Chiropterology (BATS) Encore with Merlin Tuttle

Oh hi, it's me from the future. It's been two years since we made this episode. I still love this ologist. We're still friends. He just turned eighty and I actually missed his surprise party in August. Jarrett had popped his acl and got a small fracture on his femur wasn't able to go. But actually, speaking of he just got surgery with a knee specialist in San Francisco, so we're up taking care of him and taking a few weeks off,

This is this bat, and you see how small he is. This bat is the one that sends thousands of otherwise mature, grown, brave men cowering, running in tear. Every year. I know of two cases in the last few months in Wisconsin. One man broke his leg falling downstairs getting away from one of these guys. One broke his arm swinging a tennis racket around a door jam.

How can I you can touch you? I don't want to hold him.

Now, you got to admit.

So I winged it. Oh, I was nervous. We talked for three hours. So this episode is broken into two weeks, and we cover what is a bat? How big are they? How small are they? Will they attack you? Why are people so scared of them? How do they evolve to fly? How do they sleep upside down? How scary are caves? Which ones guzzle blood? How do they protect us from mosquitoes? Can you train a bat? Why are they so cute? What's the deal with guano? The latest on white nose syndrome,

No, but there are a lot of people on this planet who know me only as the Batman.

That's not a bad that's not a bad nickname to have.

When I was working years ago studying bats in the backwoods of Tennessee, the hill Billy moonshiners were always watching out for revenuers. And when I would drive into the final hollow where they had their moonshine, which I pretended not to know where it was en route to my bat caves, I would hear them yell across the hallow to each other, the Batman's are coming. And I don't think they ever knew my real name.

That's pretty appropriate.

It was funny, you know, these guys. They they had a coat of ethics among themselves. It was very strict. You know, you turn in a fellow to the revenuers or something, and you deserved to die on the spot.

Oh no, Oh my gosh. As the batman, you weren't about to do any crime fighting. Oh my gosh. And so your work is probably primarily nocturnal when you're out doing field work, or how much of it is nocturnal? How much of it is.

A lot of it's nocturnal? More than I would like it these days?

Someone calling the bat line, that's the batphone. Huh.

Well, I mean, if it wasn't probably considered unethical or illegal, it would be fun for you to listen in on one of these calls from somebody who's terrified thinks they're about to die of rabies because the bat got near him last night.

Oh so he unplugged the batphone and we continued going back in your history. You were born in Hawaii, right, and now when did you make the move from the island to the mainland and did you grow up around caves at all?

I grew up going into lava tubes in Hawaii. My father was very interested in exploring the old lava tubes. But there aren't any bats in caves in Hawaii. I didn't discover bats until I was at least nine years old. Living in California, I really first discovered them when a classmate in the fourth grade brought a dead one to school.

Cool.

We were all curious and looked at it, and I took it home and made a steady skin out of it. At age nine, a mammalogist came to my school to speak about his research on small mammals in the jungles of Central America, and I immediately I never forget. I thought, Wow, you mean a scientists actually get paid to go have fun adventures in the jungle.

That's what I want to do. That's amazing. So you were inspired from just being a wei one.

So from age nine I got acquainted with the scientists who lectured at my school. He told me about a book I could get that would teach me how to be a memologist, and I started preparing study skins and trading specimens with museums.

Oh my gosh, So even in high school you were starting to work on this kind of in an almost professional sense, right.

Well, I actually it was only age of nine when I started doing this.

Oh my god.

I started taking accurate field notes and really getting serious. Actually, I published my first two or three papers based on high school work.

You're like the Doogie Howser of bats.

Douglas Doogie Houser is a whiz kid.

You're like a wonder kind, like a baby bat genius. Did you ever did you ever waiver in terms of what you wanted to do? Did you ever say, like, maybe I'll go into farming, or maybe I'll be a nurse or was it bats? From age nine?

Well, it starts way back before that. I mean, I was clearly a nature buff you know, from the beginning, from the time I could talk. I mean, when I was less than two years old, I knew when a bonner butterfly was about to hatch from its pupa. I would rear the caterpillars on a plant stuck in water in the window, And when a pupa would be about to hatch, I'd run around the house telling my parents, you know, come quick, come quick, the butterfly is about to come out.

Oh my god.

So I mean, And by the time I was five, my father was big time interested in seashells and collecting, and so by that time I probably knew nearly all the scientific names of the seashells of Hawaii.

Oh my god.

And then later I got into snakes and Oh, man, I could tell you stories endlessly about terrorizing my mother and all her friends with my snakes getting loose. And then I published I think two papers on shrews before I did anything on bads.

Oh so, people, it's okay to like a lot of things. Maybe over time you'll realize a common thread between your interests, or a way to link them, or do both, or you'll just figure out which one you truly love the most.

By the time I was nine, there was no question I was going to be a mammalogist, and so all the way through high school I was out. In fact, this is an interesting part of my story in well, all through college. I barely graduate from college really, In fact, I was terrified the last semester of college. I found out at the last minute that if I didn't have a C average. In my mind, I couldn't graduate. And I was taking biochemistry and I'm about to flunk it,

Oh my god, all you needed was that, just that piece of paper.

This was based on the fact that while I was near flunking out of school, I was becoming a well recognized mammalogist, hanging out with leading mammologists in the field, learning from them, and skipping classes while I did it. Oh no, And so the funny thing was I finally did graduate, got my job at the Smithsonian, but I'd been warned that I'd never make it into graduate school on my lousy grades.

Merlin got a bachelor's in zoology at Andrews University in Michigan, but he was so focused on field studies of bats that he said they had to twist some arms to get him admitted to graduate school at the University of Kansas. He was admitted on academic probation, and his admission was so conditional the school said they might not even keep

I gave a commencement address this spring at a school where I point out that you don't sit around and wait for somebody to tell you how you're going to get the biggest job opportunities, the most pay that kind of thing, because it's always going to change. Whatever everybody's telling students today is the big job opportunity area will

Oh you thought this was just about bats. Oh no way, never, No, there's so much self help in here.

