredible periods
of time. They sort of go into this stasis where their body system slow way down, they can survive the cold, and this may allow certain pathogens to stay inside their bodies for long periods of times during cold weather. So essentially the bats are kind of like little storage centers for the pathogens because the bats are able to last such a long time during winter and that their bodies, their metabolism, and their body systems have slowed down, so
everything's kind of in stasis. And then the other reason that they can spread diseases that they're really social. They love to a lot of species live in these huge communities where they're all kind of living in these tight spaces like a little city, a bat city. And you know, like I mentioned earlier, they're very socially. They share the vampire. Bat species share blood meals, you have a lot of socialization.
They're quite usually they're pretty friendly with each other. There's not a lot of infighting that happens with bat species. But if we hate bats for that, we should also hate ourselves because that's a very human trait, right. We also live in densely packed cities and are really social with each other and give each other hugs and all these things. And so it's like, well, yeah, it's true, but if we sea bats is gross and dirty for that, than humans are the same way, and personally, I don't
think that is grosser dirty. I think that's just what a social species is going to do.
Yeah, totally. I mean the more we talk about it, the more I'm thinking about how bats actually are a lot like people. Yes, especially in this social aspect. They do seem to really just love spending time together, taking care of each other, hanging out literally literally, Yeah, have you seen.
That video of It's the bats? Who are I think they're in some sort of They might be in a rehabilitation center. But they're like hanging from a cage, but it's a bunch of them. And then someone flipped the video so it looks like they're standing up and then set it to music and it looks like they're all doing sort of like, you know, like sort of a goth like rave where everyone's kind of dancing, but in a sort of like yeah, like a sulky like I'm
not really dancing kind of dances. Perfect. It's an amazing video. Well, we are going to take a quick break, but when we get back, we are going to talk about some incredible bat species, some of Kara's favorite bats. I'm nominating you too to do this, but these are from these are from your new books, so let's talk about it after the break. All right, So, Kara, you have written about a lot of bat species and you I really love this sort of curated list of your your picks
of bats. I'm not going to say necessarily they're your favorite bats, because maybe that's too I don't know all bats are great, but yeah, let's let's talk about it. The one that is really really interesting to me, this is something I did not know. It's the library bats in Portugal. Could you talk a little bit about those?
Oh? Yeah, absolutely. First, I just want to say, you know, if I could have made the book all bats, I might have done it, although maybe I.
Could still oop soul bats.
Yeah, exactly. I also want to say I didn't think about this until we started talking, but this book has so many amazing pieces in it from contributing writers who pitched, you know, their favorite animals and plants and other species and wrote about them. But I realized I kept all the bats for myself. All the bats in this book, I wrote about them.
It's smart.
I love them that much. These library that's are really cool. So there are a couple of different libraries in Portugal. I don't necessarily trust myself to pronounce them correctly.
That's okay, I pronounced not. I pronounced nothing correctly on this show.
You go on, Okay, the Joanine Library at the University of Coymbra in Coumbra, Portugal. I'm so sorry to anyone who knows about Portugal who's listening to this, But basically, there are really really old books in there, and old books are often made with things like glue and leather and stuff that bugs really like to eat. Like you know, everybody's sort of bookworms. There are a lot of different kinds of bugs that will sort of destroy old books
by just nibbling on the binding glue or whatever. In this library, there are a bunch of bats that live there that eat the bugs at night. And this has worked so well for so long that it's kind of just like it's almost like they work there, Like the librarians are used to them. Yeah, they sort of like
welcome them. They have these really old like leather what would you call them, sort of just like roll up sheets that they unroll on the tables at night, and the furniture, like the fancy furniture, so that when the bats poop, it's like nice sale, they can just roll them up again.
The chairs hard become your toilets, and we welcome you.
