S2E06 - Atiwa (Fruit bats) - Gaming with Science

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Unknown (00:00):
Brian, hello

Jason (00:06):
and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we
talk about the science behindsome of your favorite games.

Brian (00:10):
Today, we're going to discuss a T wop by lookout
games. All right, hello. Welcomeback to gaming with science.
This is Brian.

Jason (00:21):
This is Jason,

Marielle (00:22):
and this is Marielle. And I'm a researcher at Linnaeus
University in southeast Sweden,and I mostly work on
combinational movement ecology,and especially looking into the
role of animal movement for thespread of pathogens. And
sometimes I also look intodispersion of seeds by animals.
So this is what is relevant forthe game today.

Brian (00:42):
Very much, and we're extremely excited to have
Marielle van Toor here. This isa unique example of a science
game for us. This game wasexplicitly inspired by a study
that was published by Marielleand Dina Dechmann in it wasn't
even that long ago when was thestudy published?
in 2019 so that's relatively recent in Current

Marielle (00:58):
2019
Biology, which is a is a verybright and shiny journal. So
very excited to be able to makethis arrangement here to talk
about a Atiwa and sort ofenvironmental activism,
scientific environmentalactivism and ecological services
and bats and Ghana, okay, butbefore we get into that, we

(01:19):
usually start with some kind ofa science banter, science fact,
Jason, you are up this time.Marielle, I think you said you
might have something as well. Sousually we give the guest host
first dibs. So do you want toshare us something with us?
SoI have one thing that I think is really cool, and
that is in some way related tothe game, even though it's on a
completely different system, butalso located in Africa. So

(01:39):
there's a researcher whose nameis Claire Spottiswoode, and she
works in South Africa, and she'sbeen working on a system of
mutualism, and that meansinteractions that are mutual or
beneficial to both partnersbetween humans and birds. And
this is particularly the greaterHoneyguide, which is a species
that kind of indicates to honeybadgers, but also humans, in

(02:02):
this case, where to find beenests as a resource for honey
and for the honey guides also asa resource for the beeswax. And
she's been working on this for agreat time, a great long time.
And I once saw a couple of yearsago a plenary talk by her having
never heard about her work. Andit was absolutely amazing,
because so this greater honeyguide. The Latin name for that

(02:23):
is Indicator indicator, which Ithink is really fun.

Brian (02:25):
I love a I can't remember the term for when the genus and
species are the same name. It'smy very favorite.

Marielle (02:31):
I also don't remember,

Brian (02:32):
yeah, I'll look it up. I did know that taxonomically, you
cannot do that for plants.

Marielle (02:36):
It's, it is, yeah, just animals. And I don't know
about mushrooms.

Brian (02:39):
I don't know about mushrooms either. I might look
that up.

Marielle (02:43):
But anyway, so she studies these in multiple
different locations withdifferent tribes of African
peoples. And there is basicallya way to make the interaction
between humans and thesehoneyguides more likely, and
that is because these peoplehave developed, basically calls
and whistles that attract thespecies. It's like, this is
something that it's similar asto what you would do with your

(03:05):
dog. You call it by its name,okay? But here's basically a
specific type of whistle, andthe birds locally to that, to
that group of people wouldrespond to that one more likely
than to any other kind of likehuman sound.

Brian (03:17):
That's fascinating. Are honey guides corvids, because
this sounds like a crow thing.

Marielle (03:22):
Oh, now you're asking me things I do not know.

Brian (03:24):
I also when I I've heard about honeyguides before, but
I've usually heard them in thecontext of, don't they have a a
symbiotic relationship withhoney badgers?

Marielle (03:31):
Yes. So, so this is the same kind of this the same
kind of behavior, only that theydon't do it with honey badgers,
but also with people,

Jason (03:38):
So I just looked it up. It looks like they're actually
in the woodpecker family, orsister to the woodpecker family.
Yes.

Brian (03:44):
Okay, weird. If they were crows or corvids, I'd be like,
Oh, well, of course. But to seethis, like, pop up at a
completely different group isactually very cool.

Marielle (03:52):
yeah. So anyway, she gave this talk, and it was

Brian (03:52):
Yeah, absolutely. We'd be happy to, we'd be excited to put
completely mind blowing. So ifyou want, I can put in a link
for one of her studies that waspublished in, think, Nature. So
that would also give, like, anice introduction to what is
happening there.
that into the show notes. Forsure, is this like, sort of
almost, like a form of, like,pre-domestication?

Marielle (04:13):
maybe it's a couple of years ago, so I don't really
remember much, but I thought itwas really, it's not something
that we hear of usually. So thisis quite unique, I think, yeah,
if you don't consider, ofcourse, kind of like
interactions with domesticanimals.

Jason (04:26):
Yeah. Well, I want to know is, this sounds like humans
are co-opting, what the birdsalready do with the Badgers. And
I want to know how that cameabout. Like, obviously there's a
mutualism. I assume the Badgergets the food and the honey
guide gets, you said, the waxout of it. But how did the birds
and the Badgers learn tocommunicate with each other?

Marielle (04:42):
Well, the question is, is it specific? Did it
specifically evolve betweenhoneyguides and Badgers, or is
this a more kind of, likeopportunistic behavior from the
birds, like, in terms of likeobserving that there are species
that prey on honey, kind of likebees Colonies, and then kind of
use that information. It mightnot be specific to honey badgers

(05:04):
from the start, but Iwouldn'tknow.

Jason (05:05):
What do they use the wax for? I assume it's building
their nest.

Marielle (05:09):
Let me just briefly check, because I don't actually

Brian (05:11):
I guess the other thing is thinking about like, is this

Jason (05:11):
Well, Wikipedia to take
know.
a is this a learned behavior? Isthis something they have to be
taught? Is this something thatevery Honey Badger and honey
guide sort of have to developthis relationship. Does the mama
Honey Badger have to exp like,you know, indicate to the to the
juveniles, like, Hey, you shouldpay attention to these birds.