Oh, get your heart ready, and I've definitely got the passion.

And now what is it about bats? What drew you to them? In terms of all the mammals that you could study.

Well, I start out studying small mammals in general, particularly shrew's. Shrews are very interesting, Oh very Don't worry.

I have my eye on a shrewd expert, doctor Leslie carowainne Oregon. Come coming for you anyway. When it comes to mammals, how many really fly? We just have bats and sort of gliding gliding squirrels.

Right, only bats truly fly.

Okay, that's what I thought, is that one thing you love about them?

Well, I think I could have studied almost anything that happened to get in my way long enough to keep me focused for a while. I went through periods when I loved snorkeling on coral reefs, and I could have easily been a marine ecologist. I went through a phase where I'm collected and identified I think one hundred and sixty species of mosses and liver warts. I love nature.

Sure, so you understood the whole puzzle, and so every piece in a puzzle becomes really interesting and vital.

Yeah, and you know, I get internally, at least rather upset at people who are just focused on a species or a group. And you've got to save these and doesn't matter how many others you trample on. These have got to be saved. And it's not that way. Bats aren't safe until all living things are safe. They're all interlocked, interdependent, and so are we. We don't get out of that.

Merlin, come for the bats and stay for the poetic existentialism. He's the best speaking of existence. How do bats define themselves? What is a bat? How do you define a bat? I know that's a stupid question, but.

Well, they nurse their young. Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, thought that beats were true primates because they had pectorol instead of England old brass primates.

Okay, this is the flying primate hypothesis, and it relates to the flying fox, which is a fruit eating megabat as opposed to the smaller insect munching microbats. So side note, none of them are blind as a bat. These little winged fluff muffins have pretty good eyesight, and microbats use

He discovered that all flying foxes have crossing over neurons between the eyes and the midbrain. The yeah, thousands of neurons that go between your eyes and your midbrain, and in primates they cross over between the two sides, and in no other mammal do they. So that was the diagnostic. You know, if it has crossing over, it's a primate. If it doesn't, it's not. That was accepted for most

Oh my god, I had no idea that they were even up for consideration for it. It's just such an honor to just be nominated.

Neuronal evolution. You don't evolve new thousands of new neuronal pathways just overnight. Those are the slowest parts to evolve. Your fingers may get longer or shorter, things like that, but your neurons are pretty stable. So when you find thousands of neurons are doing the same things they do in primates, you should at least take a good look at what that might mean.

Yeah, and now, when it comes to the evolution of bats, where what are their ancestors, what are their relatives? What are these beautiful, very fuzzy skypuppies as they're called come from.

That's probably a pretty debatable subject. When I start studying bats, we recognize just a little over eight hundred species. Now it's almost fourteen hundred.

Now are more and more people maybe going into areas that haven't been explored or caves or do we have better technology? Why such a jump in the number of species.

Well, for a very long time, bats weren't very studied. I mean, you could go through a whole major in biology and all you'd find out about baths was there was this order chiropter and they flew and everybody ignored them. And bats haven't always been the easiest thing to study, even if you wanted to study them. But with modern technology, we're coming up with a whole lot more ways of looking at bats.

Okay, So, a bat is a mammal covered in fur that gives birth to live young and makes milk, and each one has a little belly button, and it's the only mammal capable of true flight. Also, you know how their wings are really just big webbed hands. So imagine if you had a stubby clawed thumb and then your fingers got longer and longer until your pinky was as long as your whole body and webbed, and then you were like later losers and flew away. How badass? Are you?

Well, it's very different for different kinds of bats. Most bass produced just one puppy year, and that's part of why they're so easily threatened with extinction. They form the largest aggregations of any mammal except Homo sapiens.

Oh wow.

And they not only form these huge aggregations in very places like caves, but they only produce one puppy year per mom. Their program for long life span, forty plus year old bats have been found.

What that's crazy. I didn't know that they could live that long.

They're the longest lived mammals on the planet for their size.

That's not because normally typically isn't there a metabolism of smaller mammals typically shorter and they live they live less time. Do they have different hearts?

Rodents are lucky to get in two years?

Right? Yeah, So how are they doing it? Do you think? Well?

Bats are just totally different, and it largely centers around these long life spans, and if you're going to be as sophisticated and live as long as they do, you'd better be sophisticated socially. And they have a lot of smarts. In fact, when I first banded gray bats, I had big time suspicions that they were were having friendships that you know, like these four or five baths knew each other and would travel around each together. Because I had groups of up to several baths that I had caught

No, they have bat packs.

I could tell because I banded my baths at known ages when they're just learning to fly coming out a certain case. I know where they came from, and I knew how old they were, and I knew that some of these baths weren't just mom, you know, mom, pop or brother sister, And so that led me to a

Oh my gosh, do you think that they can communicate with their sonar to each other?

Well, bats have a much bigger repertoire of communication ability certainly than we do.

Really, how are they communicating?

They can hear our low frequencies, and they can hear extremely high frequencies. They have a much broader range of hearing. In fact, I years ago stayed froggating bats, and when I discovered that a bat eight frogs, the herpetologists all laughed and they didn't believe it because they'd never seen

I'm sorry, said.

They ended up doing research on how they did it.

Oh my god. Okay. Side note, a research institute just called the Bat Lab in Tel Aviv has been analyzing fifteen thousand different noises that bats make, And they made a recent discovery that a lot of the time they're nestled together in colonies, kind of a mix between a cuttle party and a rush hour commuter train from New Jersey. Those noises are bats bickering, yep, just bitching at each other, like Jesus, Eric over who farted? Who ate a grasshopper

Well, you know, if you're going to live at forty some years and you're going to have a complex lifestyle. I mean, look the gray bats that I stayed. For example, you'll have a hibernation cave where maybe a half million or even a million or more come to hibernate in one site. Some of the destination caves, one of them had an entrance so small and well concealed that after I'd been going there years, I would still sometimes park my car and spend twenty minutes looking for the cave entrant.

