September 27, 2012 • 46 mins
Is the bat the most successful mammal on the planet? Quite possibly! In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Julie and Robert explore the insect-munching, fruit-drinking, blood-lapping world of these amazing winged sound warriors.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
See if you have any bath houses in your yard
on your trees. I don't have any bath houses, but
I have a friend with bad houses. Did did they
(00:24):
actually have bats living in them? Because that's the heart
and anybody can buy them at the Lows Home Depot
and nail them to trees. But you got to nail
them in just the right place so the sun's hitting
them at the right time, so they're just they're warmed
enough that in they're they're high enough off the ground
that they're attractive real estate opportunities for the bat world.
I believe her bat habitat has been successful. She's a
(00:46):
bat devotee because because my my my previous house, I
built one of these things. I nailed it up there.
I was really hopeful we get some bats zipping around
the backyard eating up in sects, and never happen. So
I had like a bat for close in my backyard
that weeds growing all over it. Yeah, all the other
birds just kind of roosting on it. Yeah, just like
(01:07):
wasps or something moving into it. Yeah. Yeah. Um, well,
do you have any direct like that experiences, like you've
ever been attacked by a bat, which is highly unusual
by the way, No, no, no, I do not have
any bad attack stories. That's some Some had some cool
encounters with bats on trips. When when my wife and
I went to Costa Rico, we got to see uh,
(01:28):
we went on one of these night nature hikes in
the jungle and we got to see bats zipping down
and skimming fish a little bit of fish on the
top of a pond. That was nice. And when we
went on our honeymoon in um in Mexico, we uh
there were fruit bats in the area and uh, and
we were talking to some of the other people were
staying there. Everybody was in kind of like a little
(01:49):
hot bungalow type of the thing, and we were noticing
that that they had plastic screens up um high up
in the roof. And you're thinking, oh, I guess that's
to keep wind from blowing in or whatever, but that
it was there to keep the fruit bats from coming
in there and uh and roosting, because they would they
would get into the huts. They would roost up there
and then they they would just poop all over the place.
(02:11):
So I never got to see the fruit bats, but
there are lots of stories about it. And I kept thinking, oh,
if I, if I look closely, I'll see them. And
there is nothing like seeing some some bats flying around.
If you're you know, just at the sun's going down
and out of the corner of your eyes, you might
might just think of birds or insects, but then you
start noticing you realize all the bats are out, and
it's it's beautiful. I remember seeing some of the Grand
(02:31):
Canyon and that was that was just really really beautiful. Yeah,
I was thinking, like, and of course that's a wonderful
backdrop to see it. But I was thinking even in
my suburban upbringing, you know, at night under the lights,
just seeing them swarm around was like this incredible thing.
And that was very curious about them. And I remember
seeing them at a zoo and seeing them up close
(02:53):
and being completely just blown away because in front of
me was what looked like to be a common and sister. Right,
you look at these guys really closely in these gals
and uh some of the physiology grandfather. But I did um,
it actually sounds like maybe it burped at me. I
(03:15):
don't know. But you look the physiology of these guys
and then you really began to see, um, some some
interesting traits and and I'm not not to be crass,
but I mean the woman I really got to look
at closely. The penis was very apparent. U. So you
began to look at that in the physiology of the
wings and we'll talk more about this, the arms and
(03:36):
the fingers that that seemed to be very similar to ours,
and you began to think, Wow, this creature is is
very unique, not just because yeah, yeah, and I think
that's what people tend to think of when they yeah,
it is not. It is far more complex and and unique.
And we'll talk a little bit more about that. Um,
(03:57):
but let's talk about the folklore, oh behind the bat. Well, UM,
it's it's the most obvious thing that comes to people's mind,
especially Western Western minds, is of course that the bat
is a symbol of evil. The bat is a symbol
of of of vampires in disguise, and a lot of
this goes to the fact that you have you have
bats that when the sun goes down, they emerge from caves.
(04:21):
So they're emerging from the underworld when God's light leaves us.
They're flying around in the dark, and of course we
end up with all sorts of stories about them flying
into people's hair or attacking people, which most of that
is is WHOI But certainly you do have vampire bats
that will have given the opportunity lap up a little
human blood or cat well cal's primarily they're they're they're
(04:45):
more favorite meal. But uh, but then you also have bats.
Bats are of course susceptible to raby, so you will
have encound situations where bats will become rapid and will
become a problem. But but yeah, so evil bats easy
to wrap your head around that because they're emerging from
the underworld and they're flying over the place. Well, and
the vampire bats, as you had um just brought up,
(05:06):
have like you know, I guess you could say the
things um. And so you look at them, and you
can see fifteen sixteenth century settlers in the United States,
particularly when you begin to see some of this four
folklore really start to come up, and perhaps even witnessing
one of your cows being you know, blood sucked. Yeah,
(05:28):
and of course your cow being attacked and especially back
in the day, I mean that was that was severe,
that was major business. I mean you would have people
would be brought up on witchcraft trials due to animal
deaths because I mean in part because you know, you're
living in an enlightened time with all of this folklore,
but also because it's a serious business. That's your livelihood
(05:48):
out there, and something's drinking its blood. Yes, So you
can see how these stories start to get um, you know,
bandied about. And then you've got this sort of vampire mythology,
and of course and you've got brand Stokers, Dracula and
forever more do you have the bat in the vampire
inextrictably linked together? Now, it's interesting, um to to quickly
(06:13):
dive out of folklore and then scurry back into it. Um.
We have about we have over a thousand, over eleven
different species of bats in the world. Um. They make
up about a quarter of all mammal species. Uh. And
there are forty five different species of bats alone in
the United States and Canada alone. And if we look
at bats overall, we have mega bats, which are the
(06:35):
large bats that are found in Old World tropical rainforest Australia, Asia, Africa,
and then you have the microbats, which are the ones
that are gonna occur you know, the United States, Western World, etcetera.
So it's interesting to me that in those western the
western environments where you have the microbats, that's where you
see the evil ideas come to mind. But when you're
(06:56):
dealing with the mega bats, the which which generally we're
talking about root eating bats, large wolfish looking creatures, which
long muzzle, long muzzle, which in a way could conceivably
look a little creepier because they're bigger. But but but
also those these are the places where you find more
benevolent versions of the bat and folklore. For instance, in
(07:19):
Mayan mythology, they had they had a bad god um
which was named camazots um and uh and camazots means
death bats, so I guess he well, he wasn't completely benevolent,
but still uh, you know, he was big enough to
be a god. He wasn't reduced to demon hood. He
was he was a major player in the local cosmology. Meanwhile,
(07:39):
Chinese mythology sheds a positive light on the bats, where
they're viewed as symbols of good luck, and both the
Apache and Cherokee people's of North America enjoyed the bat
and viewed their presence as a symbol to something goodless
about happened. So it's a it's a good omen to
see the bat in the sky. What's the way I
I feel like I tend to look at him, you know,
if I if I noticed bats around, it's that's a
(08:01):
good day right now. And we'll talk about more about
the benefits of bats and why they're really important to
the ecosystem. But let's talk a little bit more about
the physical description of bats. Um As you had said,
there's more than a thousand different species, and the size
is very greatly. The smallest is the bumblebee bat, and
that has I know, adorable right a six inch wingspan,
(08:22):
while a Malayan flying foxes wingspan is six ft wide,
which might strike tear into the heart if you happen
to just look up in the night sky. But still fascinating.
This the sort of variety here, Oh, real quickly. The
bumble bee bat also known as kitties hog nos bat,
which which draws an important point about the whole bats
are evil, is that bats are often to to humanize
(08:47):
um rather possibly ugly to behold or or at least there.
Their features are often exaggerated, whereas a mouse, we know
what a mouse looks like. And certainly a lot of
the mega mats they have very their their heads tend
to resemble foxes, in myself a little more traditional, if
you will. Where's the microbats? You see some crazy stuff
(09:08):
like like the wrinkle face back, which will discuss later. Yeah,
and I did want to um mention the Mega Carptera,
that's that's what you're referring to, the mega's there um
as you said, the flying fox. These these guys are
mostly vegetarians and they do feed on fruit and pollen.
Hence your point. They seem to have a little bit
better of a reputation um and it's parts of the world.
(09:32):
And then the Microcryptia is as you said. You know,
it's smaller, and it's got the pug nosed dog look
and it's a little bit odder looking and they're found
all around the world, and they are carnivores and they
feed primarily on insects. And I did want to point
out that bats belong to their own taxonic grouping uh Caroptera,
(09:55):
which means winghand. So we'll check we'll check out that
little wing hand in a moment. That's it's it's really fascinating.
But but first let's take a we we've walked through folklore,
we've walked through a little bit of taxonomy. Now let's
tiptoe just a little bit through philosophy before we really
get into the world of the bat. Because as if
(10:16):
we're putting all this together and we're coming this from
a human perspective, Uh so we're we're bringing our human
baggage with us, and we're trying to understand in a sense,
what it is to be a bat? What is the
bad experience? And there's actually a really awesome piece of
philosophical pondering from American philosopher Thomas Nagle, who was published
(10:36):
in The Philosophical Review back in four and it's um
and he basically asked a question, what is it like
to be a bat? And it's it's ultimately about the
limits of of our our our human perspective, and about
how when we're trying to imagine an alien perspective, be
it that of a bat, that of your dog, your cat,
that of a potential extraterrestrial species, they are there are
(11:00):
certain walls there that we just can't get past to
read just a quick quote from it. Here, Nagel says, bats,
although more closely related to us uh than those other species,
nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus
so different from ours that the problem I want to
pose is exceptionally vivid, even without the benefit of philosophical reflection.