Brian (05:28):
the ultimate source of all scientific information

Jason (05:34):
Wikipedia says that they feed on wax,

Brian (05:37):
okay,
Okay, so this is like when you eat your little babybel
cheese, and then you just bitethrough the wax, I guess. All
right, thank you. That'sextremely cool. And again, I
think it's, it's fun to thinkabout how these relationships
sort of like pop up at thispoint. Jason, what did you have

Jason (05:56):
i I'm starting to follow your lead and try to find things
that are on point with whatwe're talking about. So I
started to find what was coolabout bats recently, and I found
one from a few months back,where some researchers fitted
very, very tiny littlemicrophones to bats in order to
figure out their echolocation.Because there's a question of,
how on earth do bats echolocatewhen they're leaving caves, when

(06:16):
there are literally 1000s ofbats all chirping at the same
time trying to get their wayout, and they use that
echolocation to to find theirway out and not crash into each
other, into walls. But how dothey do that when there's
literally 1000s of them alldoing the same thing, and those
echoes are bouncing all aroundeverywhere? So what they did is
they made these teeny, teeny,tiny little microphones, like
four gram microphones, becausethe bat is only 40 grams, so

(06:38):
they didn't want to add a hugeamount of weight to the poor
bat, and they found that, yes,there is a huge cacophony, like
up to like, 80, 90% of theecholocation could be masked at
the time of leaving the cave,because there's just so much
noise around. But the bats thatwere closest to the one bat
going, especially the one infront, were also still the
clearest, especially the one infront, it's echolocating

(06:59):
straight ahead, so it isinterfere so the ones you're
most likely to collide with arealso the least likely to get
interfered with. And then assoon as they get out of the cave
entrance, they spread out reallyfast. And so that they reduce
those odds. Apparently itdoesn't reduce the odds to zero,
like there are occasional midair bat collisions, but the way
they work and the way they dotheir echolocation, it seems to
minimize those number of those,number of collisions, and they

(07:22):
didn't mention this, but Iimagine they still don't spread
out super far, because Iremember that when the bats are
leaving, it's a great time forthem to be predated on by like
birds of prey and such. And sothey still want to group
together for safety, but theyalso want to spread apart so
they don't crash into eachother. So maybe there may be
some conflicting forces here.

Brian (07:37):
Just out of curiosity,
Jason, Jason, did they mentionany kind of real life
application, this seems like,oh, and we can use this to
better inform air trafficcontrol or something like that.

Jason (07:48):
My suspicion would be, yeah, some sort of, like, drone
control or something becausethat, I imagine, if you I, like,
I didn't read that explicitly,but I'm guessing that it's that,
it's if you're trying to controla whole bunch of stuff using
autonomous vehicles or somethingwhere there's a bunch of noise
in the system. How can youoptimize that system so as to
minimize the number of conflictsthat happen? And so this would

(08:09):
be for like drones or autonomousvehicles or something, is my
suspicion, like, again, I don'tremember reading that in the
article itself.

Marielle (08:15):
Also interesting how it's not entirely dissimilar
from how that works if you usevisual cues instead, because I
think that is relatively similarin fish and bird swarms that you
kind of like weight the inputfrom the ones that are closest
to you most.

Brian (08:28):
Do we call it a murmuration of bats, the same
way we do for birds or or not?

Jason (08:32):
with a collective noun?

Brian (08:34):
no like, with like, the murmuration behavior where like
a bird can track is only evertracking like the three birds
around it, and that's where youget all the weird like wave
behaviors, as you see bigflocks. I guess bats aren't
really notorious for flocking. Isuppose so maybe not. I have a
bonus fact now, because Jason'sthing reminded me of something
else. Now, first of all, again,I know fruit bats don't echo

(08:54):
locate, which we're going totalk about that later,
what's the exception?

Marielle (08:57):
There's a couple of species in the genus Rousette,
who have a different form ofecholocation, but I think has
evolved independently. EgyptianRousette is a species that is
most known for it, but I thinkit had there's a couple of other
species in that genus that alsodo that.

Brian (09:14):
Well, then, hey, that actually ties into everything
else. Because I was going totalk about another example of
convergent echolocationevolution, the auditory genes in
bats and whales have converged.The genes that control their
hearing, they have the same typeof mutation. Which is

Jason (09:29):
cool.

Marielle (09:30):
That's cool.

Brian (09:30):
Yeah, it's very interesting, right? Because
obviously that had to be hit onseparately from similar
mammalian starting material.

Marielle (09:37):
I did not know that.

Brian (09:38):
Yeah, that's just my little bonus fact. We'll put
that in the thing too. But okay,all right, who wants to talk
So today, we're going to betalking about atiwa. Atiwa,
about a board game?
there is a pronunciation guidefor how it would be. It's like a
di waa, which is based on theAtiwa range of a rain forest. So
this game was created by UweRosenberg, who is a prolific and
celebrated board game designer.From Germany, looking on his

(10:01):
Wikipedia page, it has six, sixgames on board. Game Geek in the
top 100 with sort of aconsistent mechanic. He is the
co-founder of Lookout games,which published Atiwa.

Jason (10:13):
What are some of his other big hits?

Brian (10:14):
Oh Agricola would be the one that would be probably his
oldest and probably mostrenowned Feast of Odin. There's
a two player game calledPatchwork that I own and have
never played. But yes, there'sseveral games, I think, in terms
of the ones that are on the thetop 100 patchwork Agricola Feast
of Odin. I don't think Atiwabroke into the top 100
unfortunately, but he puts out agame like every couple of years,

(10:36):
like he is prolific. So the gameitself is for one to four
players got to have that soloplayer mode. Now, it does play
fast, only about 30 minutes toplay when you set it up, which
always when you look at a gamethat looks as complicated, that
seems like it's impossible, butit's really not like we'll talk
about this later. 12 and upseems about right to me. I mean,
Jason's daughters, yes,absolutely, 12 and up, but maybe

(10:57):
not. Every 12 year old is goingto necessarily but I mean, your
your mileage may vary. So thegame, what does it look like? It
is this is a worker placementgame, which is a very common
sort of designer board game,where you'll have all these
little action spots that you canput on the board that will let
you do different key things.Both of the players have three
sets of little workers that theycan go out and to assign to

(11:20):
collect various resources.There's one sort of central
board in the middle. It's got avery distinct, sort of, like top
down aerial illustration style,actually, conveniently, maybe
about drone height, or maybe batheight would be the better way
to think about it, sort oflooking down at the landscape.
So it's sort of a village inGhana. There's trees, there's