Oh god, that's amazing. Merlin says bats are important in controlling agricultural past two like the corn earworm moths, and on top of that, they are excellent meteorologists. So if you see a bat, just kindly stop it and excuse me. Pardon me, well, I need an umbrella tomorrow. I mean, if you can stop them, well speed demons.

They can fly thousands of feet above ground, catch tailwinds, and go one hundred mile close to one hundred miles an hour, so that they can really, you know, if they can figure out where the storm disturbances or things are happening, they know where the insects are happening. And we've probably got a lot more to learn about that.

Oh god.

And now get this. One of those bats, just one can eat enough corner worm laws to prevent them from laying twenty thousand or more eggs. That's enough to force the Texas farmer to spray multiple acres with pesticides at a cost of seventy four dollars an acre.

You said you weren't good at math, but I'm starting to doubt that. I think you better at math. You are. That's amazing. So the importance of them for pest control.

Is huge nationally. It's been conservatively estimated to be worth twenty three billion a summer.

Oh my gosh.

But The sad thing is that we're just looking at the tip of the iceberg of what it would be. Most of of America's bats were probably lost before we were born.

Really now, is what caused that decline? Was it loss of habitat?

Loss of habitats a big factor. Loss of habitat is what, of course happens when people get scared and starts burning their caves.

Marlin told me that two decades ago, in one part of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park, he was able to convince park officials to remove a concrete door that they'd put up at the entrance of a cave and make a friendlier to the bats who used to live there. And the bats were like, oh shit, wow, okay, thank you.

And the parks staff were really proud this time to show me that in twenty years we'd gone from right at zero to three hundred thousand bats in that cave.

Oh that's amazing.

It's not too late to restore bats. But it's too late if we don't change our attitudes. And it all gets down to attitudes. People fear most. What they understand Lee, We all fear more taken off on a plane than riding to the airport in a taxi, and yet the taxi is far more dangerous. Yeah, it just seems to be the way we are. And it's been very easy to scare people about rabies and bats, disease and bats.

I have same with sharks. Sharks kill like five people a year. Relin says, way more people die of food poisoning at picnics, from dog attacks, maybe even from falling coconuts. In America. Your chance of dying by rabies is about two million times less likely than your death by diabetes. And no, lie, I left over confetti cake for breakfast. I should have been terrified of it and thrown it at a wall and run screaming. Based on those odds.

If bats were even fractionally as dangerous disease wise as they're purported to be, people like me would have been dead eons ago.

Yeah. Have you ever had a bat by?

You ever had a bat bite me? I'm probably the world's foremost authority on bat bites.

What is it like when they bite you.

Now, I'm not a guy to brag about being bit I don't want to encourage people to be careless and get bit by any animal they don't know, or even when they do know. But here's the key. I've never been bitten by a bat that wasn't bite in self defense because I was handling him and he was frightened. I have never been attacked by a bat. I've been surrounded by millions at a time, for days at a

Merlin and other bat researchers, like veterinarians, have gotten pre exposure vaccination against rabies. That just protects them against defensive bites from some unfamiliar critters they handle, so unprotected. People bitten by any animal, of course, should get advice regarding a possible need to be vaccinated and to have the animal tested for rabies. Just be safe.

If I'm trying to scare you into taking your rabies shots, I'll tell you that almost every person in America who gets rabies gets it from bat. True, but did you know that's only one and a half people a year out of the whole US and Canada combined.

One and a half people a year and.

One and a half people per year. I mean you risk. You put your life at greater risk driving one mile in a motorized vehicle then your annual risk of rabies in America. And the good news is that for anybody who simply doesn't handle bats, the odds of contracting rabies or any disease from bat are right at zero.

So we recorded this at Merlin's kitchen table in Austin, which is of course known for its caves and bats and attractive people in bands.

Look at the Congress Avenue bridge right here in Austin. When hundreds of thousands of baths started moving into that bridge, public health people warned that they were rabid, dangerous, would attack people. People signed petitions demanding that they'd be eradicated. They're right on the verge of doing it. When I came here and convinced the city that they might be better off saving the bats. Today, decades later, we're still waiting for the first person to be attacked. We're still

Now, what about people who want to put up bat boxes in front of their or you know, on their house.

Well, it's a great idea if you're going to go to all that trouble or expense, so just be sure you do it right. If you go to my website, there's a resource on my website at Merlin Tuttle dot org that tells you how to recognize a good bathouse from one that isn't good, and even less several producers that make good ones that I have personally tested.

Okay, side note. A bathouse is a relatively flat, usually wooden, structure about the size of a suitcase, and you can mount it on your house or barn about twelve to twenty feet off the ground, so little flying critters can nestle up and roost in it like little snugly furry sardines.

Well, I'm the one that first introduced bad houses to America.

You did? Was that a hard sell?

The hard sell was with my colleagues. Really, I had several leading colleagues who actually one of them even published a scientific paper claiming that bad houses didn't work. And it was unfortunate that, without naming me specifically, that some people were promoting them to raise money despite the fact they didn't work. And all of these people that made those kind of claims ended up using them as research sites for their students when they worked.

Did they ever issue a public formal apology? No, I still owe you one. So I didn't want to take up too much of Merlin's time, and I thought I'd just move on to the Patreon questions. But as we have established, Merlin is the best, and he was in no hurry to wrap up the bat facts.

Before we get there, though, let me point out, you know that there's a lot of interest in people find out that they couldn't have margaritas without bats. Oh really, Mexico's tequila and mescal industries, which those products sell for billions of dollars annually could be lost. Without bats to pollinate the agavees which produced those products, the whole chewing gum industry might never have existed if it wasn't for the chicklay tree, that is bat seed dispersed.