Yeah, exactly, And like it's this amazing ornate library and it's kind of the it's the kind of thing where like if you were watching like a cartoon about an old library, like maybe a couple of bats would flutter by, maybe the impression like, oh this is oldy, this is drafty, spooky, but it's actually like no, it's like a collaboration. Yeah,
the bats like they go out at night. Oh sorry, they at night they fly around the library and they will eat the bugs and then they'll like fly out the windows and drink from the river, and then they come back all day and roost and nobody really like sees them when they're roosting. And if you want to see them as a visitor, you have to go to one of the sort of like cool night concerts that they have and then you might see them.
Kind of wow, they have nights.
But everybody knows they're there and every Yeah, they have like library concerts.
Oh that's fantastic, Which is cool.
Do all the bats have like there?
Do the bats all have like little earplugs they put in when when there's trying to sleep?
I know, I mean it's kind of cool to think about. Yeah, I wonder how they're like sonar like interacts with music. I've never thought about that. Yeah, you know, that's interesting.
There's definitely like noise pollution in the ocean definitely impacts the echo location of cetacean like whales and dolphins, So I'd imagine that that can be similar with bats, where where noise pollution can impact their echo location. In this case, the library sounds like chill enough that they've accommodated the bats enough that I think it's okay for there to be the occasional concert.
And the bats.
Yeah right, just like yeah, all right, all right, there's plenty of bugs at least.
Yeah, exactly, they like, yeah, they really like them. The guy I interviewed called them quote unquote honorary librarians, and they like replaced the big library doors in twenty fifteen, and they less little gaps that the bats used to get in and out like they wanted, they wanted them to come back. So that's so I love that.
That's so incredible. I love that so much. I like humanity. I don't I think that it's nice that we have civilization because I live in it and I like it.
So I do really love examples where we have figured out a way to coexist with animals that like, yes, there is a bit of inherent tension, I guess, right, because like you could imagine that, say, if these bats were in this library, if someone didn't really know what they were doing, they'd be like, well this, we got to seal up the library, we got to keep them out, right, But when we can figure out that Hey, actually this is really good for the books, and like, what's a
little bat guano if it means keeping our books safe from insects and having this cool kind of symbiotic relationship between the library and the bats, and yeah, that's that's really wonderful. I love that there's another sort of a there's another ability that bats have very important, perhaps even more important than books, and that's tequila making sure we get to feel it. If you want to talk about the sort of bat relationship to the production of tequila.
Yeah, absolutely, So. This is a bat called the lesser long nose bat, like you were talking about. They're also a communal bat. They mostly like to hang out altogether. But every year, I think it might have to do with their age, like a certain proportion of the female bats go on this really cool migration from Mexico up into California and the southwest US, and then they all have their pups together in the.
Best group, you know.
Yeah, it's a mom's group. It's a traveling mom's group. And then the pups you know, get a little bit bigger and older and more self sufficient, and then they all fly together back to Mexico, but along the way they do all this incredible important pollination. So you were mentioning before that a lot of bats, all they really want to do is like unscroll their long tongue into a flower. Yeah, so that's like this kind of bat.
Is that kind of bat? They're going from often like cactus or agave flowers to a gave flowers and they're they're drinking the nectar and they're pollinating along the way. So just like we know this about bees, especially, like plants really need pollinators in order to reproduce and to produce fruits and the other like structures of the plant that we like the most, and the agave plant only
I think gets pollinated by these bats. So yes, we really need them to do this so that we can get agave products that we enjoy, like tequila, as you said. So that's another very important relationship between human culture and bats.
Critical one might say, Uh, did you talk to have any chance you talked to doctor Rodrigo Medeian about.
These I did, Yeah, I talked to him. He's a great little piece. Yeah, he was really cool, and a lot of people were working really hard to tie the story of these bats to you know, the story of tequila. And help people understand that they are intertwined. I think he's doing a lot of that.
Yeah, absolutely, it's really important. The next bat that I wanted you to talk about was the uh, the kind of classic thing, right, like the idea of you go under a spooky bridge and then there's a bunch of bats there and people are you know, used to be afraid of this kind of phenomenon. But can you talk a little bit about these bridge bats?