(11:40):
depictions of tiny, littlegoats, tiny little wild animals,
which I wasn't really clear whatthose were at first, but
actually, from looking into it alittle bit more, hold on, I took
a note on the type of animalthat this was, ah, a Duekir.
Here it is a is. It is a smallantelope. I believe, one of the
only animals other than thebats, that is specifically
mentioned by name somewhere inthe game, and the board has a

(12:02):
lot of different action pointson it. Other than that, you have
cards that represent eitherterrain, so that may be like a
cave, a marshland, an orchard,or a location, and these are
where your villagers are goingto live, and those go from
farmstead is smallest up to atown with the most based on how
many houses they canaccommodate. In front of each
player, you'll have a littleboard where you put your entire

(12:23):
little stack of different littlewooden meeples, and those
represent goats and wild animalsand trees and fruit

Jason (12:30):
and people,

Brian (12:31):
yes, and people, families specifically. And your goal in
the game is to assemble likeupwards of eight of these little
tiles representing either theterrain or the locations, and
sort of build a little Tableauwhere your people will live,
where they will collectresources. And one of the
important Uwe Rosenbergmechanics that he uses in most
of his games is that you have tofeed your people at the end of

(12:53):
the turn, you have to haveenough resources to make sure
that your people are fed. So theconceit of the game is based on
bat's, ability to reforest islike one of the main mechanics
in the game. So as you'replaying your people need to have
a couple of things. They need tohave food, and they need to have
gold. They need to have somekind of economy, and they'll use

(13:13):
that to plus wood build theirhouses. There's several
different things that they caneat. If you have goats, they'll
provide some food just as milk.Or you can slaughter the goat
and get extra food. You can huntfor wild animals. You can
collect fruit, or you can eatbats. And if you don't have
that, you can also pay for food.So the main mechanic in the game
is these families you have. Theycall them trained and untrained

(13:36):
families. So when you start yourfamily is untrained. Evidently,
they have not been informedabout the ecological benefits of
bats. So those families have acouple different things that
distinguish them. They at theend of each turn, they go out,
and they will mine for gold, andthat is associated with
pollution. You will actuallyblock out spaces on your tiles,
the pollution associated withcollecting gold, with artisanal

(13:57):
gold mining.

Jason (13:58):
And important part here is that you're not guaranteed to
find the gold you draw it out ofthe bag. You might get one, you
might get zero, you might getvery, very lucky and get two.
But that almost never happens.So it's like you're guaranteed
to pollute your land, but you'renot guaranteed to actually earn
anything.

Brian (14:11):
That's true. So the untrained families will mine.
The untrained families also willhave the ability to eat bats.
They will provide one food asbush meat, presumably a trained
family on the and that'sfamiliar with the advantages of
bats. They don't have to gomining. They just receive gold.
I don't know what thatrepresents. I suppose that's
supposed to represent theadditional economic benefit of
working with the bats.

Jason (14:32):
I was actually explaining this to my family last night. I
was just saying, we're gonna berecording this today, and it's
like, yeah, and then you trainthe family, and then, like, they
can have a bat live with them,and then they just earn money
because of that. So my 18-yearold daughter says, Well, it
sounds like people are justpaying them to like bats maybe,
well, yes. And I thought I waslike, Yeah, but actually it's
more like the bats are payingthem rent. So if we wanted to

(14:55):
completely break the metaphor ofthe game, what happens is the
bats are now the ones mininggold, and they're justbetter at
it than the humans, and they'repaying the humans rent. In
reality, yes, it is probablylike, Oh, this is the benefits
of agroforestry or somethinglike that. But it is funny, if
you sort of like, twist themetaphor of the game a bit,

Brian (15:12):
a little bit yeah,

Marielle (15:13):
and maybe it's kind of going in the direction it's
like, these bats obviously don'tonly disperse seeds of fruit
trees, but also of seeds thatare otherwise economically
important. I think this is likethe most important seed
disperser for African teak,which is quite valuable as
lumber.

Brian (15:28):
The other thing that a trained family can do, and Jason
already alluded to this, is thatthey can allow a bat to live, I
guess, in their house, or atleast on their property. I don't
know if the idea is the bat'sactually living in the hut
itself, but just close by, andthey can't eat the bats anymore,
but the gold to bat trade offseems like it completely like
covers for that to get yourlittle houses to expand your

(15:51):
village, you need to pay forgold and trees. So you have to
cut down trees that are on yourtableau to do it, and that's
where the bats really come intoplay, because the bats are able
to eat fruit and cause trees tojust spread and sprout. And
actually, you can get a prettyefficient bat to tree engine
going at a certain point andjust have a ton of trees growing
every turn. Basically,

Marielle (16:11):
free food.

Brian (16:11):
Yep, free food, free wood, free everything. Let's
see, I think the game is basedon victory points. You get
victory points for how much goldyou have. You get victory points
for you know, how many thingsyou have on your tableau, in
terms of trees and wild animalsand goats and particularly
people, you get points for thecards that you've put into your
tableau, your locations and yourvillages and stuff. Some of the

(16:32):
terrain cards actually give younegative points. Some of the
terrain cards are like, Hey,here's like, a free house. So
actually, that's, that's verypowerful. So you're actually
going to lose some points fordoing that. One of my very
favorite terrain cards is thisvery goofy card that Jason knows
what I'm going to talk about.This is the haunted house card.
Oh, yeah. So it is an emptyhouse. It is depicted in the

(16:52):
night form, and it has a spot toput bats all around it,

Jason (16:56):
yeah. The thing is, it's actually not empty. It's just a
dilapidated, broken down house.And there it does show a family
inside.

Brian (17:04):
And yeah, I think that that is the basis of the game.
Is there anything that you feellike I missed Jason?

Jason (17:08):
My impression playing this game is, it's a very, it
feels like a very complex game,because when we were playing any
given turn, there were like 20different options I had for
where to put my meeple to try toget something done. And so I
kind of had to take the approachof, instead of like, of all
these options, which is theoptimal to do? It was more like,
Okay, here's my goal. Which ofthese options will get me closer
to that goal? They would changea little bit which of those

(17:31):
actions are available, justshifts a little bit over time.
It's not a huge amount, but itdoes change a bit to make each
game a little bit unique. And wetalked about how you were trying
to figure out, Is it possibleto, like, win the game just
through the gold mining method?And I think the answer that is
no,

Brian (17:46):
absolutely no. I don't think you can.