Okay, side note, there was a study done recently in Indonesia, which is one of the top three suppliers of cacao beans, and researchers found that bats saved farmers nearly eight hundred million dollars a year by eating bugs. So every time you see chocolate, wink at it and say, hey, bats, thanks, you did this. You did this to my mouth, and I'm grateful.

The whole world price of chocolate could go up without bats.

And now what areas of the country we tend to have more bats because I know you're here in Austin where there are tons of caves, so bats and spilologists I imagine our friends.

Yeah, we're we're lucky here in Texas because clear back from the Civil War, it was known that bats had some value. They mined the guano for saltpeter to make gunpowder. In fact, one of the biggest declines ever in American bats came during the War of eighteen twelve when extensive bat caves were mined for saltpeter for gunpowder.

Who's taking care of the guano in the caves? Like you've got let's say a million bats in a cave, there's some droppings, what's normally digesting that? Where's that?

Well, now you've come to a whole new area. We could have spent most of our time talking about bats are the primary producers of energy in a cave ecosystem, no less than plants are on the surface. Oh wow, And there are thousands and thousands of different kinds of microorganisms A studied done bracking cave. I think there was at least a thousand species and maybe a couple hundred genera of bacteria and a tablespoonful of guano from there, and most of them weren't known from any place else.

What ps What is gas a hall? I had to look this up and it's a blend of gasoline and ethanol. Boom. Kind of like if your gas tank took some shots of everclear that was made from usually leftover agricultural starches, and this fuel may offer lower levels of certain emissions. Ever Clear into your own personal gas tank of your stomach does increase emissions of three am pizza barth, so watch out for that. But anyway, bats and caves and science in the future.

But it wouldn't be terribly surprising a someday someone found that they had the billion dollar bug from a cave system where it wasn't found anywhere else and wouldn't have been if it hadn't been for the bats still being there.

Now, like to do field work in caves and what is that? What does the night of fieldwork look like to you? And did you ever feel claustrophobic?

Hi? You kidding? Well, the day that I made a wrong turn and crawled down a real tight squeezed for one hundred feet, I felt very claustrophobic. I'd been told that there was one hundred thousand bats in this place where they'd escape noticed by people. And to get there, oh, it was horrible. There was a little passage so small. You had to lie on your belly or your back with your arms either going down along your sides or

Oh my god, Oh man, I'm freaking out. I'm having an anxiety attack listening to this.

That made me much more careful about what I crawl into.

How when you got through, when you were able to, thank God, turn around and get through, because then you had to do the tight squeeze again.

I wasn't even sure I could get back through it all.

Oh my god, what was it like when you got out?

And by the time I got out, remember by that time, I would have in hypothermic, you know, just absolutely teeth chattering, and.

Oh man, what was that like when you got out? How did you celebrate that night? Did you just go straight home? I would go, I've been like I'm done for the day.

Uh.

Or did you go through the next tight squeeze to where the bats were?

I actually did go see where the baths were lived unstoppable. Well, I wasn't going to go through all that misery not find out if the baths were actually there.

Oh now, how was that tight squeeze was that easy.

Well, it was a tight squeeze for about four feet, like they said, and then it opened up.

Oh my god. So you went through twenty five times what you needed to, really fifty times that you needed to. You had to come all the way back. How are the bats?

Well, I have found a lot of undiscovered parts of caves by looking for bats, because a lot of our bats nowadays only survive where people can't find them. And so by sometimes following where you see bats disappearing, you can find caves that nobody knew about.

So they're kind of like the tour guides into unknown caves. Come follow me.

We started earlier to talk about what's happened to American bats. What the cause of decline is a major major cause of decline is loss of hibernation caves. The Mammoth Cave system alone had millions, probably tens of millions of bats hibernating in Early visitors reported that you could go for miles and the walls were solidly covered with bats in the winter.

Oh my god.

And they've lost those resources and now they have to travel much farther to find a place over winter. When they get there, it's often too warm or too cold and stresses amount so they have to wait squander energy faster than they should. All this makes them vulnerable to what else may happen. That's a threat.

You know.

It's like you've got a pie here, and every time you take a piece out of it, you got that much less energy left for survival. So you know, it's my opinion that many of the deaths that have occurred in recent years from the fungus that causes white nose syndrome may very well not have occurred had the bats not lost key hibernation sites and were already suffering at the edge of their energy limits right now.

And that was a question I was going to get to you, which I'm glad you brought it up. But what is exactly white no syndrome. This is a fungal infection.

It's a fungal infection that appears to have been inadvertently introduced from Europe. It's found all across Europe in Asia. The bats in Europe and Asia rarely are harmed by it. They may have been harmed by it a long time ago, but they've evolved immunity. And it's been said that some human undoubtedly brought it, who went to a cave in Europe and then went to a cave in America. But truthfully, we don't know how it got here. I think it's more probable that a bat came across from Europe and

Everybody, oh my gosh. And so maybe one that was infected with it spread it to a cave. Do they know the actual area where they first kind of identified it on this continent.

Yes, it was a commercial cave in New York, and it's been said that that proved that it was human born. But if a new fungus came to a state, where would you expect it to be seen first in a commercial cave where people are going every day. It doesn't mean that people started it there. It just means that it was more likely to be found there, right.

Correlation, of course, is not causation, So more peepers on bat noses could just have helped identify it faster. We don't know.

There's been a huge focus on stopping it spread by telling people that they couldn't go in caves anymore, and that hasn't even slowed the spread because bats are far more effective spreaders. Just bats that I banded in one cave in northern Alabama ended up being found almost all the way into the state of Kansas, into Missouri, into Oklahoma, into Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina.

They're like truckers. They really make in and around. And now are they finding a place to sleep? Every night or rather every day? Typically? Our most bats nocturnal. Are they sleeping like on a daily schedule?

The only truly diurnal or at least partially diurnal bats are on remote islands where there are very few birds of prey. Okay, a bat in the daytime is pretty easy prey for a hawk.