Yes, another incredible bat positivity tale. So these are the Congress Avenue bridge bats in Austin, Texas. I love these bats. I actually wrote my master's thesis about these bats because I was so taken by them. But basically, yeah, so Mexican retail bats. They live in really big colonies, like a lot of bats living colonies like we've been discussing, but their colonies are huge. And basically what happened was there's a big group of them that was living in
a cave in the woods near Austin. But then you know, somebody developed the woods and got rid of the cave and they had nowhere to go, so they went into the city and I think first they were roosting in like a high school or something, and people were like, Okay, that's not good. They drove them out of the high school.
They were given too many people wedgies, too many swirlies, shoving all the nerds.
You know. Yeah, they're definitely jocks. They have so much athletic ability. It just it messes with their judgment. Yeah. So yeah. They went under this bridge right in the middle of the city called the Congress Avenue Bridge, and they were like, this is the perfect place for us to live. It's right over the water, there's bugs every night, we can just swoop around. We're living our like an incredible life here together. And the people in the city
were kind of like, I don't know about this. I mean, as we were saying, there's so many bad associations with bats. But this group called Bat Conservation International was also getting off the ground at that time, and they did a lot of education and very quickly people realized like, actually, these bats are so cool and you can stand on the bridge and watch them do their incredible thing every night,
and it's so like peaceful and beautiful. Meanwhile, they're eating all the bugs that would be eating you if they weren't doing it. It's such a win win So what has happened is the bats have become like a big cultural property of Austin. You know, like people say, keep Austin weird. It's got this like quirky repuation as being a city for artists and people who want to do things, you know, a little differently, and the bats kind of represent that. They've become a big symbol for Austin. There's
a big statue. If you go shopping in town, a lot of stores have a lot of bat memorabilia and like art and stuff. And I think it's it's a great example of people realizing that actually like that. Maybe we thought this was scary, but it's it's cool. It's helping us and coexistence continuing there, which I love. And yeah, if you want to go in the I think like summer is the best time to go see them, because they they might they hibernate.
Maybe not the best time to be in Austin, Texas, but the best time to see these.
Yeah, you can go in the late summer too, and you can still get a good, good bat view And it's always fun like everybody's out. People are like selling glow sticks, which I think is really funny. On the bridge and hanging out with their friends, and you can go kayaking on the river and see them like they're awesome.
I love those bats, and I'm just thinking of people with their glow sticks forming a sort of runway for these bats, leading them back like a plane landing. But yeah, if you've never seen it. Sometimes, like bats, as we've
mentioned before, they're very social. So a lot of these communal living bats, when they exit their their roost for the night, they all do so kind of together in this big sort of plume of bats, and it has sort of similar properties to say, like birds who have these like cool murmurations, and it's really really beautiful, well like.
The beginning of Batman, but instead of being scary and right, it's cool and fun. Right.
And also they contribute more to the economy than Batman does.
He's not doing nearly enough.
He's he's buying a lot of fancy gadgets and not you know, paying a lot of his taxes, is all I'm saying.
He's not giving back, right.
So we're going to take a quick break and when we get back, we are going to talk about some other halloweeny creatures who are spooky and oogy and creepy and wonderful, so we will be right back, all right. So I know that this is a very bad centric episode, but it is Halloween or right before it or right after it. I don't understand the calendar. So I did want to talk about some other creepy Crawley Halloween animals that you discussed in your book, and these are also
some of my favorites in general. You know how during Halloween, it's crazy how into Halloween Americans are. I'm learning this now being in Italy, how incredibly huge Halloween is in the States. Like here, it's not as much of a thing. It's growing in popularity. But yeah, like the incredible displays that people put up at in their homes, I do miss a lot. And one of the big sort of
Halloween decorations is the giant spiders. Like you put a big giant maybe it's felt, maybe it's made out of pipe cleaners, I don't know, but it's a big old fake spider in your doorway to scare the little kids. And the cool thing is that there are real spiders who do the same thing. So, uh, the like, let's talk a little bit about the decoy spider because I love these little gals. They are so incredible, totally.