Jason (17:48):
You're destroying your board to be able to put stuff
there, which is what gets youmost points. And you're not
guaranteed to get the gold back.You train a family, you're
guaranteed to get the gold. It'sjust better. So they're not
subtle in the messaging of thegame is that having the bats
around and living in harmonywith the bats is just paying
better for trying to win thegame.

Brian (18:04):
It sort of takes that idea of board game metaphor and
like what you take away from andit's like, okay, don't do this.
This is bad. You literallycannot win this way. One of
these days, I am just gonna haveto try being the like, Captain
Planet, the bad guy, thevillain, who would just know I
don't like bats and I refuse towork with them. We'll just see
how bad it actually goes.

Jason (18:23):
Eat all the bats and mine all the gold.

Brian (18:25):
And yep, eat all the bats, mine all the gold, cut
down all the trees,

Marielle (18:28):
hunt down all the wildlife.

Brian (18:30):
Yep, just goats. Nothing but goats.

Jason (18:32):
It was a little a little bit of dissonance in that we
worked out that mathematically,at the end of your last turn,
you still have to feed everyoneand stuff. And so that's the
point at which the wild animalsaren't worth very many victory
points. And so that last turn,the most optimal way of feeding
all your families is just toslaughter all the wild life

Brian (18:50):
Yeah, you just, you just drive all the wild animals
extinct. It's fine, they'll comeback.

Jason (18:53):
That's a little bit of dissonance, but that's it's only

Brian (18:57):
to be honest, that last turn change in strategy is also
in the last turn,
really common for a lot of thesegames. There's usually things
that you would do in the lastturn that would make no sense
any other time. I imagine thatfor an optimizer like you,
Jason, this game probably didseem really complicated. I gotta
be honest, I was dreading thisgame just a little bit. I was
concerned that as a very Euroworker placement game, by the

(19:20):
pinnacle of Euro workerplacement game designers, Uwe
Rosenberg, that this was goingto favor strategic complexity
over fun, that this was going tobe like the game for the Board
Game Geek, Board Game Geekextremist, yeah, so in in magic
terminology, you have the Spikearchetype, the person who there
to master the rules and to winthrough understanding the game

(19:41):
better than their opponents.This is like how the world
record Scrabble people aren'tnecessarily people who speak
English, they just havememorized the dictionary. Were
you aware of that?

Jason (19:49):
I was not aware of that.

Brian (19:50):
Yeah, some of the anyway that's that is a complete and
utter tangent. So we don't needto go down that route. But
Mariel, have you had a chance toplay Atiwa before?

Marielle (19:59):
A couple of. Times, yes, yeah. That's a bit of time
ago. Okay, I have to say I'm notthat particularly strategic
about these games. I just dowhat I think is fun.

Brian (20:07):
Yep, me too.

Marielle (20:07):
and I'll see what what happens in the end. Which means
that in another one of UweRosenberg's games, Caverna, I
tend to lose, and it's alwaysthe same person who wins in our
little board game group, yeah,because that's the thing that I
never do, but here I've one timemanaged to win.

Brian (20:23):
It sounds like you may have a similar board game
dynamic to Jason and I, where Iam the less strategic player I
play for fun.

Marielle (20:31):
Yeah, fun is good.

Brian (20:32):
Are you a board game nerd? Marielle, I forgot to ask.

Marielle (20:35):
Not a nerd.
I think that's more my friends.Okay. I'll go along happily,
though.

Brian (20:40):
All right,

Jason (20:41):
you did say, before we started recording, you're a
podcaster, though,right?

Marielle (20:45):
Long time ago. It's quite some time ago, but I did
that during my PhD with a friendof mine, science news podcast.

Brian (20:51):
What was the title? Is it still like around?

Marielle (20:54):
No, it's like, it's no longer active. I think you can
still find the episodes onYouTube or so. It's in German,
though the name of the podcastwas, and you can pronounce it
two different ways, conscienceor con science, because we were
both located in Conscience insouthern Germany.

Brian (21:08):
Oh, well, that's a cool triple pun. I like that a lot,
all right. So yeah, let's, let'stry to talk about the science.
Here we again. We're in thisabsolutely unique circumstance
of having a game inspired,having the researcher who
inspired the game here to talkabout the science, one of one of
the researchers, one of theresearchers

Marielle (21:24):
Exactly. Yeah, we need to basically do a little
disclaimer, because the studysystem is mostly that of Dina
Dechmann, who is at the MaxPlanck Institute for nowadays
animal behavior, and she's aformer colleague of mine, so I
did my PhD there, and she hasbeen working with the study
system for at least since 2009 Ithink. And I joined for this one

(21:45):
one study, because our interestskind of combined, and we said,
it's like, oh, it would be coolto, kind of like, do this in
this other way. And that iswhere my expertise came in.
Yeah. But she's been workingwith this particular bat species
in that particular area for avery long time, together with
others. Of course,

Brian (22:00):
you're still colleagues, right? You just you were at Max.
Planck, is that correct?

Marielle (22:03):
Yes,

Brian (22:04):
okay, all right, I understand it's like, I don't
think she died.

Marielle (22:10):
No,

Jason (22:13):
that would explain why she didn't respond to emails. No
offense if you're listening.Dina,

Brian (22:17):
yeah. Is she gonna listen to this? Should we give her a
hard time for not coming on?

Marielle (22:18):
Oh, no, I don't think we should,

Brian (22:21):
okay.

Jason (22:22):
I know schedule probably very, very busy conducting
research out there in the realworld to help you,

Brian (22:27):
anybody can make time to actually like to have professors
schedules coordinate for thingslike this is always seems like a
small miracle. So, you know, noshade, if she, you know, I am
sure she would have come if shewas, if she was able. But yeah,
Dina Dechmann and yourself, youguys were colleagues on this,
and she has done a lot of workon the bats. But let's actually
so some of the things that wehad here was like, so How

(22:49):
accurate do you think thescience is as depicted in Atiwa?
So maybe we should say a littlebit about what the study was,
yes please, of course, thatwould make perfect sense,

Marielle (22:56):
because otherwise it will be harder to understand. So
this is mostly based on thestudy of our species of fruit
bat that is called straw coloredfruit bats. And as far as I'm
aware, it's the most common kindof like individual numerous
species of mammals in Africa.