(11:23):
Anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space
with an excited bat, I love that knows what it
is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life. And
then he goes on to say bats sonar, though clearly
a form of perception, is not similar in its operation
to any sense that we possess, and there is no
reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we
(11:46):
can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for
the notion of what it is like to be a bat.
And what I think is interesting about that is that
and yet we we can't help but try, I mean,
we're gonna try to, and that we're just a little
bit squeak through and get into this because it's so
fascinating to me. I was thinking about it um in
(12:07):
the same terms of when we were talking about sepal
of pods and our inability to truly understand them because
they're communicating in a way that that we would never
be able to be living in a different sensory world understand. Yeah. Absolutely,
And they are experiencing a color spectrum that we can't
even begin to understand because we don't have have the
(12:28):
machinery for it. Um. That being said, though, that we
can kind of get a glimpse into the world of
bats and how very cool it is. And we will
talk about eto location uh in this podcast, but we
have another one coming up that is devoted entirely to
that because you talk about the doors of perception flying
open when it comes to bats and their ability to
(12:50):
see and I'm saying that in quote marks, Uh, it
is amazing stuff. Yeah. So where do bats come from?
They didn't just fly out of a hole in the
underworld one day. They of course evolved like everything else
on Earth. And Uh, as best we can tell from
fossil evidence, they came about about fifty million years ago.
That's about how far back we have to look to
(13:11):
and find evidence for bat like flying mammals. Uh. They
probably started off in the trees, we think, instead eating
a little tree creatures, and then they began to really
go after a key market. Because evolution, of course, is
always about and I'm going to anthropomorphize evolution a little
bit here, uh, which I can't help it do, but
(13:32):
but evolution is all about going after a market, doing
what's work, what works, and I mean it's just extreme
business savvy. So you have the bats, right, and what
is this this vital market that they need to get into.
They want to eat instincts. They need to eat instincts.
That's there, that's the thing. But there's a whole period
of time, a recurring period of time in which the
(13:54):
markets wide open. It's just right for the picking. They
just need the right evolutionary adaptations to go after all right.
So in other words, they show up on the scene
fifty million years ago and birds already well established and
they're eating up all of all of the prey, right,
And so they looked to the night sky and they say, ah,
I see a smart dishport of insects there. If only
(14:15):
I could get to them. And essentially this is where
you begin to see where the bat becomes an extremely
successful mammal because it is able to then uh, basically
evolved into flight, which we'll talk about a little bit.
But also it becomes a nocturnal creature who can hunt
at night get all of those insects. But also it's
(14:37):
a it's able to use the cover of night uh
from other predators, so it doesn't get eaten up. Yeah.
I mean, obviously there are nocturnal birds. You have owls
and and and some other creatures of avian creatures that
that do their thing at night. But for the most part,
this was a wide open space. So bats moved into
(15:00):
it and really they came to own the night. I mean,
they're they're certainly preyed on by some creatures, but but
they're really ruling it out there and have arguably become
one of one ill of, if not the most successful
mammals on the planet. Yes, yes, for this very reason.
I mean, you can certainly the argument can fall to,
you know, rat versus bat. You could maybe make an
(15:21):
argument for domestic cat as well, but that that's a
slightly different business model. Yeah, and a whole other podcast
coming up, by the way. Certainly both the bats, both
the rats and the cats uh a certain amount of
their success to humans. But but the bats, they're doing
it all by wings, so so certainly you can give
the natural bump to them in the contest. Yeah. Um.
(15:43):
This is from the Department of Energy. Aska Scientist Mike
Stewart says that the night is really a win win
proposition for bats because they are better suited um as
as a mammal um to the night because they're expending
so much energy to stay in flight, so the cool
air would help them to had excess body heat, so
that's that's a boon to them. And because the night
air is cooler and has a higher density than the
(16:06):
hot air during the day, it makes it easier to
derive lift by flapping wings and cool denser air. And
again we'll talk about the wings situation in a bit,
but as we know, bats aren't constructed like birds, so
they need all the help they can get in the
lift department. And then echolocation is um is one of
two main adoptions again here that make bats six such
(16:27):
successful nocturnal creatures. Yeah, it's worth noting there's no way
a bat is going to outply a bird. And if
you've if you've ever watched Atton Borrows the Life of mammals,
there's there or well now I can't remember if this
was an episode of the Life of Mammals are the
Life of Birds but one of those two series, I
just go watch them both. Uh, you get to see
this in action as as a mega bats afrigo, which
(16:51):
kind of fruit that it was? Um, I just have
a terrible time if they're up against predatory birds during
the daylight, swoop in and just take them because they're
they're just a total on a total different level performance wise,
but at night they're the they're the top player. But
it's really echo location that makes them this standout mammal right,
because their ability, this ability that they have evolved makes
(17:13):
them super successful. Yeah, they can navigate this world of night.
They can find these often tiny they're a tiny creatures.
The flitting about out there in the dark is it's
zero in on them and swoop in for the kill.
All right, let's do a little brief overview of echo location,
and again we won't go into it too much because
we have a podcast devoted entirely to it. It is
that fascinating. Tom harris um is a House to Works
(17:36):
writer and he has an excellent how bats work article
to check that out. But he asked you to imagine
an Echo canyon when you think about echolocation, and it's
like a canyon, right that you shout in. Yeah, so
I'm thinking at the Grand Canyon. I don't know, I've
never actually tried about, but at the Grand Canyon, I
should say, when you shout, you produce a sound that
(17:58):
um that makes sound waves, obviously, and that travels across
the canyon, and then the rock face on the opposite
side of the canyon deflects the air pressure energy of
the sound wave so that it begins moving in the
opposite direction, heading back to you. Okay, So if you're
in an area where at atmospheric pressure, then air composition
is constant. Sound waves always move at the same speed.
(18:21):
And if you knew the speed of sound in the area,
and you had a very precise stop watch, for instance,
you could use sound to determine the disness across the canyon.
And he says this is the basic principle of echolocation.
Bats are making sounds the same way that we do,
by moving air past their vibrating vocal cords. In some
bats emit the sounds from their mouth, which they hold
(18:43):
open as they fly, and others emit sounds through their nose.
So yes, the basic principle of radar and sonar, I'm
sending out these waves that they're bouncing off something. And uh.
In sonar and radar you have either you know, a
guy sitting there with a stopwatch or more likely a
machine that's interpreting that data and letting know what distance
has been traversed with the bat. Of course, it's all
(19:04):
taking place in the brain. Yeah, something that we couldn't
never do right of this different data coming back at them,
and it puts us back in the nagle area of
how how do we even imagine that we we can't right? Right,
because that that is something that is specific to them
and in second nature of course, and the way that
they can sit there in abstract um about this data
(19:25):
that's coming in. All right, so let's take a quick break.
But when we get back we will talk about these
finger like bones in the bats wings that are so
wonderful and creepy and important to their ability to apply.
(19:45):
All right, we're back, and yeah, we're about to take
wing with the bat. And if you look at the
any skeletal layout of the bat, and and there's one
with on our housetu works how bats work article, you'll
see that it really it's not a situation and of
and this is something that we kind of get gets
complicated with all of our visions of like bat like
(20:05):
wings and imagining creatures and dragons, you tend to see
a creature that has more like batman, you know, where
he has like more like a flying squirrel, where he
just has a bunch of webbing under his arms. But
most of what you're seeing with the bat's wings, those
are fingers, So that's it's a it's a hand that
has become wing. Yeah, and if you look at the
skeletal system, you will see what looks to be like
(20:29):
arms on on the wing stretched out on either side,
and then five fingers draping from that um. And it's
just it's amazing because what it's doing is it's creating
sort of like these spokes, just like the spokes for
an umbrella in terms of giving it structure but also mobility. Yeah,
and then you have this webbing in between that of
(20:49):
course becomes the wing surface and uh, and that material
also has a it's really really remarkable, and it has
a heels really swiftly as it would need to do
because if you get that that stuff gets tord worn
or or or bitten or clawed at in any way,
they need that to heal up pronto so that they
can fly again. Yeah, And that webbing, that elastic skin
stretches from the edge of the forelimb all the way
(21:11):
to the tip of an elongated little finger, and then
the wing attaches to the lateral side of the body
and lower limb down the ankle. And some bats also
have a membrane between their legs connecting to the tail,
and this hind leg wing integration is very different from
a bird obviously, and as we have mentioned, it's a
treat that's shared with gliders. So if we look at
(21:33):
the evolutionary flow of this, we can easily imagine a
creature in the distant past. It eats insects, It calls
up trees to eat insects. Eventually it takes two gliding
uh to catch more insects, and over time that evolves
into a full blown sense of flight, ability to fly
and catch things in the night. Yeah. Because really, what
(21:56):
you're looking at when you're looking at that, when you
see that it is a modified mammalian limb um. So
let's talk about something called the rogue finger gene. Yeah,
this is pretty pretty crazy. Uh. You know, the more
we've learned about the about genetics, we get to where
we can pinpoint individual genes that that you've you've present,
you've on can can cause remarkable changes in physiology. And
(22:20):
there's actually a study from Colorado Health Sciences Center in
Denver and they pinpointed the single gene that allows bats
to grow wings and fly, and it's called b MP
two and it's one of a family of genes that
are important for limb development in mammals. So you find
it in bats, but you don't find it in mice. Yeah,
And it's really cool because it does get this sort
(22:41):
of pinpoint how that's evolved because the problem here is
that we have um a bit of a gap in
the fossil record, right, so we don't necessarily know what
what sort of in between animal I guess you could
say that's truly evolved from. But knowing this, we can
we can point to the fact that um that bats
did have this gene or or they do have this
(23:02):
gene and it allowed that elongation of these finger bones,
which was really important in creating a wing with a
high aspect ratio. Meaning that all of a sudden, the
longer you know your UM, these fingers get and the
more membrane than, the easier it is to get lift
and to take off as a creature. So so important
(23:22):
because remember bats are the only group of mammals to
have evolved power powered flight, So this is a really
important aspect of it. And in fact, to get a
real good sense of of how this gene has affected
the growth of this UM bat's limbs, if you do
look at a skeletal system of them, what becomes apparent
UM is that it's so exaggerated, these these four limbs
(23:46):
that it sort of looks like Edward scissor hands. Yeah,
so imagine that, and then also know that scientists have
tinkered with some mice to mess with this gene to
see if they if they reduced it, if they took
it out of the sequence, what would happen. And they
did find that UM with with mice that they could
get something like a six percent increase in limbs when
(24:09):
they tinkered with it. The reason they use mice is
because again if you look at a mouse, very similar
to the physiology, the basic physiology of course UM then
as with a bat and so when they began to
see that increase, they said, Wow, that doesn't seem like much.