I'm glad you picked this one. I love this one too. This isn't something I really knew about before I started
doing the research for the book. So, yeah, like Katie said, there's a couple of different kinds of spiders at least in a couple of very different parts of the world that basically they have these webs up in the forest and they'll inadvertently or advertently capture little bits of you know, the bugs they want to eat, but then also for us debris like bits a leaf or stick, and what they'll do is they'll like arrange the debris in their
web to make a big spider. So they're very small, but they make the shape of a big spider, and you know, they're like the ones that have been found are like there's varying degrees of success, right, Like some of these big spiders have six legs and some are super lumpy, but some of them, like really they do like.
They nail it. Yeah, the artistic abilities of these spiders does vary.
Yeah, or you know, the intention maybe they're trying to go for something that they're like, this is a cubist spider. This is a spider, and this is a realistic spider.
Art is.
The idea is that, I mean, people, aren't you know why. We don't know always why these things happen or why they evolve. But the idea is that this big spider is scarier to a potential predator than the tiny spider that is the real spider. So it's like it's like a like having a mech suit or something, right, Yeah, Like it's like you have a big robot that you're
inside of. The spider has a big spider that it's inside of, and it's kind of There's a whole group of spiders called orb weavers that are able to sort of create pictures in their webs like this, and it's thought that these are orb weavers who have just come up with this really cool and bizarre sculpture to build.
It seems to offer them a bit of an advantage, right, Like there could be some camouflage going on where it could potentially intimidate predators who would be too small to want to take on this large spiders, this large spiders, and it could also like redirect the aggression of say birds or any other predator towards the sort of fake out spider while the real one slips off and just scoots away.
And it's like they can kind of move the web, you know, so they can make the big spider.
Kind of you. Oh, that's so good. You know those costumes that they give little dogs that have the spider legs, It's like it's like the little tarantula costumes that they put on the little dogs, and then the dogs just like bounding around, but they've made it such that the legs kind of jiggle as the dog trots around, So it looks very unsettling when it's on one of these little dogs.
But yeah, that's kind of essentially it. This is like a little tiny Chihuahua spider jiggling around in a big fake spider, freaking everyone.
Out right right. I've been thinking about how I want to dress my cats up as bats as Halloween. I have two black cats, and I'm sure it would be so cute how that I probably wouldn't like it. Oh, just just put a little like they wear little harnesses, okay, you sometimes they hang out in the backyard.
Yeah, you could put wings. I see no problem with that. You could put little wings on there. I don't think they'd noticed, Yeah, I don't. I'm not all my like my dog is naked and proud. I the only the only Halloween costume I've ever been able to get on her was a little bow tie and I just called her a political pundit and that was it. I'm babysitting three cats and there's no way I would ever get anything on them for any amount of time. But one of them looks just like Garfield, so I'll say that's
his costume. He's Garfield, yeah, because he's big. He's big and he likes food.
Speaking of Halloween, I did just remember that last year, I got those Reces bats that they make, you know, oh yeah, little like peanut buttercup bats, and I printed out a bunch of bat facts and I attached them. That amazing. That's incredible an educational Halloween.
You would have been my favorite house. When I was a kid, I dressed as a bat. I think more than once. Actually, when I was a kid, I think there's a couple couple of years I went as a I had the wings. I was very particular. I didn't want the wings on my back. I wanted them attached to my hands because it's like, well, that's what bats
are like. The wings are essentially extended fingers of the bat, which I couldn't necessarily do, but essentially attaching the fabric like from sort of my hips to like my pinky and then the rest of my arm so that I could have wings and like spread my hands out like I was a bat. And that was so cool. My mom indulged me. I also read the book Stella Luna as a kid, so that helped. But I was super intended bats as a kid. I loved them. Look at you now and look at me now, talking talking talking
bats on a podcast. So also speaking of our pets, there is I think I've actually talked about this on the show before, but I can't help bringing it up because it's Halloween. But the ghost dogs of the Amazon, who are actually not so scary but more just fascinating and really cute. I assume I've never seen one, for reasons that will become clear.