Brian (23:14):
Wow,

Marielle (23:14):
African continent. And what they do with this really
special is so they they hang outduring the day in trees, roosts
in colony sizes up to a million.So it's a huge amount of fruit
bats making a lot of noise,probably. And what they do is
they they commute at night. Sowhen, when dusk falls, they fly
out from their roost, seeminglyindependently, in different

(23:37):
directions, and then they go insearch of flowering or fruiting
trees. And then they will, ifit's if it's a flowering tree,
they will basically just try toslurp up the nectar, maybe eat
some some pollen. And if it's afruiting tree, they will go
there. They will pick a fruitfly to a feeding roost, like a
different tree that's a littlebit away, which is more safe,
because obviously, if you have afruiting tree that's like

(23:58):
attracting a lot of animals, youwill also have predators. And
then they will eat this fruit.If it's one that has a large
seed, they will kind of likesqueeze out the fruit juice and
just drink that and then dropthe seed where they eat. And if
it's small seeds, they mightingest them. And then that is
when these long distances thatthey cover during a single
night, so these these foodtrees, can be up to 80 to 90

(24:19):
kilometers away from where theysleep during the daytime.

Jason (24:21):
Wow.

Marielle (24:22):
That is when this kind of like having seeds in their
gut and transporting them oververy long distances is
ecologically very important,because they will just poop off
the seeds wherever they go.

Brian (24:33):
So you're used to hearing about birds having this kind of
behavior.

Marielle (24:36):
Yes, and here the thought is, why are bats
particularly good at this?Because they eat the seeds that
they actually eat are usuallysmall ones, and small seeds are
common in pioneering and treesthat are able to kind of
colonize open areas. And whatbats do, different from a lot of
forest bird species is actuallycross open areas.

Brian (24:54):
Oh, okay,

Marielle (24:55):
which a lot of birds don't really like doing,
especially if they're forestspecialists. Whereas these bats
don't care, because they fly atnight.

Jason (25:02):
And you said earlier, these bats don't echo locate,

Marielle (25:05):
no,

Jason (25:05):
presumably because they're not trying to. They can
navigate well by sight, and theyprobably seek out their food
more by smell. Is that right? Iassume they have really good
senses ofsmell.

Marielle (25:14):
Might be, yeah, and, and, I mean, obviously they're,
they're mostly, they get it getsunderway while it's still dusky,
so there's like twilight around.And what you can how you can
always tell a species of batthat is echolocating from one
that is using sight. The oneswith sight have really, really
big eyes. The ones that don'techolocate and Eidolon, the
straw colored fruit bat, hashuge eyes.

Brian (25:35):
They're very cute.

Marielle (25:36):
They are, I mean, watch them eat a banana.

Brian (25:42):
Yeah? We will absolutely put a video of that into the
show notes.

Marielle (25:46):
So in the study that we did was basically we had
tracks, GPS tracks from thesebats, and what I did was
basically train a movement modelbased on that and do a bunch of
simulations to kind of look atgiven their behavior that they
do, and given on the colonysizes that we are aware of
during different times of year.What would we expect to see in
terms of seed dispersal for anentire colony instead of just a

(26:08):
single individual, kind of likea spatially explicit prediction
of what we think might happen.

Jason (26:12):
Okay, what was your take home from that

Marielle (26:14):
that they probably, just like most of the seeds will
probably disperse to relativelyclose to the roosting site
because they have very long gutretention times. And gut
retention time means, how longdoes the seed stay inside the
body of the bat? How long doesit take before it exits the bats
again? I mean, we did. We didthe simulation basically for a
single night based on theassumption that all that these

(26:34):
bats are eating during thisnight is like small seeded
fruits, huge amounts, I mean,amazing amounts of poop spread
over the environment.

Jason (26:42):
Hey, bat guanos have been a resource for centuries. So,

Marielle (26:46):
yeah. So actually, the seeds get deposited with their
own little heap of fertilizer.

Brian (26:50):
It's a good relationship

Marielle (26:51):
more relevant for elephant dung, I guess, with
seeds, but less competition,because less seeds in the single
droplet.

Brian (26:58):
So I did want to ask, so the game, what it depicts, it's
just fruit. It's incrediblygeneric. And basically every
tree has sort of this, like, I'mnot sure it's just a generic
orange colored fruit.

Jason (27:10):
It looks like a pumpkin to me, but it's probably meant
to be more like a peach orapricot or some other, like,

Marielle (27:15):
no its a very specific fruits.

Brian (27:19):
Is it Shea? Is it Shea fruit?

Marielle (27:21):
Oh, help. I used to know this. I don't remember,

Brian (27:24):
is
something I was not able like Iwas trying to figure out, you
know, I found the duikerantelope and everything. And
then the only other speciesthat's specifically mentioned by
name in the game, other thanEidolon, other than the straw
collar fruit bat itself, is thebaobab tree. But I'm trying to
figure out what this fruit is.It looks a little bit like a
shea tree fruit, but I don'tthink people eat that.

Marielle (27:42):
The species is Uapaca kirkiana. I can also look at the
English name. Hold on, so it'scalled Sugar Plum in German.

Brian (27:50):
So I'm assuming, based on a name like that, that must be
Yeah, sugar plum.
good

Marielle (27:54):
or ridiculously sweet, and nothing else. I don't know,
but it would be obviously a goodenergy source for bats, if it's
very dense in sugars.

Brian (28:01):
Okay, so the particular fruit that's depicted in the
game is probably supposed to Oh,it is. It is. Look at that. That
has a lot of different colors.That's neat. Okay, well, we're
gonna have to link to that too.Thank you for sharing that,
because I could not figure itout. So I was like, I was trying
to look up native fruit trees inGhana, and there were a lot of
ones that were mentioned aseconomically important, but this

(28:22):
one wasn't on the list. So thankyou.

Marielle (28:24):
Yeah. The thing is, I probably know which photo this
kind of illustration is kind ofinspired by,

Brian (28:29):
oh yeah, like the original illustration of the bat
eating the fruit.