But if you had a six increase in the limbs
of a human, they would grow something like four inches.
(24:30):
We've got to figure out how to pump this into
basketball players, I know, right right. So again, powered flight
bat's not as good as this as birds. Powered flight
involves a tremendous amount of energy. Um. I mean, the
case can be made that it's really not an energy
efficient means of flight, but it's the only thing that
the nature can really achieve on this planet anyway. So
(24:53):
it's it's worth noting that that on the whole birds
versus bats thing. You will watch any bird. Most birds anyway,
don't have any real problem taking off from the ground. Um.
It's more of a struggle for some than for others,
so some have to really get kind of a running
start at it. But most of the birds that you
canna see around your backyard, they can just take right off.
Not so with the bat, which is why why you
(25:16):
if you go to a bat cave, or if you
or even just say, I say a tree where you'll
find fruit brats, bats roosting, or the top of a
bungalow in Mexico. They're they're hanging up there right, and
they're they're part of the advantage here. There are a
number of advantages to to roosting in this this position,
but one of them is that they can drop right
down into flight. There they just use gravity to achieve
(25:38):
to achieve that initial boost of lift, as opposed to
having to painstakingly flap their wings and get nowhere on
the ground or even try sort of a running lift
because they have such short time legs that they can't
even do that. Yeah, it always reminds me of there
was a plane back in Uh. There was an experimental
aircraft back in called the x F A five Goblin. Uh.
(26:00):
Some of you airplane buffs might be familiar with it.
And it was a stubby little plane. And the idea
that it was a parasitic fighter that it would you
would stow this in the belly of a bomber and
then a bomber on a long bombing run. It could
there's attacked by fighter planes, they could deploy this guy
to go out and deal with the problem. And uh,
and it was sort of launched in a similar way.
They would kind of hang it down from the from
(26:22):
from from the Bombay and then just let it drop
and then it with a cheap flight. Yeah. See, I
mean it's Do you think they took that example from nature?
I don't know, you know that, I mean, in a
sense they did. I mean it's the same some of
the same physics. Yeah, just like sonar is taken from
from basically a location. All right, let's talk about how
(26:44):
these guys feed. And we had mentioned the vampire bat,
but I did want to point out that most of
the bats are insectivores, and meaning that they eat insects
and the brown bat, which is indigenous for North America,
and catch and eat as many as twelve hundred mosquitoes
(27:04):
in one hour exactly. That's why I wanted these guys
living in my backyard. I get it, right, I know.
And it's particularly in conditions like we've had here in
the South, where there's just I mean to spend mosquito
crazy it's been. They've been so excited. Um, this is
really important to the ecosystem and of course to my legs,
um not becoming devoured. But I do want to mention
(27:26):
too that there is brack and cave in Texas and
that contains more than twenty million fats. Imagine the amount
of I guana in that one and uh, they eat
about two hundred tons of insects every night. Nice, imagine
without those guys doing their job, everything we just get
out of whack fast. But not everyone eats insects. Again,
(27:47):
you have the vampire bad which is is the only
mammal that lives exclusively on blood. And uh and typically
these things gathering colonies about a hundred animals sometimes and
loving groups of a thousand or war and uh they
say that in one year, uh, a one strong bat
colony can drink the blood of twenty five cows. And now, yeah,
(28:09):
and they're not tapping the cows out here. I mean
that they drink them a little bit of their blood. Right.
It's it's kind of like it's almost well not really
a parasitic relationship, but there they can serve the cows.
They are in a way, they're milking the cow, and
they want that cow to be there tomorrow and the
next night and the next time when they come back
for more and more blood. But what's the one thing
(28:30):
that I was really surprised by because I guess I
you know, I knew about vampire bats. I've always known
about vampire bats, but they didn't really know all the
hard facts about them, like, for instance, that vampire bats
strike their victim from the ground, which is which is
something you in the movies. You see like vampire bats
are swooping around the heroine's head and she's screaming, right,
But the tactic is a bit different. The idea is
(28:53):
to land in near the prey and then creep up
to it on all fours and with that kind of
awkward back crawl um that batman never seems to really use.
Uh you know, he's all into humulating the bat, but
he doesn't really do though. Yeah so um yeah, So
the bat hash is crawling up to the cow, and
(29:13):
then the bat will use a heat sense a run
its nose that points it towards the spot with the
warm blood is flowing just beneath the skin. And then
it will leap up and it will use its um
it's sharp little razor teeth to open up a little
tap if you will, and then uh, it's will begin
lapping at the blood and it's saliva provents the blood
from clotting while it's feeding. It actually has a specialized
(29:36):
tongue to lap up the blood as well. It's it's
got little rivulets in it. Nice. Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
It's found in Mexico, Central America, and South America. And
then you also another important thing. Not only are bats
doing us a huge service in curving insect populations, but
they're also in some areas major pollinators. Uh. Their bats
that drink nectar and UH. And they're important pollinators of
(29:59):
say the organ pipe cactus UH in the United States. UH.
They're also pollinators of really important cash crops like mango, cashew, balsa, agata,
bananas very important. And in some cases you actually have
bats that are the primary pollinators of a of a
of the plant. So it's a it's just a one
(30:20):
to one relationship between these two guys. If one goes
and the other one is in serious trouble. And some
of these guys are crazy too, because they have like
extra long tongues basically like a like the probiscus of
a of a butterfly used to get nectar from a
particular flower. UM. Sue Bernard, she is a lead keeper
at Zoo Atlanta, has said that UM that they also
(30:43):
are responsible for up to eight of reforestation because of
the seed droppings um from from the fruit that they eat.
You try the fruit eaters, they're they're the whole relationship
here is I give you some some delicious fruit because
some seeds in it. If you could poop that some
were to grow, that would be great. And the bats like, yeah,
(31:03):
sure I can do that, yeah yeah um. And she
also said that in terms of um pollinating, that between
two and three hundred products and grocery stores are bat derived,
and some of those especially, Yeah, you have to look.
It's that it's there under chicken, beef, seafood product, cattle
by product, and eventually bat exactly. But peaches, plums, pears
(31:29):
would we wouldn't have them without bats. And speaking of
the amount of fruits that they ingest, I think this
is really interesting. Um. Every once in a while they
will come upon, you know, the green parts of tomato
that you've seen before, or the green parts on a fruit,
and this is not a good thing. It's a secondary
plant compound. Yeah, especially bad for light taking. Bat mother's
(31:51):
yeah and pregnant that yeah, I can actually affect that
the development of the fetus. Um. So what happens is
that these female bats because they have consumed some of
these plant compounds secondary plant compounds. They will compensate the
toxicity of these compounds by eating mineral rich clay or water.
(32:11):
And according to Dr Christine Voit, local people in Africa
and South America um also some parts of Africa are
familiar with the detoxic detoxifying qualities of mineral rich clay
and consume it during pregnancy and lactation. Yeah, you see
this in in in many animals. Really, if there there's
an animal that is it is eating something and have
(32:33):
some sort of toxic effects, you know, they can't just
turn to have a little tongues. They have to scark
down some clay or some some sort of dirt to
deal with it. Yeah, or hang around salt licks. Yeah.
All right, so let's dive into the back colony. We've
already talked about the roosting a little bit like they
the flight advantages of it, but of course there are
other advantages to living on the roof of a cave
as well. For starters. What else lives on the roof
(32:55):
of a cave, right, Insects? Well, insects, but in terms
so yeah, there there may be food up there, but
for the most part, it's a safe place to hide out.
Now the bottom of the cave underneath where the bats
are living, because that's a different story. You can have
some baby bat falls down there and injured, or old
bat plummets to the bottom of the cave. There's no
(33:15):
telling how many things will be ready to eat it up. Um.
You'll have their their insects that can do this job.
You'll have surface animals that wander down for these eating
meals like skunks. Um. Again, it was I think it
was a Planet Earth War Life of Mammals. One of
the Miniattinborough Discovery Channel BBC CO Productions has a gem
(33:36):
sequence where you see these awful skunks going down there
to eat baby bats. I do recall and in one
of the episodes, um that I think it was where
there were three million bats and this was in a
cave in Borneo with the giant Guando mountain. Yeah, like
Guando Molton because then that of course is going that
Guano mountain is feeding cockroaches primarily, but then cockroach has
(33:59):
become another food, so ors and so on and so forth.
It becomes this whole yeah, cave ecosystem that is dependent
upon the bat colony, which is which is fascinating. That's
that's the whole podcast in he spent an entire month
filming in that yeah cave, waiting through the go No,
I mean literally waiting through it. But yeah, let's talk
about these colonies a little bit. Uh. It is, of
course a very great place for bats to stay. It's cold,
(34:23):
dark conditions. It's ideal for me maintaining their body temperatures
during sleep or what we call sleep, which is really
torpor hibernation. And the potabtles them slows down and maybe
I found that rabies. If that has rabies, it'll act
slower on them during this that's right, yeah, yeah, um.