Yeah, So just to say, this entry in the book was written by a journalist named Claudia Guide, who's really great. She spoke to the world's leading ghost dog expert. Were not elite Pittman, but basically these dogs live in the Amazon and they're just super rare, like nobody ever sees them. Yeah, every once in a while, you know, you'll get a glimpse of one on a camera trap, or you'll hear one making a little hoot, because that's the time they make.
But like there's really just not that much known about them, which kind of brings home one of the lessons that I took from this book, which is that like, even though we feel like we know everything about the world, there's actutes, so so much going on that we don't know, especially in places like the Amazon, which we are like destroying. We're really destroying all the stuff that we don't even
know about yet. In any case, this biologist became really obsessed with these dogs in around two thousand, she was working in Peru. She started to track them with radio collars, and she eventually lived with one because somebody had sort of like almost like poached a puppy from the reinforest and was raising it as like a normal dog.
It was like, I don't want to be clear, We're clear, this is not a These aren't fairal domesticated dogs. These are these are canids, a species of canad similar to say, I mean not similar, but in the same vein as like say, like a dingo is a species of canaan.
Yeah, yeah, so it's not. Yeah, it's not the kind of puppy that you want to just be hanging out with if you're not prepared for that. So she she bought this puppy from this person, and she actually sort of lived alongside it almost like again not like a pet, but just observing and learning a lot about what these dogs did and like leading it on the leash or being led by it through the leash for a year. Yeah, learned like what it eats. They eat fruit, which is cool,
they eat nuts. They actually like are important seed dispersers in the rainforest poops. And after about a year she just took the leash off and he ran away. Makes sense.
That's really interesting. I didn't know about that that someone actually was able to get information that way. Yeah, but yeah, that that is I kind of like that, Like essentially it's like no, you're not I'm not you're not gonna tame me. I'm not gonna be domesticated, and I'm out of here, which is very different even from sort of
dog ancestors. Right, Like, I'm not suggesting anyone tries to tame a wolf, but technically speaking, you can, and people who tame wolves can actually form a relationship with them, and the wolves are actually pretty They can act, you know, somewhat doug like, right, like being friendly with their with
the people who've tamed them. Maybe sometimes you lose some fingers or your life, but a lot of the times you, you know, these people who you know, tame these wolves usually on like wolf rescues do form like kind of a relationship with wolves. They're very different from dogs, though it's not going to be just like a large husky. They are much more fiercely independent than dogs. They seek human help, much less, much more likely to kill you, you know. They just operate by different rules from dogs
because dogs have been their dogs are not tamed. They are domesticated. They've gone through many, many, many, many generations of artificial selection by humans and also potentially some self selection in terms of like domesticating themselves so that they could get in on our sweet, sweet scraps. But these dogs, these ghost dogs, they're not necessarily of the of the
same sort of lineage, right, They're not. They're related to wolves, they're related to domesticated dogs, but they are not necessarily pack animals, and so if they have a more solitary lifestyle, it makes sense that there's just not You're not going to be able to tame one because it doesn't really have any interest in you, because in its natural environment, is not necessarily social in the same way that wolves or dogs or even hyenas or dingos are.
Yeah, totally. One thing that this bile just learned was that one reason that people don't see these ghost dogs is they live in burrows, like kind of on their own, or they'll hide inside.
Of hollow trees or yellow that's adorable.
So they are like they are sneaky, They're just sneaking around.
Yeah, kind of sounds like my dog. She likes to sometimes hide under a chair and I spend like, you know, fifteen minutes of panic, like where is she? There's no way she could have left the apartment. I'm on the top floor. What's going on? And she's just like hanging out under a chair, probably deeply amused at me as I'm looking around.
Ghost dog.