Marielle (28:33):
There is a photo, photograph of that that's also
in the press release that wasmentioned in the little
information booklet that comeswith the game. And a photo has
been taken by Christian Ziegler,because, like a very well known
nature photographer who works alot with scientists at the Max

Brian (28:49):
Institute, this is such a unique experience of having this
game that is tied so explicitlyto this study. It's very, very
fun. Okay, so one of the otherthings I wanted to ask based on
this conversation about the ideaof the large fruited the large
seeded fruit versus the smallseeded fruit is it does make me
curious if there's any evidenceof co-evolution, or a symbiotic

(29:09):
relationship between specificfruit trees and between the
bats, because it seems likethere's sort of a natural
compatibility here.

Marielle (29:16):
I don't know whether that would be the case in any
kind of like seed dispersal assuch. What you do see is kind of
CO evolution betweenparticularly bats, particular
bat species and tree speciesthat require bats for
pollination. So flowers areoften much more morphologically,
kind of like adapted to theirpollinators, as opposed to
fruit, because fruits that willbe tasty to nearly everyone,

(29:39):
okay, that makes sense. I'm notaware of any like specific
species specific some mutualismswith straw colored fruit bats,
but I think there's a couple ofexamples for it in meso Northern
America in terms of pollinatingbats.

Brian (29:54):
Okay, so co evolution from a pollination perspective,
but not necessarily forexplicitly seed dispersal.

Marielle (30:00):
not that I'm aware of at least.

Brian (30:01):
Okay, all right, so how do you like again? The whole
point of the game is bats eatfruit, grow trees like that. If
that conceit seems like that isat the core of how this is
working. Obviously, all gamesare a metaphor. It's not a
perfect representation. You'renot going to grow a tree and
well, it's always a littleunclear. How much time is
passing when we're dealing withthese things. Jason, do you want

(30:24):
to like, how would weapproximate the amount of time

Jason (30:28):
Well, so at the end of every turn you have your
that is passing?
reproduction phase, which iswhere, if you have enough of a
certain type of meeple on there,the families, the goats, the
wild animals, they make more ofthemselves. So I think a year is
probably a good one. The peopleI assume are less like this is
families growing. More like,hey, a new family has moved into
the neighborhood, into thevillage, from somewhere else.

(30:49):
But if we're assuming, like thewild animals and the goats,
probably about a year,

Brian (30:53):
okay, so, but a tree is not going to grow in a year. No,

Jason (30:58):
that's an abstraction, yeah,

Brian (31:00):
but I don't know any game, video game or board game.
Well, with the, I guess, withthe notable exception of
photosynthesis, where growingthe tree is the entire mechanic
of the game, where the treesaren't growing way too fast,
right? That's just nobody wantsto wait for trees to grow as
long as they actually take togrow, right?

Marielle (31:15):
That would be a very long let's create 35 rounds of
this before we commit the firstharvest.

Brian (31:23):
Maybe that's that's going a little bit too far down the
simulation route, I suppose.Again, one of the things I
wanted to mention is, and I loveit whenever a game does this,
because, again, it's veryhelpful to me, is that there's
an accompanying booklet thatcomes with the game, sort of
explaining the history of Ghana,the study from a lay
perspective, how it isrepresented in the game, gold
mining, all of this stuff. It'slike, Oh, okay. Well, here's my

(31:45):
designer notes. Also in the rulebooklet, there is a little tiny
caricature of Uwe Rosenberg,sort of explaining the
implementation of differentaspects in the game, which I
think when you get to the pointwhere you're putting your own a
caricature of your own head intothe game, that must mean that
you, you're a celebrated andrecognized board game designer,
I suppose,

Marielle (32:03):
also some level of, probably kind of personal
engagement with this that goesbeyond just like, oh, I had this
idea for a game

Brian (32:10):
that's true,

Marielle (32:11):
like, personal interest in the entire system.
Probably, yeah, because I thinkas far as I've heard, he wanted
to write a book about this.

Brian (32:19):
there was supposed to be, like a full companion non
fiction book. I don't speakGerman, Weckruf aus Ghana.

Marielle (32:26):
Yeah, it's like wake up call,

Brian (32:28):
but as far as I can tell, unfortunately, it looks like
that was never published.There's an ISBN number that
doesn't go anywhere. It seemslike maybe, maybe Atiwa didn't
sell as many copies as theywanted to kind of justify it.
But, you know, the game is outthere, and I have to imagine
that the game has attractedattention, and that's not a bad
thing. Again, this idea of gamesas educational tools,

(32:48):
particularly, this is reallyspecifically an outreach tool,
isn't something I've really seenvery much. So

Marielle (32:54):
no, this is, this is definitely the best, like, this
study has had the best outreachI've ever seen. Like, Let's all
make board games about studies,because then people will
actually be interested in it.

Jason (33:04):
Well, let's all make good board games. Good board we have
talked about the issue whereeducational board games are
almost a dirty word, becausemost of the scientists making
the games are not gamedesigners. They don't know how
to make the game fun. I think itreally helps here that you had a
world class, literally, worldclass game designer translate
the science into something thatis an actually very fun,

(33:26):
strategically complex workerplacement game that still
manages to convey the point ofthe science,

Marielle (33:32):
yes, but also creating some somewhat of a "what if
"scenario. Because obviously, Imean, part of the motivation for
working with bats can also bethey get a lot of bad
representation elsewhere. It'slike they have not always the
best names, and they're not onlyfrom a scientific standpoint,
straw colored fruit bats are notonly interesting in terms of

(33:52):
ecosystem services, but also, ofcourse, zoonotic diseases,
zoonotic being diseases that canspread from animals to humans.

Jason (34:00):
Yeah, I believe bats are like one of the huge reservoirs
of coronaviruses in the world,aka, where COVID probably came
from, if you step it back, a fewmutations.

Marielle (34:09):
So doing something to kind of show is like these are
not only negative, but that canalso be like a positive
association, and to a degreethat we're probably not fully
aware of, that is kind of likethe study, and then what he did
was basically, it's like, whatif people actually were aware,
were actually aware of this in aparticular region? How could you

(34:29):
develop a system where you havecooperation, instead of eating
them just for bush meat? Becausethat is what happens.

Jason (34:34):
That was a question we had. Is there any sort of
outreach, extension programs inplace to to do what happens at
the game, to educate familiesand say, Hey, this is actually
helping you out in the long run.So let's try to get this harmony
going. Is, do those programsactually exist?