And it also provides cover from predators, as you pointed out,
(34:43):
and it is an ideal gathering spot for socializing, including mating. Yeah,
I should point out real quick. Just one more note
about hanging upside down in the bat cave. If you
or I were to do it, we wouldn't last that
long because it would be tremendously painful for muscle would
just have a time with that, and I'd fall and
(35:03):
a skunk with eating the order. But the cool thing
about the bats is that gravity keeps their talents closed
instead of a contracted muscle, So the bat doesn't actually
have to exert any effort to hang like that. Yeah.
Once they basically clicked together their talents, that just they
just hang right there and they, as you say, they
(35:23):
don't have to use any muscle energy to keep them shut. Um.
And it was reading though that when they want to
come out of it, then they do have to obviously
activate their muscles in order to try to get them
pride open again. Yeah. So it's the exact opposite of
me hanging from the roof of a cave. Yes, yes,
unless you grow very large talents. Um. Okay. I want
(35:45):
to talk about specialization because I think this is really interesting.
The National Environment Research Console reports that bats build long
term companionship with other individuals and these companions are members
of exclusive social groups that can last for many years.
And the this was from Tom August from the Center
for Ecology and Hydrology, and he actually built up a
(36:05):
spider web diagram to reveal bats social networks. And even
though bats change where they sleep in the cave every
few days, what he found is that they cluster with
the same bats and that groups appear to be made
up of twenty to forty. Individuals and researchers have also
witnessed territorial disputes as well as altruistic acts like bringing
(36:26):
food to sick of that friends we can't hunt for themselves,
and that bats can also use the characteristics of other
bats voices to recognize each other. Um This is according
to a study by researchers from the University of to Bingjin,
Germany and the University of Applied Sciences in Constants, Germany.
(36:47):
And The researchers first tested the ability of four greater
mass eared bats distinguished between the echolocation calls of other bats,
and after observing that the bats learned to discriminate the
voices of other bats, they then programmed a computer model
that produces the recognition behavior of the bats, and analysis
of the model suggest that the spectral energy distribution and
(37:07):
the signals contain individual specific information that allows bats to
recognize each other, which I think it's pretty fascinating. So
inside the cave you have this tremendous sense of community.
Everybody's hanging out literally, and then when the sun goes down,
everybody exits the cave and what does it look like.
It is amazing because it is three million bats exiting
(37:27):
right in which you can take a while. Um, it
can actually take up to three hours. And the bats
form a swirling donut shaped figure that looks like a superorganism.
And that's so predators are confused. Although if if you yes,
exactly and they that's why you kind of see them
darting about in changing direction. And that's what's so amazing
(37:49):
about how that donut ship continues to scirreluc Again, there
are birds, predatory birds, the hawks, etcetera, that love to
have themselves a little bat for dinner. Yeah, yeah, Actually, um,
you know that doesn't really work on birds of prey
like falcons because I can still just pluck them out
of the air with these, but um, I do think
that's interesting. Bat biologist Nuclear lay feast Off of u
(38:10):
n C Center for Design, Innovation and Winston and Winston
Singalem State University says that when filming a bat exodus,
it's just it's a quite an experience because you say
that you can feel the wind from thousands of wind
queens batting. If you happen to stand up in the
wrong um area, you will get hit by bats. Obviously
(38:30):
they don't care. Um, that that many bats exiting just
changes to the quality of light in that area. The
light dims, the light dims, and he said, smells atrocious.
That you will get background on you, you will get urine.
It is. It is a very dramatic exit. All right,
we're in the home stretch now, and it's worth noting
(38:53):
that again, there's so many different species of bats out there,
and and some of them have really evolved some some
some very interesting ways of getting about. Uh. For instance,
you do have bats that swim. In fact, the facts
are still being generated on this, but it looks like
(39:14):
a lot of varieties of bats can swim if they
have to um, if they're under stress, if it's obviously
if it's a situation of of life or death. You
have bats of course that that feed up off of fish,
like the ones I observed in in Costa Rica. Occasionally
bats like that will wind up in the water and
they're gonna need to swim for it. Whether or not
(39:34):
they can actually outswim the things that are waiting for
bats to fall in the water, that's kind of a
to nature to decide. But but but we have observed
bats swimming even underwater in those situations, and you had
mentioned about that, you guys saw that's the greater bulldog
that and um that it actually uses echolocation to pinpoint
(39:56):
the ripples in the water, will say like a minnow's
fin has has um gone through it, and it either
dives in head first or it will trawl the surface
of the water with its talents. And then of course
we mentioned the vampire bats that land near the cow
or these sleeping human and and then then creep in
(40:17):
for the kill, which their sexy back crawl. But but
but it's not alone. There's also the New Zealand short
tailed bat. And this guy is really interesting because you've
evolved in New Zealand, which until the arrival of humans,
there were no native mammals other than bats, so so
he had a free for all pretty much. So he
actually you and I don't know what I'm calling me.
(40:39):
He I should come. She her as she she evolved
so that she could actually move around more in the ground,
feeding onto restaural invertebrates as well as flying. So so
this particular species of bat is actually rather adapt at
using a second location in the air for prey, but
also using a sense of smell to hunt on the ground.
(41:00):
I found that pretty pretty crazy. And now I've seen
some footage of these guys, it's really cool. They're just scampering. Um.
And then I mentioned earlier, I mentioned the wrinkly face
bat who has the awesome name of Centurio Cynics and
uh and I believe this is the one on our
Facebook page stuff to blow your mind. A few weeks back,
(41:22):
I posted one of these old illustrations German illustrations, scientific
illustrations to the various bat faces. Yeah, and the one
that's because you get to see all this just amazing diversification.
And there's like one super round wrinkly bat face that
it's a face that looks like a wax seal on
a on an envelope, you know, like an old timey
wax seal, like that kind of face. And the really
(41:43):
interesting thing about this guy is that they've they've conducted
studies into his an oddly faced, oddly shaped skull, because
it turns out he has a really powerful job and
like more powerful than than carnivorous bats. And this is
a bat that eats fruit. So it's been kind of
a puzzle for scientists, like why why has he got
this super powerful jaw. If he's just dining on soft fruits,
(42:05):
he's not even getting like hard fruits. So the theory
is that, of course he hasn't always depended upon soft fruits.
That that he's and and that's why he's retained this
ability to to chew on harder uh materials. Isn't the
job of something like uh, it's stronger than other bat jaws. Yeah,
it's crazy. Yeah, he's a little guy too, and the
(42:28):
face is really amazing. Yeah. And of course we are
still finding new species of bats, which I think is amazing.
Like just this month September two thousand twelve, in Eastern Africa,
they discovered four new species of bats. So we're just
continually continuing to add to our understanding of how bats work,
as well as our understanding of how many bats we have.
(42:50):
It's really amazing stuff when you consider the sort of
tricks that they have up their sleeve. Um. And again
we'll talk about echo location in the next podcast. But
the more that we can learn about these these creatures,
I think the better off we could become, even if
we can't fully understand or inhabit their mind. Right. Yeah,
(43:11):
So I'm gonna I'm gonna leave you in just a
couple of notes. We're gonna we're gonna skip the listener
mail since I think we've gone a bit long here.
But a little bit of outside reading here. Check out
a book called after man Cohen, A Zoology of the
Future by Dougal Dixon. It's actually the work of a geologist,
um and author, but he uh it's like a crazy,
(43:33):
awesomely illustrated book that is uh sort of imagining what
life on Earth now might evolve into in the future.
And there's a whole section like he clearly loved bats
and loved the ideas of of of an animal evolving
for flight and then re adapting to new situations, certainly
like a winged baton New in New Zealand that also
(43:54):
is running around the ground, that kind of thing. And
there's a whole island, uh fictional island he creates an
it called the the Islands of Batavia. Oh yeah, And
so he imagines all of these crazy different bats, bats
that live exclusively on the ground, bats that live in
the trees more like you know, sort of like getting
back to their roots, and including an extra large night
(44:15):
stalker bat called the man Ambulus para horridas and uh,
it's about in his imagining, it's about a one and
a half meters tall in Rome screeching and screaming through
the Batavian forest at night impacts. Um. There are also
other illustrations of their animals, right, Like I recall seeing
a bird that was mimicking a flower and it was
(44:38):
beautifully illustrated, and it's it's got its mouth open and
the tongue looks like a steam in and of course
it's attracting bats. But yeah, it's crazy stuff. It's it's
as imaginative as anything you'll see and like, uh, like
Avatar or what have you. And then also check out
a blog post that I did a few weeks back
and I'll link to it again in the in the
blog posted the companies this episode, but was called Jim
(45:00):
Trainers Animated Worlds of Bats, world of Bats and Dinosaurs.
Jim Trainers a Chicago based illustrator, illustrator and animator who
did a short film called the Bats. Uh. And it's
it's really it's it's really cute, but in a way
that keeps an eye on what animals really are, which
I find really and really cool and really uh enlightening. UH.
(45:22):
For instance, there's a scene, my favorite quote from it
the bats and narrating and the bats talking about its
life in the cave and uh, and the bat says,
one morning, I echoed an enormous worm. I cried because
I could not eat him all at once. God appeared
to me and she said, sometimes you have to kill
more than you can eat, which I love because we're
because trainer is h He's he's anthemomorphizing the bat to
(45:47):
an extent, but he's also keeping an eye on all
the the animal qualities that that make up this creature
and make it so unique and so perplexing and ultimately
so alien to USDN. That was just lovely. Yeah, So
if you have some tidbits on bats, you would like
to share with us your encounters with bats, be they frightening,
be they inspiring, share them with us. We would love
(46:10):
to hear about it. You can find us on Facebook
and tumbler. We are stuff to blow your mind on
both of those and on Twitter we go by the
handle blow the Mind, and you can also drop us
a line at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com
(46:30):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
It how stuff works dot com,
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
See if you have any bath houses in your yard
on your trees. I don't have any bath houses, but
I have a friend with bad houses. Did did they
(00:24):
actually have bats living in them? Because that's the heart
and anybody can buy them at the Lows Home Depot
and nail them to trees. But you got to nail
them in just the right place so the sun's hitting
them at the right time, so they're just they're warmed
enough that in they're they're high enough off the ground
that they're attractive real estate opportunities for the bat world.