Yes, she did dress herself up for Halloween. She tossed a toy weasel in the air and then it landed around her neck. Like she's a fancy lady. So that's about as close as we're going to get to a Halloween costume. My dog the fancy lady wearing a mink around her neck, which is actually just a gross old
toy that she's had since she was a puppy. I do want to talk about carnivorous plants, because I think that's kind of a that's kind of a Halloweeny thing that we don't tell or I don't talk about plants that much on the podcast. It's not my strength, but I do love carnivorous plants. I love especially pitcher plants, because of all of the various symbiotic relationships they have
with other critters like bats, frogs, crab, spiders. You've basically got like your perfect Halloween mix with pitcher plants, all the crowd favorites of Halloween, and then your cauldron, which is made out of a plant that does even mean.
Yeah, I love that. I love carniverse plants too. They're like they really teach you that there are no rules, you know. Yeah, like we think that we understand how plants work, but then there's all these ones that are like flipping the food chain, and yeah, we're just like, Okay, go for it. Picture plants are really cool. Like you said, they look like a cauldron. They are just like this big cup and then at the bottom of the cup there is like a murk of digestive juices, which I
assume that's what's in a cauldron as well. I guess that's something like that confirmed. But yeah, they so all carnivorse plants. Basically, instead of getting their nutrients from soil the way that we understand plants to do it, they get their nutrients from like living things like bugs, like
a venus fly trap is the classic example. It will snap up a little fly and then digest the fly, and that's how it gets some of the things it needs like nitrogen and phosphorus and stuff like that that other plants will drop through their roots from the soil. So yeah, very cool. Picture plants. They don't really necessarily like actively move like a lot of carnervous plants, like the fly trap, which will go like out and grab the fly.
Like a trigger that the fly hits and then that triggers this.
Yeah, yeah, which is so cool. But the picture plants are they're just hanging out and waiting for something to fall in. Basically that's.
My method of eating weight around and wait for something to fall in.
They have these ways of attracting prey, so like they will have a little like sweet nectar around like the lip of themselves, and then a bug will come and eat it and fall in over and sometimes they'll get, you know, something bigger than that. But a lot of them have evolved over time to be even more interesting. One of my favorite ones I learned about writing this book was the lowest picture plant, which is also known
as the shrew poop plant. So basically it's like nectar appendage attract shrew shrews, and the shrews will come and like leaning over to lick the nectar off the edge of the picture plant like puts them in like the squatty potty position, you know, And so they're just like, oh, well, like how convenient I can eat and also relieve myself at the same time.
Yeah, food plant.
Yeah, it poops into the plant and the plant is like, yes, like that's what I wanted, and it's free. I guess the nutrients. I know. It's so funny. It's like so crazy, how amazing these different strategies are that have evolved over time the same thing. There's another picture plant that does this with really really tiny pats that are like an inch long and it's appendage. Like the bats echo locate and they can see like, oh, this is the guy. This is the one we like, Like, we want to
go roost in here. Yeah, And they go and they like roost inside the giant picture plan and they poop in it, and the plant.
Is like, yes, right, fertilizer. Because these plants are freaks. Yeah, I love that. I also love the ones that have the semitic relationship with the crab spiders because the spiders will also make a little home out of these plants.
And it's interesting because these piccher plants will both eat insects, but also so it won't necessarily eat the spider while it's alive, because the spider is suspended by a thread, so it's got kind of a safety tether and but the spy but it's not really a it is more of a mutualistic relationship because when the spider, the spider might catch a fly that it was kind of thinking of landing in the plant but kind of decided against it.
But oops, now there's a spider there. And so it will eat the juices out of the spider or eat suck the juices out of the fly or whatever insect, and then dump the rest of its carcass into the plant, and the plant can actually use that. So the plant that have these little spiders living in them actually end up getting more nutrition than ones that do not have the spiders. And of course the spiders also get more catches by being in this plant that has this fragrance
that attracts the flies. So it's a mutually beneficial relationship. And then the sort of the best deal for the picture plant is that once the spider finally kicks the bucket, where does it go? It falls right back into the picture plant, and so you know, it's like, well, you were my friend, my little buddy, and now you're my meal, which I don't know. I don't know that picture plants
are sentimental, probably because they don't have a brain. But still it's a beautiful friendship all the way until the soupy end.