When are they sleeping, like, let's say that they are out and about. Are they returning to the same cave unless it's a hibernation period or a migration period.

Bats are very loyal to specific areas. If you have four or five caves fairly close together. They may very well move among those. In my study, I banded forty some thousand gray bats and track them for twenty years, so I got pretty good date on what the bats are doing. They were very loyal to a home what i'd call a home area. They'd have a nurse cave that was center focus. Then they'd usually have a few ba I call bachelor caves within a few kilometers around that.

One bachelor caves were they mostly dudes. Okay, quick, before the dudes, let's divert to some lady batfax. So Merlin says that before a female gray bat can breed, for example, she has to have access to some insect rich territories, but those are usually guarded by the older females who probably chatter at them things like back off, Mikayla, this is Denise's mosquito patch. She will cut you. So Michaela

But most gray bats wait a year or so before they act. They'll breed, they'll mate the first fall, but my belief is that probably they just if they don't get enough energy the next spring to produce a feed as they resorb it, which is known to occur in bats. Oh wow, they have wonderful birth control methods that they don't waste anything. You know, they resort the embryo.

Wow, they can recycle it if they're like not a good time not.

I don't know whether gray bats resorb or not, but some bats do. I know that.

I'ms it, Daisy, let me just recycle those molecules.

I did not know that, but any rate, I knew one place where a banded female own the same territory for at least four consecutive years, and she probably was allowing her offspring special access to her territory.

So it's almost like a dynasty or a legacy territory.

Well, they know each other, that's so cool.

I loved I love that they think that, like Han Kamer, four or five of us were friends. They come come check out my territory. Some of my insects like, no, go for it, go for it. We're good, we're friends.

Now you asked about you know, are these old dudes at the bachelor's caps. No, they're dudes and gals that haven't yet can see far enough to produce an offspring.

Now, do they tend to have the same mate year after year?

Not?

Gray bats? Oh, gray bats might offend a few people's tastes. They have what appears to be a grand old orgy every fall. But there are bats that are monogamous really and apparently stick together for long periods of time. One will stay with the pup and babysit, and the other will go out and hunt and bring rats and things back, and for the one that's babysitting.

Oh my god, Now, what is the biggest bat in the smallest bat You've.

Got every thing from giant flying foxes with almost six foot wingspans.

Six foot wingspans. Yeah, that's bigger than this table. I had no idea they were that big. Yeah, Oh my god. Wow. Okay, so they're.

Huge all the way down to tiny little bumblebee bats, which actually I'm leading a trip in November to show members of Merlin Tttle's bat conservation. These bats, We're gonna look at the flying foxes and the bumblebee bats on the same trip.

What where are they?

Thailand?

They're both in Thailand. Uh huh my god, that's an amazing trip. I might just have to piggyback on that trip. Look at that about So in mid November, Merlin is leading a group through Thailand to see painted bats, flying foxes, we little bumblebee bats and more so is this man living his dream or what the answer is? Yes. Also, it should be noted that Merlin is an incredible bat photographer. In his thousands of Bats photos are kind of like if bats had a glamour shot studio set up in

Oh?

I love those big male hammerhead bats. I never worked so hard in my life trying to get a picture of a bat. I caught dozens of hammerhead bats, but I never got an alpha male.

I know that the alphas have bigger heads.

They have bigger heads. Well, they're older and they're more developed. Mm hm uh. I've I definitely have the world's most nearly complete collection of bat photos.

Yeah, your bat photos are amazing, but.

I still don't have a fully Now. I've got some pretty nice males, but not the not the gorgeous one that I want.

So you've seen ones that you just haven't been able to photograph.

The reason I don't have the gorgeous one, those alpha males are usually way the highest up in the safest place courting, and they're not coming down to feed where I can catch them very much. The people are catching those are putting nets way up in the canopy of the forest, And back when I was trying to catch mine, we didn't yet have triple what we call triple high nets that we could raise up to where they.

Are, and so there are probably unphotographed like alpha male hammerhead bats out there.

Well, people looking for ebola in them have photographed them. And that's another sore point with me. You'd think nowadays that it had been documented clearly that bats are the source of ebola, and yet that's not true at all. After all these years of speculating that came from bats and spending millions of dollars trying to prove it came from bats, Still, in my opinion, the best evidence doesn't go to bats.

Really, where do you think it came from?

Well, we hadn't don't have any proof yet. Okay. The last time they said they had real good evidence that ebola might come from bats, they found a piece of RNA virus in an insectivorous bat's mouth in a mouth swab. They said this was related to ebola, you know it was. They couldn't prove it, but it was a genetic fragment

Oh my god.

What I point out is that even sick bats rarely become aggressive. It is so rare that in sixty years of studying bats all over the world, hundreds of species, I have yet to see an aggressive bat or to document one actually going out and attacking somebody. I mean a vampire bat in Latin America. Yes, may sneak up and try to get a nip at night and a bike. That's not what we're talking about in the rest of

Raby's side note is a virus that can be transmitted from animals to humans, and it is potentially fatal if it's not treated. But Merlin says that a fear of rabies is very lucrative, so post treatment for rabies, which people have been known to get needlessly in a panic without even being bitten by or touching a bat just seeing one. That treatment will run you forty eight thousand dollars in some American emergency rooms. Dogs, coyotes, foxes, skunks,

Let me make one point abundantly clear for anybody who simply doesn't handle bats, the odds of contracting anty disease from any bat are very close to zero.

Yeah, oh, I believe it.

We hear so much about baths, but did you know that worldwide dogs count for ninety nine percent of human rabies, about sixty thousand a year, as opposed to probably ten a year worldwide from baths. You know, we're kind of naturally a little bit frightened of anything we don't know about. We don't know much about baths. We only see a bout when he's in trouble, dying, or you know, being defensive.

Oh my gosh, Can I ask you listener questions?

Sure?