I believe her bat habitat has been successful. She's a
(00:46):
bat devotee because because my my my previous house, I
built one of these things. I nailed it up there.
I was really hopeful we get some bats zipping around
the backyard eating up in sects, and never happen. So
I had like a bat for close in my backyard
that weeds growing all over it. Yeah, all the other
birds just kind of roosting on it. Yeah, just like
(01:07):
wasps or something moving into it. Yeah. Yeah. Um, well,
do you have any direct like that experiences, like you've
ever been attacked by a bat, which is highly unusual
by the way, No, no, no, I do not have
any bad attack stories. That's some Some had some cool
encounters with bats on trips. When when my wife and
I went to Costa Rico, we got to see uh,
(01:28):
we went on one of these night nature hikes in
the jungle and we got to see bats zipping down
and skimming fish a little bit of fish on the
top of a pond. That was nice. And when we
went on our honeymoon in um in Mexico, we uh
there were fruit bats in the area and uh, and
we were talking to some of the other people were
staying there. Everybody was in kind of like a little
(01:49):
hot bungalow type of the thing, and we were noticing
that that they had plastic screens up um high up
in the roof. And you're thinking, oh, I guess that's
to keep wind from blowing in or whatever, but that
it was there to keep the fruit bats from coming
in there and uh and roosting, because they would they
would get into the huts. They would roost up there
and then they they would just poop all over the place.
(02:11):
So I never got to see the fruit bats, but
there are lots of stories about it. And I kept thinking, oh,
if I, if I look closely, I'll see them. And
there is nothing like seeing some some bats flying around.
If you're you know, just at the sun's going down
and out of the corner of your eyes, you might
might just think of birds or insects, but then you
start noticing you realize all the bats are out, and
it's it's beautiful. I remember seeing some of the Grand
(02:31):
Canyon and that was that was just really really beautiful. Yeah,
I was thinking, like, and of course that's a wonderful
backdrop to see it. But I was thinking even in
my suburban upbringing, you know, at night under the lights,
just seeing them swarm around was like this incredible thing.
And that was very curious about them. And I remember
seeing them at a zoo and seeing them up close
(02:53):
and being completely just blown away because in front of
me was what looked like to be a common and sister. Right,
you look at these guys really closely in these gals
and uh some of the physiology grandfather. But I did um,
it actually sounds like maybe it burped at me. I
(03:15):
don't know. But you look the physiology of these guys
and then you really began to see, um, some some
interesting traits and and I'm not not to be crass,
but I mean the woman I really got to look
at closely. The penis was very apparent. U. So you
began to look at that in the physiology of the
wings and we'll talk more about this, the arms and
(03:36):
the fingers that that seemed to be very similar to ours,
and you began to think, Wow, this creature is is
very unique, not just because yeah, yeah, and I think
that's what people tend to think of when they yeah,
it is not. It is far more complex and and unique.
And we'll talk a little bit more about that. Um,
(03:57):
but let's talk about the folklore, oh behind the bat. Well, UM,
it's it's the most obvious thing that comes to people's mind,
especially Western Western minds, is of course that the bat
is a symbol of evil. The bat is a symbol
of of of vampires in disguise, and a lot of
this goes to the fact that you have you have
bats that when the sun goes down, they emerge from caves.
(04:21):
So they're emerging from the underworld when God's light leaves us.
They're flying around in the dark, and of course we
end up with all sorts of stories about them flying
into people's hair or attacking people, which most of that
is is WHOI But certainly you do have vampire bats
that will have given the opportunity lap up a little
human blood or cat well cal's primarily they're they're they're
(04:45):
more favorite meal. But uh, but then you also have bats.
Bats are of course susceptible to raby, so you will
have encound situations where bats will become rapid and will
become a problem. But but yeah, so evil bats easy
to wrap your head around that because they're emerging from
the underworld and they're flying over the place. Well, and
the vampire bats, as you had um just brought up,
(05:06):
have like you know, I guess you could say the
things um. And so you look at them, and you
can see fifteen sixteenth century settlers in the United States,
particularly when you begin to see some of this four
folklore really start to come up, and perhaps even witnessing
one of your cows being you know, blood sucked. Yeah,
(05:28):
and of course your cow being attacked and especially back
in the day, I mean that was that was severe,
that was major business. I mean you would have people
would be brought up on witchcraft trials due to animal
deaths because I mean in part because you know, you're
living in an enlightened time with all of this folklore,
but also because it's a serious business. That's your livelihood
(05:48):
out there, and something's drinking its blood. Yes, So you
can see how these stories start to get um, you know,
bandied about. And then you've got this sort of vampire mythology,
and of course and you've got brand Stokers, Dracula and
forever more do you have the bat in the vampire
inextrictably linked together? Now, it's interesting, um to to quickly
(06:13):
dive out of folklore and then scurry back into it. Um.
We have about we have over a thousand, over eleven
different species of bats in the world. Um. They make
up about a quarter of all mammal species. Uh. And
there are forty five different species of bats alone in
the United States and Canada alone. And if we look
at bats overall, we have mega bats, which are the
(06:35):
large bats that are found in Old World tropical rainforest Australia, Asia, Africa,
and then you have the microbats, which are the ones
that are gonna occur you know, the United States, Western World, etcetera.
So it's interesting to me that in those western the
western environments where you have the microbats, that's where you
see the evil ideas come to mind. But when you're
(06:56):
dealing with the mega bats, the which which generally we're
talking about root eating bats, large wolfish looking creatures, which
long muzzle, long muzzle, which in a way could conceivably
look a little creepier because they're bigger. But but but
also those these are the places where you find more
benevolent versions of the bat and folklore. For instance, in
(07:19):
Mayan mythology, they had they had a bad god um
which was named camazots um and uh and camazots means
death bats, so I guess he well, he wasn't completely benevolent,
but still uh, you know, he was big enough to
be a god. He wasn't reduced to demon hood. He
was he was a major player in the local cosmology. Meanwhile,
(07:39):
Chinese mythology sheds a positive light on the bats, where
they're viewed as symbols of good luck, and both the
Apache and Cherokee people's of North America enjoyed the bat
and viewed their presence as a symbol to something goodless
about happened. So it's a it's a good omen to
see the bat in the sky. What's the way I
I feel like I tend to look at him, you know,
if I if I noticed bats around, it's that's a
(08:01):
good day right now. And we'll talk about more about
the benefits of bats and why they're really important to
the ecosystem. But let's talk a little bit more about
the physical description of bats. Um As you had said,
there's more than a thousand different species, and the size
is very greatly. The smallest is the bumblebee bat, and
that has I know, adorable right a six inch wingspan,
(08:22):
while a Malayan flying foxes wingspan is six ft wide,
which might strike tear into the heart if you happen
to just look up in the night sky. But still fascinating.
This the sort of variety here, Oh, real quickly. The
bumble bee bat also known as kitties hog nos bat,
which which draws an important point about the whole bats
are evil, is that bats are often to to humanize
(08:47):
um rather possibly ugly to behold or or at least there.
Their features are often exaggerated, whereas a mouse, we know
what a mouse looks like. And certainly a lot of
the mega mats they have very their their heads tend
to resemble foxes, in myself a little more traditional, if
you will. Where's the microbats? You see some crazy stuff
(09:08):
like like the wrinkle face back, which will discuss later. Yeah,
and I did want to um mention the Mega Carptera,
that's that's what you're referring to, the mega's there um
as you said, the flying fox. These these guys are
mostly vegetarians and they do feed on fruit and pollen.
Hence your point. They seem to have a little bit
better of a reputation um and it's parts of the world.
(09:32):
And then the Microcryptia is as you said. You know,
it's smaller, and it's got the pug nosed dog look
and it's a little bit odder looking and they're found
all around the world, and they are carnivores and they
feed primarily on insects. And I did want to point
out that bats belong to their own taxonic grouping uh Caroptera,
(09:55):
which means winghand. So we'll check we'll check out that
little wing hand in a moment. That's it's it's really fascinating.
But but first let's take a we we've walked through folklore,
we've walked through a little bit of taxonomy. Now let's
tiptoe just a little bit through philosophy before we really
get into the world of the bat. Because as if
(10:16):
we're putting all this together and we're coming this from
a human perspective, Uh so we're we're bringing our human
baggage with us, and we're trying to understand in a sense,
what it is to be a bat? What is the
bad experience? And there's actually a really awesome piece of
philosophical pondering from American philosopher Thomas Nagle, who was published
(10:36):
in The Philosophical Review back in four and it's um
and he basically asked a question, what is it like
to be a bat? And it's it's ultimately about the
limits of of our our our human perspective, and about
how when we're trying to imagine an alien perspective, be
it that of a bat, that of your dog, your cat,
that of a potential extraterrestrial species, they are there are
(11:00):
certain walls there that we just can't get past to
read just a quick quote from it. Here, Nagel says, bats,
although more closely related to us uh than those other species,
nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus
so different from ours that the problem I want to
pose is exceptionally vivid, even without the benefit of philosophical reflection.
(11:23):
Anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space
with an excited bat, I love that knows what it
is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life. And
then he goes on to say bats sonar, though clearly
a form of perception, is not similar in its operation
to any sense that we possess, and there is no
reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we
(11:46):
can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for
the notion of what it is like to be a bat.