I sort of think it's our job as the storytelling species to like add this meaning yeah, onto these relationships that we observe. So I think it's totally valid, yeah, to sort of be like this is this way. Yeah, that's just my personal opinion.
It's like if a Little Shop of Horrors ended very differently.
Yeah, Or it's like how people talk about cats would like eat you if your dead body was in your house. They might, you know, they might, but it's not necessarily like a bad thing. It might. No, it's a way of incorporating you. Yeah, to themselves.
Yeah, I mean I think that, Like, I think that the more complex and animal gets, especially ones that are highly social or at least tolerant like cats and dogs, the more I do think they really kind of appreciate these sort of relationships, right, Like if you have a hamster, it may have a dim appreciation for you. A dogg or cat is going to have a greater appreciation for you,
and I think they do. They are going to miss you if you keel over and die, and they will be sad about it, and they might possibly eat some of you. None of those are mutually exclusive of.
Yeah, totally. They are a little spooky though, so they're still on them.
There you go, Yeah cats and yeah, shout out to black cats. I don't think there's any I know that people like talk about how Halloween is a really dangerous night for black cats. I don't think that's true necessarily, like in terms of like people are like, ah, people are trying to do rituals with black cats. I don't think any of there's any actual evidence of that other
than like scattered anecdotes. But you know, every night is potentially dangerous for cats if they're outdoors, I mean, particularly black cats. They're harder to see, so they can be victims of getting hit by cars. So you know, keep keep your cats in this Halloween and if possible, the rest of the year too. But they are they are wonderful, wonderful animals. Nothing nothing spooky or different about black cats
compared to other species or other breeds of cats. They are, uh sometimes looked over in shelters and stuff, but they really are just the same sweet little fluffballs or sometimes not so sweet fluff balls as other cats.
I love my black cats. I like Halloween because there's just a lot of black cat appreciation out there. Yes, Like we can go around and you see a lot of black cat representation in yards and in windows and in the aisles of the drug stores and stuff. And I do like that. Yeah for Halloween.
Yeah, Now there I mean, you know, it's kind of like, I do feel that there has been a cultural shift in terms of black cats, bats, things like that, where people kind of appreciate them more rather than genuinely being afraid of them. Black cats are still somewhat overlooked in shelters, like they're less taken up than other types of cats,
which is a shame. But yeah, I mean I think that like, if you watch Kiki's Delivery Service and don't come away wanting a black cat, there's something wrong with you. All right, Well, before we go, let's play a little game called Guess Who's squawking? The Mystery Animal Sound Game. Every week I play a mystery animal sound and you the listener. K you're the guest, try to guess who is making this sound. It can be any animal in the world, So you know, no pressure, not hard at all.
Here is the hint for this one. It's a bit of a long hint, but here we go. So I've actually used this sound before on the show, but I can't help pulling it out again because I think it could be a sample in a europop song. Our. One of our last episodes is about Eurovision, and so one of our last episodes was about Eurovision. So anyways, maybe I should even say Colombian music because this little guy is from the andyes, all right, Cared, do you have any guesses of who this could be?
This a velbird?
Oh man, you are so close, you are so so close. It is it's in the same sort of region. It's a it is a bird. This is the club winged Mannikin. So this you are incredibly close it Actually they sound very similar, but they have a very different way of producing sound. So the club wing Mannequin is a cute little bird with a red cap, a brown vest, and black and white wings that are surprisingly short and stubby. They are bad flyers, not very graceful, but the wings
have this superpower, which is sunnation. They vibrate their wings incredibly fast, and they have a mechanism similar to how insects produce sound through stridulation, like crickets that rub their wings, but the feathers have been specifically modified to kind of have this like ridge structure, sure, like a spoon and washboard kind of structure that allows them to stridulate, and so it shakes its wings like a hundred times a second,
producing this loud incredible sound, which a bird like the bellbird, which produces a very similar sound, produces instead with its syrinx, which is sort of the bird version of a larynx, and it just has this large resonance chamber that can produce this loud sound. But this little bird uses its wings and it is one of my favorites. And it's also just really funny how little and stubby, and if you've ever seen them fly, they are not elegant.