Yeah, okay, they have good questions. Okay, before we get to your questions, there were almost three hundred and fifty submitted, the most for any episode to date. But first, a word about some sponsors who make it possible to donate to a cause each week. This one was easy. The

Absolutely?

Really?

Go to my website at Merlin tuttle dot org. Go to videos, and you will see a bat training me training you.

This bat.

Weighs just four grams, that's less than a US nickel small that I was convinced that there was no way you could have trained him. He couldn't be smart enough to be trained. And yet the first one I got, I put it in my walk in studio because I was going to photograph it there, and I fed it mealworms, hand fed it while I held it when I first took it in after I'd caught it, and then I left it over the night, came back the next day

Side note, wooly bats looked like if you shrunk a buffalo and washed and conditioned and blowed rit its hair and then stuck huge beige cone ears on it, just the fuzziest.

And they brought it to me to show them how to photograph a back catching flying insects, which is a real challenge, and so it was. They didn't. It rained a lot, and they didn't catch this bat until like two nights before I had to leave the country, and I figured, God help me, I'll never be able to train this bat and do these things in that time. And so I decided though I'd go through the motions had to. So I take the bat into my studio and I came get him to eat meal worms out

I wonder if that's how they nursed. Do you think that that's maybe how they get their mother's attention.

I have no idea, But how would I relate to his mother? Tell me about your mother his His mother wasn't as big as my nose.

Oh god. So they can be trained, and they can train you.

I have trained quite a few bats. I can train them to go where I point. And primatologists tell me that they haven't even been able to train primates to do that. They've been able to train domestic dogs to go where you point, but not primates.

Wow.

And so when I was talking to a primatologists one time, she was really excited when when I said that I could train baths to go where I pointed. In fact, I've trained them to a point where I wanted them to come, catch pray, take my hand back. And then a camera film crew would start with a high speed camera, and the bat would wait and wouldn't come until I heard the high speed camera come, and then he would come.

Oh my gosh, that's better than most actors in LA can hit a mark on time.

I mean I had one of those baths that just new field assistant overtamed. I told him how important it was to get these baths over their fear of us and everything, and he just overdid it. So the next night, my colleague Mike Ryan and I went out to do experiments, and we couldn't do experiments because the bat wanted to come sit on our shoulders wait to be fed. I finally just gave up, didn't want to rough the bat up,

Did you have anything to feed it?

Yeah, we had some leftover minnows and and my assistant had kind of become better acquainted with that bath than I had. The bat had had one. They have big ears, this species does, and one of his ears half of it was missing. So my assistant noticed that and said, oh, that's a bat. We just turned loose.

Do you ever miss bats when you have to leave a certain field site? Are you like I'm going to miss that? Bet?

I have at times practically died of curiosity wondering what would have happened if I'd have had another week or another month or something to work with that bat? How smart would it have turned out to be? I mean, I normally don't work with the same bat. A week would be a long time for me to work with one. Bet.

So, Yes, bats can be trained. Boy, howdy can they? So? Sarah I and Ichi who asked this question had no idea how much I thought that that was going to be a big No? I had no idea. Oh that was a great question, then, Oh my gosh.

And after all these years of studying bats, I am still discovering really cool, neat new things about their intelligence. I am amazed at their intelligence.

Oh and quick aside, In the wild, bats can use echolocation at precise angles to detect insects. Hiding still in leaves. And also they'll spy on other species to see where they get their food sources. Also, per our discussion earlier, they talk. They talk to each other. They're talking to each other and they're bitches and I love it. I have another question from Catherine Hatcher, who herself is an ologist. She's a first time question asker. She said, I want

On whether you're a species that bears twins or singletons. Twins are born much smaller than singletons, but most bass produced just one puppy year, and that one pup is about a third mother's white. That'd be like a thirty or forty pound baby born by a human mother.

That's the big one.

Where I've watched them in caves here in Texas, and I might say normally I would be very upset if somebody told me they were going in watching mothers give birth in a cave, because that would be very disturbing

Oh my god.

So these bats are kind of like animals on the Galopagos Islands. They're not very frightened of people because people don't usually come in and bug with them. Yeah, and so I, over a period of a week or so, would get bats along one wall a custom to my presence. I could walk back and forth and photograph them without them panicking and dropping their young or anything, and it was really cool. The pup when it's first born, has what appears to be like a safety line, like an

Oh my god.

Now you can you imagine being a mom trying to find your baby.

This is like like a music festival like Coachella, but it's like sixty thousand babies and you'd have to find your baby, right, that's a nightmare.

Well, and you got all these other pups calling saying, you know, calling their moms, and all these moms calling back to their pups. I mean, when I was watching these things happen, there would be thousands of adults flying by, and all of a sudden you'd see one puff rear up and vocalize, and then you'd see one of the adults turn and come back and come back to that one.

Wow. I know, you want to know what a f retail bat sounds like. So also, Merlin says that they produce more milk for their size than a Jersey cow would because the pups need to grow fast, and they're burning up so much energy clinging to a coal cave wall when their moms are out munching mosquitoes. Can you imagine having a forty pound baby and then the next day that baby was able to cling to a rock face, Well, you maneuvered like a fighter pilot in the sky using

Well, it's believed that I know for gray bats they can probably start flying in within nineteen days or so. Oh okay, But the free tail bats have longer, narrower wings. They're more like little jets. As I point out, they can go cruise at one hundred nearly one hundred miles an hour with tail winds. So with those jet like narrow wings, it undeadly takes longer to learn to fly. But just imagine the problems faced by a young bat as it learns to fly. You're down in a pitch

Is that why they say bad out of hell? Just to get me out of that?

And here's the thing. A pilot gets to practice on a nice long horizontal runway where you know if even if he's one hundred yards off, he's probably still okay these bats. From the moment a pup first drops from the ceiling to practice its first flight, it's going to be moving at ten to thirty feet per second. Gravity sucks in that first flight. The cave is only about sixty feet wide, so within a couple of seconds he's on a direct collision course with a proverbial brick wall.