And what I think is interesting about that is that
and yet we we can't help but try, I mean,
we're gonna try to, and that we're just a little
bit squeak through and get into this because it's so
fascinating to me. I was thinking about it um in
(12:07):
the same terms of when we were talking about sepal
of pods and our inability to truly understand them because
they're communicating in a way that that we would never
be able to be living in a different sensory world understand. Yeah. Absolutely,
And they are experiencing a color spectrum that we can't
even begin to understand because we don't have have the
(12:28):
machinery for it. Um. That being said, though, that we
can kind of get a glimpse into the world of
bats and how very cool it is. And we will
talk about eto location uh in this podcast, but we
have another one coming up that is devoted entirely to
that because you talk about the doors of perception flying
open when it comes to bats and their ability to
(12:50):
see and I'm saying that in quote marks, Uh, it
is amazing stuff. Yeah. So where do bats come from?
They didn't just fly out of a hole in the
underworld one day. They of course evolved like everything else
on Earth. And Uh, as best we can tell from
fossil evidence, they came about about fifty million years ago.
That's about how far back we have to look to
(13:11):
and find evidence for bat like flying mammals. Uh. They
probably started off in the trees, we think, instead eating
a little tree creatures, and then they began to really
go after a key market. Because evolution, of course, is
always about and I'm going to anthropomorphize evolution a little
bit here, uh, which I can't help it do, but
(13:32):
but evolution is all about going after a market, doing
what's work, what works, and I mean it's just extreme
business savvy. So you have the bats, right, and what
is this this vital market that they need to get into.
They want to eat instincts. They need to eat instincts.
That's there, that's the thing. But there's a whole period
of time, a recurring period of time in which the
(13:54):
markets wide open. It's just right for the picking. They
just need the right evolutionary adaptations to go after all right.
So in other words, they show up on the scene
fifty million years ago and birds already well established and
they're eating up all of all of the prey, right,
And so they looked to the night sky and they say, ah,
I see a smart dishport of insects there. If only
(14:15):
I could get to them. And essentially this is where
you begin to see where the bat becomes an extremely
successful mammal because it is able to then uh, basically
evolved into flight, which we'll talk about a little bit.
But also it becomes a nocturnal creature who can hunt
at night get all of those insects. But also it's
(14:37):
a it's able to use the cover of night uh
from other predators, so it doesn't get eaten up. Yeah.
I mean, obviously there are nocturnal birds. You have owls
and and and some other creatures of avian creatures that
that do their thing at night. But for the most part,
this was a wide open space. So bats moved into
(15:00):
it and really they came to own the night. I mean,
they're they're certainly preyed on by some creatures, but but
they're really ruling it out there and have arguably become
one of one ill of, if not the most successful
mammals on the planet. Yes, yes, for this very reason.
I mean, you can certainly the argument can fall to,
you know, rat versus bat. You could maybe make an
(15:21):
argument for domestic cat as well, but that that's a
slightly different business model. Yeah, and a whole other podcast
coming up, by the way. Certainly both the bats, both
the rats and the cats uh a certain amount of
their success to humans. But but the bats, they're doing
it all by wings, so so certainly you can give
the natural bump to them in the contest. Yeah. Um.
(15:43):
This is from the Department of Energy. Aska Scientist Mike
Stewart says that the night is really a win win
proposition for bats because they are better suited um as
as a mammal um to the night because they're expending
so much energy to stay in flight, so the cool
air would help them to had excess body heat, so
that's that's a boon to them. And because the night
air is cooler and has a higher density than the
(16:06):
hot air during the day, it makes it easier to
derive lift by flapping wings and cool denser air. And
again we'll talk about the wings situation in a bit,
but as we know, bats aren't constructed like birds, so
they need all the help they can get in the
lift department. And then echolocation is um is one of
two main adoptions again here that make bats six such
(16:27):
successful nocturnal creatures. Yeah, it's worth noting there's no way
a bat is going to outply a bird. And if
you've if you've ever watched Atton Borrows the Life of mammals,
there's there or well now I can't remember if this
was an episode of the Life of Mammals are the
Life of Birds but one of those two series, I
just go watch them both. Uh, you get to see
this in action as as a mega bats afrigo, which
(16:51):
kind of fruit that it was? Um, I just have
a terrible time if they're up against predatory birds during
the daylight, swoop in and just take them because they're
they're just a total on a total different level performance wise,
but at night they're the they're the top player. But
it's really echo location that makes them this standout mammal right,
because their ability, this ability that they have evolved makes
(17:13):
them super successful. Yeah, they can navigate this world of night.
They can find these often tiny they're a tiny creatures.
The flitting about out there in the dark is it's
zero in on them and swoop in for the kill.
All right, let's do a little brief overview of echo location,
and again we won't go into it too much because
we have a podcast devoted entirely to it. It is
that fascinating. Tom harris um is a House to Works
(17:36):
writer and he has an excellent how bats work article
to check that out. But he asked you to imagine
an Echo canyon when you think about echolocation, and it's
like a canyon, right that you shout in. Yeah, so
I'm thinking at the Grand Canyon. I don't know, I've
never actually tried about, but at the Grand Canyon, I
should say, when you shout, you produce a sound that
(17:58):
um that makes sound waves, obviously, and that travels across
the canyon, and then the rock face on the opposite
side of the canyon deflects the air pressure energy of
the sound wave so that it begins moving in the
opposite direction, heading back to you. Okay, So if you're
in an area where at atmospheric pressure, then air composition
is constant. Sound waves always move at the same speed.
(18:21):
And if you knew the speed of sound in the area,
and you had a very precise stop watch, for instance,
you could use sound to determine the disness across the canyon.
And he says this is the basic principle of echolocation.
Bats are making sounds the same way that we do,
by moving air past their vibrating vocal cords. In some
bats emit the sounds from their mouth, which they hold
(18:43):
open as they fly, and others emit sounds through their nose.
So yes, the basic principle of radar and sonar, I'm
sending out these waves that they're bouncing off something. And uh.
In sonar and radar you have either you know, a
guy sitting there with a stopwatch or more likely a
machine that's interpreting that data and letting know what distance
has been traversed with the bat. Of course, it's all
(19:04):
taking place in the brain. Yeah, something that we couldn't
never do right of this different data coming back at them,
and it puts us back in the nagle area of
how how do we even imagine that we we can't right? Right,
because that that is something that is specific to them
and in second nature of course, and the way that
they can sit there in abstract um about this data
(19:25):
that's coming in. All right, so let's take a quick break.
But when we get back we will talk about these
finger like bones in the bats wings that are so
wonderful and creepy and important to their ability to apply.
(19:45):
All right, we're back, and yeah, we're about to take
wing with the bat. And if you look at the
any skeletal layout of the bat, and and there's one
with on our housetu works how bats work article, you'll
see that it really it's not a situation and of
and this is something that we kind of get gets
complicated with all of our visions of like bat like
(20:05):
wings and imagining creatures and dragons, you tend to see
a creature that has more like batman, you know, where
he has like more like a flying squirrel, where he
just has a bunch of webbing under his arms. But
most of what you're seeing with the bat's wings, those
are fingers, So that's it's a it's a hand that
has become wing. Yeah, and if you look at the
skeletal system, you will see what looks to be like
(20:29):
arms on on the wing stretched out on either side,
and then five fingers draping from that um. And it's
just it's amazing because what it's doing is it's creating
sort of like these spokes, just like the spokes for
an umbrella in terms of giving it structure but also mobility. Yeah,
and then you have this webbing in between that of
(20:49):
course becomes the wing surface and uh, and that material
also has a it's really really remarkable, and it has
a heels really swiftly as it would need to do
because if you get that that stuff gets tord worn
or or or bitten or clawed at in any way,
they need that to heal up pronto so that they
can fly again. Yeah, And that webbing, that elastic skin
stretches from the edge of the forelimb all the way
(21:11):
to the tip of an elongated little finger, and then
the wing attaches to the lateral side of the body
and lower limb down the ankle. And some bats also
have a membrane between their legs connecting to the tail,
and this hind leg wing integration is very different from
a bird obviously, and as we have mentioned, it's a
treat that's shared with gliders. So if we look at
(21:33):
the evolutionary flow of this, we can easily imagine a
creature in the distant past. It eats insects, It calls
up trees to eat insects. Eventually it takes two gliding
uh to catch more insects, and over time that evolves
into a full blown sense of flight, ability to fly
and catch things in the night. Yeah. Because really, what
(21:56):
you're looking at when you're looking at that, when you
see that it is a modified mammalian limb um. So
let's talk about something called the rogue finger gene. Yeah,
this is pretty pretty crazy. Uh. You know, the more
we've learned about the about genetics, we get to where
we can pinpoint individual genes that that you've you've present,
you've on can can cause remarkable changes in physiology. And
(22:20):
there's actually a study from Colorado Health Sciences Center in
Denver and they pinpointed the single gene that allows bats
to grow wings and fly, and it's called b MP
two and it's one of a family of genes that
are important for limb development in mammals. So you find
it in bats, but you don't find it in mice. Yeah,
And it's really cool because it does get this sort
(22:41):
of pinpoint how that's evolved because the problem here is
that we have um a bit of a gap in
the fossil record, right, so we don't necessarily know what
what sort of in between animal I guess you could
say that's truly evolved from. But knowing this, we can
we can point to the fact that um that bats
did have this gene or or they do have this
(23:02):
gene and it allowed that elongation of these finger bones,
which was really important in creating a wing with a
high aspect ratio. Meaning that all of a sudden, the
longer you know your UM, these fingers get and the
more membrane than, the easier it is to get lift
and to take off as a creature. So so important
(23:22):
because remember bats are the only group of mammals to
have evolved power powered flight, So this is a really
important aspect of it. And in fact, to get a
real good sense of of how this gene has affected
the growth of this UM bat's limbs, if you do
look at a skeletal system of them, what becomes apparent
UM is that it's so exaggerated, these these four limbs
(23:46):
that it sort of looks like Edward scissor hands. Yeah,
so imagine that, and then also know that scientists have
tinkered with some mice to mess with this gene to
see if they if they reduced it, if they took
it out of the sequence, what would happen. And they
did find that UM with with mice that they could
get something like a six percent increase in limbs when
(24:09):
they tinkered with it. The reason they use mice is
because again if you look at a mouse, very similar
to the physiology, the basic physiology of course UM then
as with a bat and so when they began to
see that increase, they said, Wow, that doesn't seem like much.