Marielle (34:51):
This is something that would obviously be better
answered by Dina, because sheshe is aware of that more and
also involved in some of kind oflike monitoring projects and so
on. So. Have, they have, like,an Africa wide Eidolon
monitoring program that they'rerunning where they do also
educate people, I think, butthat is then really people who
are kind of, like local andinterested in that to begin
with. I'm not aware of anylarger scaled education in that

Brian (35:14):
regard. So that that really is the what if scenario.
It's like, what if we did dothis. It's not representing
something that's actuallyhappening. It's more of like we
really should be doing. This isthat the idea of like ecosystem
services, this idea of the sortof like unseen economic benefits
that come from a healthyecosystem, it's very hard to
communicate, because it's like,you've got to you can't see it,

(35:36):
or you just assume it, versusthat tangible benefit of money
in hand, right? It's It'stricky, and I know this is one
example of that, of the benefitsof bats for reforestation. I
think wetlands, we talk aboutthat, for their ecosystem
services, for what they do, forthe water system, for cleaning
up water. And the ways tocalculate it is, if you didn't

(35:58):
have that, how much would itcost to do that yourself. How
much would it cost for humans toreplicate that? And usually it's
not practical. It's like, youshouldn't be doing it, right?
You can't do it,

Marielle (36:08):
yeah. And sometimes it's also really kind of, like,
hard to understand what isactually going on. And, like,
how much of a deal is it like,what are the kind of, what is
kind of the rattail of all ofthis? Because we assume that
there is a huge impact of hugebat colonies on seed dispersal
and probably also nutrientspread, but we don't know, and
the only way to really test thatout is to kind of take away all

(36:30):
the bats. Oh, no, we shouldn'ttest at all.

Brian (36:34):
Not a good thing for a controlled experiment. I don't
think,

Marielle (36:37):
no,

Brian (36:37):
but I guess that's why studies like this are so
important, right is to try toget a clearer understanding
about what the benefits actuallyare.

Jason (36:45):
Yeah, I was gonna say there are examples where we do
get this right. So myunderstanding is, and we can, I
can double check this, but inthe show notes, is that part of
the reason why a large part ofupstate New York, here in the
States, is state park orwilderness or stuff, is to
essentially maintain thedrinking water quality for New
York City. It's like the Hudsondrains like half the state. And

(37:06):
apparently, long time ago, theyrecognized that we need to
protect this so that New YorkCity actually has quality
drinking water. And so that'swhy the development up there has
been much less. And I'll doublecheck that and put in the link
in the show notes for thesources for that.

Brian (37:19):
I guess I'm also curious, what was the what was the
context of this game happening?You were approached about this
for permission, or what wasthat? How did that happen?

Jason (37:29):
How do we get Uwe Rosenberg to make a game out of
our research? That's what he'sasking,

Brian (37:34):
not really, but, but sure.

Marielle (37:36):
No, actually, I had nothing to do with that at all.
It's like at the time that thegame was nearly finished, and
they were looking for someadditional information for their
little um info booklet.

Brian (37:45):
Oh, wow.

Marielle (37:45):
They kind of put in with the game. They told us,
it's like, Oh, yeah. So UweRosenberg made this game, would
you like us to include any moreadditional information? And
you're like, is this spam? Andthe only reason why I kind of,
like, looked at it to beginwith, was because lookout games
and the name Uwe Rosenberg ranga bell. So as I said, I'm not

(38:08):
the Board Game Nerd, so I didn'timmediately recognize the name,

Brian (38:08):
man, he really must have got inspired by your study. It's
but like, sounds familiar, andthat's why I looked at it. I was
like, Oh, I think this is a bigdeal. I had to ask my nerd
friends first
got to feel really good. It'sjust like he read a press
release related to the study,and it was like, this is the
seed of a thing that I'm goingspend the next year of my life

(38:31):
working on

Marielle (38:32):
somehow. Yes, I don't know how that happened, and
maybe it was just this. I thinkin the booklet, he mentioned
specifically some reference to alocal King, yeah, who does exist
and who is quite fond of thesebats and lets them kind of like
roost in his private gardens.And that is kind of like an
example for for the localcommunity, maybe. But the
problem is, I've never actuallybeen there. So as I said, it's

(38:54):
Dina's study system, and I wasjust a local computer nerd to do
some calculations.

Brian (39:00):
Jason is also my local computer nerd. Although I guess
you spend more time in the fieldthan I do. I'm really the
laboratory, so I shouldn't,like, point any, any shade
you're in your direction,

Jason (39:11):
yeah, although I say, like, it's definitely people ask
me for gardening information,just because they hear I work on
corn. It's like, wrong skillset. Like, you want to genome
analyzed. I'm good. Its amiracle my corn survives at the
end of the season.

Marielle (39:23):
Yeah. Also, don't dare put me in a lab.

Brian (39:26):
Oh, are you? You are not a wet lab person?

Marielle (39:28):
No it's like I did some lab, lab work during my
education, but I no, okay, I'mnot very good at that.

Brian (39:37):
That's totally fair. My lab smells very bad. That's my
usual thing. I like to point outto people. But anyway, let's
see. What else is there?Anything else that we should
talk about that we haven't yetrelated to the science?

Jason (39:48):
Well I'm curious. Let's broaden this a little bit. So we
focused a lot on this particularstudy system, with these
particular fruit bats. Howwidespread are fruit bats? Most
of the bats I think about arethe echo locating bats, which
presumably are not fruit bats.Bats. But are there fruit bats
on every continent? Like? Howmany species are there like,
like the penguins can have it. We'll just ignore it

(40:14):
for the purposes of everycontinent step statements.

Marielle (40:20):
Oh, and now you're asking the non bat experts. So I
think this last time I heardthere was, like around there was
more than 1400 species of bats,most of which are what you call
the microbats, Microchiroptera,which is the echolocating ones,
but some of those are also fruiteating, kind of like you have
these two big branches. One ismega bats, the other one is

(40:42):
micro bats. She tells yousomething about the size

Brian (40:44):
we need some nano bats we'll have to work on that.

Marielle (40:50):
And I think I mean, this might be completely wrong,
that there's around 250 speciesor so of the larger ones

Brian (40:56):
aren't most mammals, bats?