Is poor little.

Pups, and he has to make that flight while avoiding multiple potentially fatal collisions per second. He has to do a perfectly tying barrel roll and with millimeter split second precision, get his feet out front to grab the wall and not bash his head on the wall.

That brings me to a question a lot of listeners had. Do they sleep upside down? How do they sleep? Wall clinging to things? Chet Kenny One, Pedro Martinez, Amber Cooper, Heather Circle and Laura Dosbobeck all wanted to know about this hanging from the feet situation.

They have a real cool system where the tendons lock. When you pull down on the claws hanging to the ceiling. That tends to lock the tendons, so they don't use any energy hanging.

On Wow, So it takes energy for the bat to open its talent, so opens them, finds the spot to grip, and then when it relaxes hanging by its own weight, clamps those talents closed, and then it's upside down night night for the sky fuzzies. So it's kind of like putting a remember those things you put on your car steering wheel of the club, You just like lock it on and there it is. I didn't I always wondered that because it always seems like once you relaxed and slept, you just goho.

Well, and people also ask a lot why doesn't the blood all rush to their heads?

Yeah, why doesn't it?

The better case is why doesn't the brood the rush to our feet?

That's a good question.

What happens when all of a sudden you feel faint? Get your head down right? So, so we're the ones that ought to be explaining what the problem is.

That that's very good. Yeah. And when you lose enough blood to your head, such as, for example, by being spun in a giant centrifuge, your noggin is like, yeah, nope, I can't brain right now and things go dark. But that's like watch this. I have so much blood and my smash face. Right now, I'm headed to dreamtown to get some z's with four hundred thousand of my closest friends farting grasshoppers on me. Speaking of large populations, a few of you, including ab seven point zero, wanted to

The largest remaining known population is it Bracken Cave, just twenty miles from the center of San Antonio.

Oh So, Texas.

And I'm very proud to report that, after some twenty years of working with many others to do it, I managed to laid the charge that got that cave protected with hundreds of actually several thousand acres around it as a nature reserve.

That is amazing to think that there are so many bats in existence that wouldn't be here without you.

It's still one of my all time favorite places on the planet. It is just an incredible experience to see that many bats come out of anything.

I mean how many bats. Some estimates are around fifteen million bats. That's like the population of humans in Los Angeles, all in one cave system. And when they emerge at night to feed, it's like a winged commute hour on the four h five, but flappier, way more beautiful and

It's really spectacular. Just come to our bridge if Congress Avenue Bridge.

Yeah, Julie Noble, who I believe Julie Noble said, OMG, talk about the bat bridge. Please that us all.

If you go to the Congress, if you go to my website again Merlin Tuttle dot org. Go to my photo gallery. It's divide into catching prey, rearing young, all those kind of things. Go to the subsection called emergencies and you'll see some of my pictures of the huge numbers coming out of the Congress a new bridge, and how close they are to people without anybody ever being harmed.

One of the reasons Austin is known as the largest urban batcolony is because of Merlin Tuttle. Because of Merlin. So when the Congress Avenue Bridge was reconstructed in nineteen eighty, the underside happened to be perfect for roosting, but the city was not into having millions of bats in its midst and Merlin, who was a founder of Bat Conservation International until his retirement, thought that Austin was perfect for

Yes, David Bamberger built that out toward Johnson City in Texas.

He was.

A rancher who joined my board directors years ago when I first got involved in conservation, and he worked helping us with protect Bracken Cave. And one day he said, Marily, you know I don't have any caves on my ranch, but I'd sure like to have something, you know, where I could show people baths on my ranch. You think we could build a cave or something that baths would come to. And I said yeah. I said, you know, there are abandoned mines and railroad tunnels and things all

If you build it, he will come.

So he hired a really good engineer architect whatever the combo should be, and I designed what it should be like to get the right temperature and darkness for the baths, and the engineer architect designed something that wouldn't fall down, and so then he named it the car Uptorium. And it's interesting. I told him to watch out that when the baths first came, don't go run in to see them because they might give you a bad report and

To be side, it turned out okay.

But he now has between half a million and a million baths there and that it's totally artificial cave.

Wow does he get to claim them as dependents on his taxes or pets?

I'll tell you what he does do now. He goes in once one At least last time I talked to him, he was going to start this, going in once a year with a front endloader on a uh small tractor and harvesting the guada on using it on his ranch.

Oh yeah, so a ton of people had questions about that. Okay, So when it came to bats, a lot of folks on Patrion wanted to talk shit and but that I mean they had guano questions, such as Julie Bear, who brought it to my attention that back guano is used as a sculptural medium. Thank you, juliber Wow okay wow.

Well, I don't know that anything can be said to be safe, right. For example, I point out when people tell me how dangerous bats are because one and a half people persons a year in the US and Canada combined die of bat rabies, I point out that twenty to forty times that number die of dog attacks every year.

Oh man, that's a good point.

So I mean anything we do has some risk. Probably the biggest risk we all take every day is getting in our car and driving to work, but we don't think of it as a risk because we do it every day. And so if you ask if something you know has any risk, I have a hard time with

Would Indiana Jones be tough enough to sit on a guanopile? No freaking way.

I rarely think about needing to take extra precautions to sterilize my hands when I come out of a bat cave. But I can tell you I'm almost religious about coming home and washing my hands carefully after I've been to see a doctor in a hospital. Yeah, I mean, the most dangerous animal on this planet for you to meet and get a disease from is another.

Human going on a date is probably way more dangerous than sitting on a pile of Dright, one, what about what kind of boots do you need if you're mucking through caves? What kind of boots? You must have? A favor kind?

No, not just any sturdy hiking boot.

All right, I figured you'd need some kind of need high rubber waiters.

Now, if I'm going in bracking cave or one like that that has millions of free tail bats living near the entrance where they attract ormested beetles, then I'll wear rubber almost almost knee high boots to keep the domestic insects from climbing up and buying me.