But if you had a six increase in the limbs
of a human, they would grow something like four inches.
(24:30):
We've got to figure out how to pump this into
basketball players, I know, right right. So again, powered flight
bat's not as good as this as birds. Powered flight
involves a tremendous amount of energy. Um. I mean, the
case can be made that it's really not an energy
efficient means of flight, but it's the only thing that
the nature can really achieve on this planet anyway. So
(24:53):
it's it's worth noting that that on the whole birds
versus bats thing. You will watch any bird. Most birds anyway,
don't have any real problem taking off from the ground. Um.
It's more of a struggle for some than for others,
so some have to really get kind of a running
start at it. But most of the birds that you
canna see around your backyard, they can just take right off.
Not so with the bat, which is why why you
(25:16):
if you go to a bat cave, or if you
or even just say, I say a tree where you'll
find fruit brats, bats roosting, or the top of a
bungalow in Mexico. They're they're hanging up there right, and
they're they're part of the advantage here. There are a
number of advantages to to roosting in this this position,
but one of them is that they can drop right
down into flight. There they just use gravity to achieve
(25:38):
to achieve that initial boost of lift, as opposed to
having to painstakingly flap their wings and get nowhere on
the ground or even try sort of a running lift
because they have such short time legs that they can't
even do that. Yeah, it always reminds me of there
was a plane back in Uh. There was an experimental
aircraft back in called the x F A five Goblin. Uh.
(26:00):
Some of you airplane buffs might be familiar with it.
And it was a stubby little plane. And the idea
that it was a parasitic fighter that it would you
would stow this in the belly of a bomber and
then a bomber on a long bombing run. It could
there's attacked by fighter planes, they could deploy this guy
to go out and deal with the problem. And uh,
and it was sort of launched in a similar way.
They would kind of hang it down from the from
(26:22):
from from the Bombay and then just let it drop
and then it with a cheap flight. Yeah. See, I
mean it's Do you think they took that example from nature?
I don't know, you know that, I mean, in a
sense they did. I mean it's the same some of
the same physics. Yeah, just like sonar is taken from
from basically a location. All right, let's talk about how
(26:44):
these guys feed. And we had mentioned the vampire bat,
but I did want to point out that most of
the bats are insectivores, and meaning that they eat insects
and the brown bat, which is indigenous for North America,
and catch and eat as many as twelve hundred mosquitoes
(27:04):
in one hour exactly. That's why I wanted these guys
living in my backyard. I get it, right, I know.
And it's particularly in conditions like we've had here in
the South, where there's just I mean to spend mosquito
crazy it's been. They've been so excited. Um, this is
really important to the ecosystem and of course to my legs,
um not becoming devoured. But I do want to mention
(27:26):
too that there is brack and cave in Texas and
that contains more than twenty million fats. Imagine the amount
of I guana in that one and uh, they eat
about two hundred tons of insects every night. Nice, imagine
without those guys doing their job, everything we just get
out of whack fast. But not everyone eats insects. Again,
(27:47):
you have the vampire bad which is is the only
mammal that lives exclusively on blood. And uh and typically
these things gathering colonies about a hundred animals sometimes and
loving groups of a thousand or war and uh they
say that in one year, uh, a one strong bat
colony can drink the blood of twenty five cows. And now, yeah,
(28:09):
and they're not tapping the cows out here. I mean
that they drink them a little bit of their blood. Right.
It's it's kind of like it's almost well not really
a parasitic relationship, but there they can serve the cows.
They are in a way, they're milking the cow, and
they want that cow to be there tomorrow and the
next night and the next time when they come back
for more and more blood. But what's the one thing
(28:30):
that I was really surprised by because I guess I
you know, I knew about vampire bats. I've always known
about vampire bats, but they didn't really know all the
hard facts about them, like, for instance, that vampire bats
strike their victim from the ground, which is which is
something you in the movies. You see like vampire bats
are swooping around the heroine's head and she's screaming, right,
But the tactic is a bit different. The idea is
(28:53):
to land in near the prey and then creep up
to it on all fours and with that kind of
awkward back crawl um that batman never seems to really use.
Uh you know, he's all into humulating the bat, but
he doesn't really do though. Yeah so um yeah, So
the bat hash is crawling up to the cow, and
(29:13):
then the bat will use a heat sense a run
its nose that points it towards the spot with the
warm blood is flowing just beneath the skin. And then
it will leap up and it will use its um
it's sharp little razor teeth to open up a little
tap if you will, and then uh, it's will begin
lapping at the blood and it's saliva provents the blood
from clotting while it's feeding. It actually has a specialized
(29:36):
tongue to lap up the blood as well. It's it's
got little rivulets in it. Nice. Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
It's found in Mexico, Central America, and South America. And
then you also another important thing. Not only are bats
doing us a huge service in curving insect populations, but
they're also in some areas major pollinators. Uh. Their bats
that drink nectar and UH. And they're important pollinators of
(29:59):
say the organ pipe cactus UH in the United States. UH.
They're also pollinators of really important cash crops like mango, cashew, balsa, agata,
bananas very important. And in some cases you actually have
bats that are the primary pollinators of a of a
of the plant. So it's a it's just a one
(30:20):
to one relationship between these two guys. If one goes
and the other one is in serious trouble. And some
of these guys are crazy too, because they have like
extra long tongues basically like a like the probiscus of
a of a butterfly used to get nectar from a
particular flower. UM. Sue Bernard, she is a lead keeper
at Zoo Atlanta, has said that UM that they also
(30:43):
are responsible for up to eight of reforestation because of
the seed droppings um from from the fruit that they eat.
You try the fruit eaters, they're they're the whole relationship
here is I give you some some delicious fruit because
some seeds in it. If you could poop that some
were to grow, that would be great. And the bats like, yeah,
(31:03):
sure I can do that, yeah yeah um. And she
also said that in terms of um pollinating, that between
two and three hundred products and grocery stores are bat derived,
and some of those especially, Yeah, you have to look.
It's that it's there under chicken, beef, seafood product, cattle
by product, and eventually bat exactly. But peaches, plums, pears
(31:29):
would we wouldn't have them without bats. And speaking of
the amount of fruits that they ingest, I think this
is really interesting. Um. Every once in a while they
will come upon, you know, the green parts of tomato
that you've seen before, or the green parts on a fruit,
and this is not a good thing. It's a secondary
plant compound. Yeah, especially bad for light taking. Bat mother's
(31:51):
yeah and pregnant that yeah, I can actually affect that
the development of the fetus. Um. So what happens is
that these female bats because they have consumed some of
these plant compounds secondary plant compounds. They will compensate the
toxicity of these compounds by eating mineral rich clay or water.
(32:11):
And according to Dr Christine Voit, local people in Africa
and South America um also some parts of Africa are
familiar with the detoxic detoxifying qualities of mineral rich clay
and consume it during pregnancy and lactation. Yeah, you see
this in in in many animals. Really, if there there's
an animal that is it is eating something and have
(32:33):
some sort of toxic effects, you know, they can't just
turn to have a little tongues. They have to scark
down some clay or some some sort of dirt to
deal with it. Yeah, or hang around salt licks. Yeah.
All right, so let's dive into the back colony. We've
already talked about the roosting a little bit like they
the flight advantages of it, but of course there are
other advantages to living on the roof of a cave
as well. For starters. What else lives on the roof
(32:55):
of a cave, right, Insects? Well, insects, but in terms
so yeah, there there may be food up there, but
for the most part, it's a safe place to hide out.
Now the bottom of the cave underneath where the bats
are living, because that's a different story. You can have
some baby bat falls down there and injured, or old
bat plummets to the bottom of the cave. There's no
(33:15):
telling how many things will be ready to eat it up. Um.
You'll have their their insects that can do this job.
You'll have surface animals that wander down for these eating
meals like skunks. Um. Again, it was I think it
was a Planet Earth War Life of Mammals. One of
the Miniattinborough Discovery Channel BBC CO Productions has a gem
(33:36):
sequence where you see these awful skunks going down there
to eat baby bats. I do recall and in one
of the episodes, um that I think it was where
there were three million bats and this was in a
cave in Borneo with the giant Guando mountain. Yeah, like
Guando Molton because then that of course is going that
Guano mountain is feeding cockroaches primarily, but then cockroach has
(33:59):
become another food, so ors and so on and so forth.
It becomes this whole yeah, cave ecosystem that is dependent
upon the bat colony, which is which is fascinating. That's
that's the whole podcast in he spent an entire month
filming in that yeah cave, waiting through the go No,
I mean literally waiting through it. But yeah, let's talk
about these colonies a little bit. Uh. It is, of
course a very great place for bats to stay. It's cold,
(34:23):
dark conditions. It's ideal for me maintaining their body temperatures
during sleep or what we call sleep, which is really
torpor hibernation. And the potabtles them slows down and maybe
I found that rabies. If that has rabies, it'll act
slower on them during this that's right, yeah, yeah, um.