That's so cool. Thanks for teaching me about that. I learned so much today overall.
Well, I learned so much from reading your book, so it seems we have made a fair exchange of knowledge here. And you also help out this podcast. When I read your articles, I'm like, I have to talk about that. Uh So, I'm so glad that I could return the favor at least once. Onto this week's mystery animal sound. The hint is this happy hollow ween from this loud little aquatic gentleman. All right, Karen, you got any guesses.
An aquatic gentleman? An aquatic like a little tadpole with a top hat, but probably a fish of some kind. Is it like a like a sea robin or something like that.
Oh interesting, I don't as sea robin.
You said, yeah, that's a kind of fish that I know can make sound.
But you know, I don't even know about that fish, so you are incorrect yet. Now I want to learn about the sea robin fish, so you're on the hook for teaching me that. So another hint. It's not the sea robin fish. But tell me about the sea robin fish.
Oh, I mean, it's just like, it looks really funny. It lives in shallow water, and it's called the sea robin because it has fins that look sort of like wings. And then it also comes like I love this guy gurgle above the water. It can make suense.
Oh my god. Well now I know what I'm going to use for a future one of these. I'll have to wait a little while so people don't see it coming. But this guy looks incredible. I love his little wings. That's amazing. In a way, you still win because you taught me about an animal that I have not heard of before. But but no, you did not get it. But we will reveal the answer to this one next time on Creature Feature. Kara, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm so pleased to have you on.
I had a great time reading your book, and I highly recommend it. It's Atlas Obscuro, not a ciro, sorry, at List Obscure Wildlife and co authored by Kara Gaimo. Where can people find your book and where can people find more of your incredible writing?
Oh? Yeah, so my book is available basically everywhere. You can buy it online, you can probably buy it at your local bookstore. I agree with Katie, if you like this podcast, you'll probably like the book. I I feel like more confident saying that than I have on any other podcast I've done.
It's one hundred percent true. Like, if you like this, this is like kind of like this podcast in book form, but with very much care of flavored. So wonderful.
And as for me, I don't know, I'm I'm all over the place. I'm actually I'm on a book tour right now. If if you're I don't know when this episode is going to.
Come out, but halloweenish, okay.
If you're in Portland, Oregon, you can see me at Portland Book Festival on November two. That's my birthday. Oh that's cool.
Celebrate celebrate my birthday by going to Portland.
And I'll yeah, I am freelance, so you can I crop up all over the place. You can look for my byline anywhere. You enjoy fine journalism about creatures, And yeah, I think that's all I can really plug right now.
I have gotten to the point where I will be reading something and I forget to look at the author and I'm like, wait, this is para, isn't it. And I checked and I'm so right.
Oh, that's fun, that's cool, that's awesome.
All right, guys, well, thank you so much for listening. Have a real, real, good, spooky and fun Halloween. Enjoy all the candy. I'm not a dentist, so I'm gonna say, eat all the candy you want. Don't even refresh your teeth. I don't care. Yeah, happy Halloween. If you're enjoying this show, you rate and review that tangibly helps me and I read all of them and appreciate it all. And thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song Exo Alumina.
I almost forgot to tell you that if you think you know who the mister animal sound is, if you have any questions ooh oh, if you have animal costumes, that you put your at least partially willing pets in, send them to me at Creature Featurepod at gmail dot com. And this has been a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or Hi Gus, what where have you
listened to your favorite show. I'm not your mother, and I'm certainly not watching you from behind you right now, so it's none of my business. DNX Wednesday,