Okay, let's talk about bats inside your house, which was on a lot of your minds Lauren Kelly, first time question asker Evan Jude donas Sue Oregonian, Wesley Winks, Enrique Sarmiento, and Julie Noble who side note Julie Noble dressed as me for Halloween week at her office and carried a number one dad mug and I saw a picture and it made my whole damn day. Anyway, this is a hot topic, bats inside your house. Michelle Lee and a

Jesus, there's two minutes, I guess. The first thing I'd suggest, if it's not too difficult, would be to open the doors and windows to the outside and shut off all doors to the rest of the house. Lower the lights to a level where it's not real bright, but don't turn them out where you can't see the bat. One of the worst mistakes people make. I can't tell you how many times I've had this call where somebody calls me in and they saw a bat, and they fled

Because here's why aeronautics nerds open your big bat ears, because this is some good stuff.

Picture yourself is piloting a small aircraft and you fly up to a dead end corner. You have to turn around to a U turn to get out of it. When you do that, you drop your airspeed to just about zero and you start falling. So you have to swoop down at a fairly sharp angle to regain flight speed and be able to continue flying. So if you're in the middle of that room and the bat's going back and forth the corners trying to find a way out, and he's swooping down each time to regain flight speed,

No?

No, I was real lucky. Well, how do you know he wasn't chasing a mosquito? And you flew before and you ran away before you found out that he wasn't after you. Oh, could that be possible? And I've even investigated cases where they got scratched on a rose bush on the way to their house fleeing the bat, and then went and got their raby shots because the bat actually got them. Oh no, I've investigated maulings.

Get ready for the story. Oh my word, on my word.

A Tennessee Valley authority DAMN in Alabama shut down one time because the workers wouldn't go to work because the guy had been mauled by a bat in the dam mauled. They called, and I had a consulting contract with him at the time. They insisted on me coming down and settling problems, and I said, there's no need for me to come down. It's inconceivable that this guy got mauled by a bat.

Conceivable.

You know, there's another explanation. You don't need me to come up with that. Oh no, no, nobody's going to believe this until we get somebody, an expert down here. So I get down there and the guy has very little real skin left from about his elbow halfway to his wrist down his arm. I mean, it's just almost raw flesh. Is really a mess. Obvious something did a bad hell of a job on him. But at a glance I knew there was no bat in the world

Did they finish his locker properly, put some duct tape on it or something? Well?

I left at that point, I'd solve the immediate.

Problem Batman out. One question was understandably echoed over and over by folks such as had Their Circle, Elizabeth Illian, Elizabeth McLachlan, Amanda Rivera, Deep Nervisen, Raymond J. Deutsche, Hail Holings, Bob Clark, Georgia, Hattie Stouschnoff, Karina Peterson, Gwenn Bode, Melissa Cowen, Tangi Goat, Erica Smith, and Katie Thronberg, who asked variations of why on Earth are they so darn cute? Why are bats so stink and cute? Are bats not the cutest?

Well, the bats are thinking, look so cute. Those are baby flying foxes. And remember we talked about whether fly whether some bats might be primates or not. Flying foxes have faces that look just like lemiers that are primates. In fact, leading experts have it before mistaken bat flying fox skulls for lamier skulls.

Oh my gosh. So we're seeing baby primates and we're identifying with.

Them, and they've got big eyes and fox like faces, and you know, most most flying fox post mind, they're just about as cute as anybody thinks they're not cute, just as a hard time seeing cuteness. I mean, they's cute as any panda gotta be. But they wrap those in little towels because they're more comfortable that way. Their mama normally keeps them wrapped in her wing, and they actually feel more comfortable when they're wrapped in a towel like that, and so that's the way they keep them.

That baby burritos. Polity Semon's that a great question. Is there any evidence in our modern technological environment with its noise, electromagnetism, radar is messing with the bat's ability to navigate.

We don't know. There are so many things we don't know that it's just absolutely terrifying, and some of them pertain equally or more to us. One thing that hasn't come up here is what we don't know about what's happening with all the pest is sides were spraying on the world because we're losing bats and other insectivorous animals that once kept insects in check. In the United States alone, we now use approximately a billion tons of pesticides annually.

Will people having bat boxes in their backyard or in their you know, the top of their house. Will that help the bat population at all?

Yes, it will. In fact, where we mentioned the fungus whiteness that causes white no syndrome, where that has already passed through and killed off a large number of bats. Several states are using relying on people's backyard bath houses tom under recovery of the species.

Oh wow. And so if you have that, you know, as a hospitable measure, then researchers can come and take a look and see how many people are, how many little bats are nesting in there.

I mean, I personally help monitor a site in New York where we know that for like five or ten years at least they this family had at least twelve hundred bats every year in their bath houses, and then as after white nose syndrome passed, they only had forty.

Oh wow.

But now they're abuilding, and I believe I can't remember this year they're up toward two hundred.

I bet. And now, what about someone who wanted to go see a bat or go bat scooping, or what's the best time to see a bat and just enjoy a bat? What kind of what kind of good binoculars or night vision? Or where should you sit? How do you? And my mom and dad have some bats. They've named them flad. They call them all blad. But they come out at dusk and they wait and watch on the porch, and they're they're so excited to see them. When they

I have spoken to so many people who will tell me with amazement. You know, I've lived in my neighborhood for twenty years and I've never seen a bat. And then I heard you speak the other night, and now I see bat. Sometimes it's just a matter of looking at the right time. Give me a break. I got to run to the door.

Oh yeah, yeah, no worries. Thank you so much for talking to me. I love that. Okay, okay, So at this point two hours in, we both needed a little intermission, a bathroom break, a sip of water. So I figured this is a good time to stop and make you wait a week for more Merlin. In the meanwhile, ask the smartest people the stupidest questions. Not only will you know more about what's snoozing in crevices and fluttering overhead,