And it also provides cover from predators, as you pointed out,
(34:43):
and it is an ideal gathering spot for socializing, including mating. Yeah,
I should point out real quick. Just one more note
about hanging upside down in the bat cave. If you
or I were to do it, we wouldn't last that
long because it would be tremendously painful for muscle would
just have a time with that, and I'd fall and
(35:03):
a skunk with eating the order. But the cool thing
about the bats is that gravity keeps their talents closed
instead of a contracted muscle, So the bat doesn't actually
have to exert any effort to hang like that. Yeah.
Once they basically clicked together their talents, that just they
just hang right there and they, as you say, they
(35:23):
don't have to use any muscle energy to keep them shut. Um.
And it was reading though that when they want to
come out of it, then they do have to obviously
activate their muscles in order to try to get them
pride open again. Yeah. So it's the exact opposite of
me hanging from the roof of a cave. Yes, yes,
unless you grow very large talents. Um. Okay. I want
(35:45):
to talk about specialization because I think this is really interesting.
The National Environment Research Console reports that bats build long
term companionship with other individuals and these companions are members
of exclusive social groups that can last for many years.
And the this was from Tom August from the Center
for Ecology and Hydrology, and he actually built up a
(36:05):
spider web diagram to reveal bats social networks. And even
though bats change where they sleep in the cave every
few days, what he found is that they cluster with
the same bats and that groups appear to be made
up of twenty to forty. Individuals and researchers have also
witnessed territorial disputes as well as altruistic acts like bringing
(36:26):
food to sick of that friends we can't hunt for themselves,
and that bats can also use the characteristics of other
bats voices to recognize each other. Um This is according
to a study by researchers from the University of to Bingjin,
Germany and the University of Applied Sciences in Constants, Germany.
(36:47):
And The researchers first tested the ability of four greater
mass eared bats distinguished between the echolocation calls of other bats,
and after observing that the bats learned to discriminate the
voices of other bats, they then programmed a computer model
that produces the recognition behavior of the bats, and analysis
of the model suggest that the spectral energy distribution and
(37:07):
the signals contain individual specific information that allows bats to
recognize each other, which I think it's pretty fascinating. So
inside the cave you have this tremendous sense of community.
Everybody's hanging out literally, and then when the sun goes down,
everybody exits the cave and what does it look like.
It is amazing because it is three million bats exiting
(37:27):
right in which you can take a while. Um, it
can actually take up to three hours. And the bats
form a swirling donut shaped figure that looks like a superorganism.
And that's so predators are confused. Although if if you yes,
exactly and they that's why you kind of see them
darting about in changing direction. And that's what's so amazing
(37:49):
about how that donut ship continues to scirreluc Again, there
are birds, predatory birds, the hawks, etcetera, that love to
have themselves a little bat for dinner. Yeah, yeah, Actually, um,
you know that doesn't really work on birds of prey
like falcons because I can still just pluck them out
of the air with these, but um, I do think
that's interesting. Bat biologist Nuclear lay feast Off of u
(38:10):
n C Center for Design, Innovation and Winston and Winston
Singalem State University says that when filming a bat exodus,
it's just it's a quite an experience because you say
that you can feel the wind from thousands of wind
queens batting. If you happen to stand up in the
wrong um area, you will get hit by bats. Obviously
(38:30):
they don't care. Um, that that many bats exiting just
changes to the quality of light in that area. The
light dims, the light dims, and he said, smells atrocious.
That you will get background on you, you will get urine.
It is. It is a very dramatic exit. All right,
we're in the home stretch now, and it's worth noting
(38:53):
that again, there's so many different species of bats out there,
and and some of them have really evolved some some
some very interesting ways of getting about. Uh. For instance,
you do have bats that swim. In fact, the facts
are still being generated on this, but it looks like
(39:14):
a lot of varieties of bats can swim if they
have to um, if they're under stress, if it's obviously
if it's a situation of of life or death. You
have bats of course that that feed up off of fish,
like the ones I observed in in Costa Rica. Occasionally
bats like that will wind up in the water and
they're gonna need to swim for it. Whether or not
(39:34):
they can actually outswim the things that are waiting for
bats to fall in the water, that's kind of a
to nature to decide. But but but we have observed
bats swimming even underwater in those situations, and you had
mentioned about that, you guys saw that's the greater bulldog
that and um that it actually uses echolocation to pinpoint
(39:56):
the ripples in the water, will say like a minnow's
fin has has um gone through it, and it either
dives in head first or it will trawl the surface
of the water with its talents. And then of course
we mentioned the vampire bats that land near the cow
or these sleeping human and and then then creep in
(40:17):
for the kill, which their sexy back crawl. But but
but it's not alone. There's also the New Zealand short
tailed bat. And this guy is really interesting because you've
evolved in New Zealand, which until the arrival of humans,
there were no native mammals other than bats, so so
he had a free for all pretty much. So he
actually you and I don't know what I'm calling me.
(40:39):
He I should come. She her as she she evolved
so that she could actually move around more in the ground,
feeding onto restaural invertebrates as well as flying. So so
this particular species of bat is actually rather adapt at
using a second location in the air for prey, but
also using a sense of smell to hunt on the ground.
(41:00):
I found that pretty pretty crazy. And now I've seen
some footage of these guys, it's really cool. They're just scampering. Um.
And then I mentioned earlier, I mentioned the wrinkly face
bat who has the awesome name of Centurio Cynics and
uh and I believe this is the one on our
Facebook page stuff to blow your mind. A few weeks back,
(41:22):
I posted one of these old illustrations German illustrations, scientific
illustrations to the various bat faces. Yeah, and the one
that's because you get to see all this just amazing diversification.
And there's like one super round wrinkly bat face that
it's a face that looks like a wax seal on
a on an envelope, you know, like an old timey
wax seal, like that kind of face. And the really
(41:43):
interesting thing about this guy is that they've they've conducted
studies into his an oddly faced, oddly shaped skull, because
it turns out he has a really powerful job and
like more powerful than than carnivorous bats. And this is
a bat that eats fruit. So it's been kind of
a puzzle for scientists, like why why has he got
this super powerful jaw. If he's just dining on soft fruits,
(42:05):
he's not even getting like hard fruits. So the theory
is that, of course he hasn't always depended upon soft fruits.
That that he's and and that's why he's retained this
ability to to chew on harder uh materials. Isn't the
job of something like uh, it's stronger than other bat jaws. Yeah,
it's crazy. Yeah, he's a little guy too, and the
(42:28):
face is really amazing. Yeah. And of course we are
still finding new species of bats, which I think is amazing.
Like just this month September two thousand twelve, in Eastern Africa,
they discovered four new species of bats. So we're just
continually continuing to add to our understanding of how bats work,
as well as our understanding of how many bats we have.
(42:50):
It's really amazing stuff when you consider the sort of
tricks that they have up their sleeve. Um. And again
we'll talk about echo location in the next podcast. But
the more that we can learn about these these creatures,
I think the better off we could become, even if
we can't fully understand or inhabit their mind. Right. Yeah,
(43:11):
So I'm gonna I'm gonna leave you in just a
couple of notes. We're gonna we're gonna skip the listener
mail since I think we've gone a bit long here.
But a little bit of outside reading here. Check out
a book called after man Cohen, A Zoology of the
Future by Dougal Dixon. It's actually the work of a geologist,
um and author, but he uh it's like a crazy,
(43:33):
awesomely illustrated book that is uh sort of imagining what
life on Earth now might evolve into in the future.
And there's a whole section like he clearly loved bats
and loved the ideas of of of an animal evolving
for flight and then re adapting to new situations, certainly
like a winged baton New in New Zealand that also
(43:54):
is running around the ground, that kind of thing. And
there's a whole island, uh fictional island he creates an
it called the the Islands of Batavia. Oh yeah, And
so he imagines all of these crazy different bats, bats
that live exclusively on the ground, bats that live in
the trees more like you know, sort of like getting
back to their roots, and including an extra large night
(44:15):
stalker bat called the man Ambulus para horridas and uh,
it's about in his imagining, it's about a one and
a half meters tall in Rome screeching and screaming through
the Batavian forest at night impacts. Um. There are also
other illustrations of their animals, right, Like I recall seeing
a bird that was mimicking a flower and it was
(44:38):
beautifully illustrated, and it's it's got its mouth open and
the tongue looks like a steam in and of course
it's attracting bats. But yeah, it's crazy stuff. It's it's
as imaginative as anything you'll see and like, uh, like
Avatar or what have you. And then also check out
a blog post that I did a few weeks back
and I'll link to it again in the in the
blog posted the companies this episode, but was called Jim
(45:00):
Trainers Animated Worlds of Bats, world of Bats and Dinosaurs.
Jim Trainers a Chicago based illustrator, illustrator and animator who
did a short film called the Bats. Uh. And it's
it's really it's it's really cute, but in a way
that keeps an eye on what animals really are, which
I find really and really cool and really uh enlightening. UH.
(45:22):
For instance, there's a scene, my favorite quote from it
the bats and narrating and the bats talking about its
life in the cave and uh, and the bat says,
one morning, I echoed an enormous worm. I cried because
I could not eat him all at once. God appeared
to me and she said, sometimes you have to kill
more than you can eat, which I love because we're
because trainer is h He's he's anthemomorphizing the bat to
(45:47):
an extent, but he's also keeping an eye on all
the the animal qualities that that make up this creature
and make it so unique and so perplexing and ultimately
so alien to USDN. That was just lovely. Yeah, So
if you have some tidbits on bats, you would like
to share with us your encounters with bats, be they frightening,
be they inspiring, share them with us. We would love
(46:10):
to hear about it. You can find us on Facebook
and tumbler. We are stuff to blow your mind on
both of those and on Twitter we go by the
handle blow the Mind, and you can also drop us
a line at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com
(46:30):
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