Marielle (40:58):
uh, no rodents, I think are more species rich,
okay, according to thisreference, 197 species of
megabats

Brian (41:05):
We just need three more to get the even 200

Marielle (41:08):
Yeah, that's probably gonna happen, because there's a
lot of like, I mean, especiallyin the microbats, there's a lot
of cryptic speciation, where youhave species that look the same
but they're not actually thesame species.

Jason (41:18):
Yeah, genetic data will probably start separating that
out some.

Brian (41:21):
Yeah, I was gonna say, Jason, that's your job. You
could be the genome guy, right?Get us those extra three species
of bats?

Marielle (41:27):
I mean, the one that I mentioned Rousettus, the
echolocating mega bats. Seemsthere's like a bunch of
subspecies with very distinctdistribution areas. Maybe
there's something more to that.And then you would get above

Brian (41:38):
I gotta say that genus name is fantastic. Eidolon. What
a fantastic like, I'm used toonly hearing that in fantasy
settings, but that's a good one.

Jason (41:46):
So when you say mega bat is big, big bat. Like, how big
of a bat are we talking about?Is it like cat sized with wings,
or

Marielle (41:54):
they're much more lightweight. So I don't want it
not the largest, but also notthe smallest. And they, I think,
weigh up to 350 grams, but thewingspan is like 75 centimeters.
Oh, wow, quite large. There'slarger ones, especially if you
go to Southeast Asia,

Brian (42:10):
if there's no other specific scientific topics, I
think maybe we should do one ofmy favorite parts of the
episode, which is the nitpickcorner, which is, where is a
little thing that was like, youknow, that's not exactly this.
Is where we do the um, actuallythis right? Or how we would make
things better. We just giveourselves permission to nitpick,
right? We don't actually expectthe game to be perfectly
accurate, but we just want topoint out anything that's not

(42:33):
quite like that actually wouldbe in science. So obviously, we
already talked about trees don'tgrow in a year. I think
everybody already knows that,but it's worth mentioning.
Marielle, is there somethingthat you had that you wanted to
point out?

Marielle (42:43):
So I think what Dina would like me to point out is
that the picture on the front ofthe box doesn't actually show a
straw colored fruit bat.

Brian (42:52):
Oh no! Oh, what is it?

Marielle (42:54):
Well, I don't remember, but if you look at the
straw colored fruit bat, thehead is much doesn't go grey,

Brian (43:00):
more straw colored.

Marielle (43:01):
Yeah, exactly. And especially, they have this kind
of, like, yellow strip of fur onthe sides of their neck, which
is where the name, I think,comes from. As I said, it's
like, I can show you the picturethat I think inspired this to
some degree, because it's thesame fruit, but I don't think it
depicts it correctly.

Brian (43:16):
Okay, that is a pretty big and legitimate nitpick. I
think, to have the whole game beabout straw colored fruit bats,
and have the cover image not bea straw colored fruit bat.

Marielle (43:26):
Yeah. Dina would know which one one is shown there.
But as I said, I'm a bit moreiffy on my bats.

Brian (43:31):
Okay, all right, Jason, did you have something you
wanted to pick at?

Jason (43:34):
The only one I could think of is that one end of game
thing where it's like, okay, nowtime to slaughter all the wild
animals and eat them for food,because I get more points that
way. That's the one thing.

Brian (43:47):
Is there a way that you would penalize that? I guess you
just need to make the wildanimals worth more points or
something?

Jason (43:49):
Basically, yeah, okay, the only reason they do that is
because they're worth a lotfewer points than goats, but
they give you the same amount offood just about

Brian (43:56):
and mine actually isn't even in the game, but I'm gonna
pick anyway. It's in theaccompanying booklet, the
section about the benefits offruit bats. When they go to the
list, there's a thing the listof bat superpowers is long. They
see with their ears, useultrasound to orient themselves
in the dark. That's true, butthat's not, that's not these
bats, right? There's also thecomments about they their cells
slow down the aging process. SoI think that maybe some bats,

(44:17):
obviously, maybe live for longtimes or have cancer repairing
genes. But again, it's like,that's not wrong. It's just not
specifically these fruit bats,

Marielle (44:27):
no. But bats are generally quite long, lived

Brian (44:29):
okay, for their size?
More than you would expect?

Marielle (44:31):
So they, I think I once had in my hand a captive
bats that was one of thehorseshoe bats. That lady was 20

Brian (44:35):
that's a long time for an animal that's that size, right?
years old, and that is notuncommon to see in that
I guess.

Marielle (44:45):
Yeah.

Brian (44:46):
Do they do? They break the the heartbeat rule, or that
rule of thumb?

Marielle (44:50):
Well, what is an average heart rate if you have a
species that goes into torpor,

Brian (44:54):
good point,

Marielle (44:55):
Hibernate? Yeah, that's hard to tell, but I think
they do okay. That comesespecially. Actually, I think so
what they do, like they wouldusually, you would expect them
to consume more energy, if we'renot talking about echolocating
bats, because Echolocation isenergetically costly. But what
they do is they time it withtheir wing beads, and that makes
it cheaper.

Brian (45:12):
I never really thought about there being a cost to
echolocate.

Marielle (45:15):
I mean more bats, if you measure it right in front of
their face, I think it's like120 decibels. That's a loud
scream.

Brian (45:23):
So they're yelling so much they're burning calories.
That's very cool. Okay, let'ssee, there was, you used an
idiom. I wasn't familiar withthe rat tail

Marielle (45:34):
Oh, sorry, that's like a German Yeah,

Brian (45:36):
I figured it was a German idiom. What does that mean?

Marielle (45:39):
It basically means, like, everything that's somehow
attached to it. It's like, thechain of consequences.

Brian (45:44):
Okay, okay, okay, that's cool. I don't know if we haven't
I couldn't

Marielle (45:48):
remember what I wanted to say. So it's like,

Brian (45:50):
it's fine. No, this is, this is the fun thing about
having people from all over theworld, they get to talk to us,
and we get to learn differentidioms and stuff. Okay, so I
think if that's our nitpickcorner, why don't we move on to
grading, and then we can wrap upthis. One's a little tricky.
Let's start with science. Jason,why don't you go first?

Jason (46:07):
So I am not a bat expert, so I'm going off the vibe I've
gotten from talking withMarielle here and the other
stuff, I'd say my metric isgenerally like, how well is it
getting across was trying to do?And the metric here is, is
trying to show that if wecooperate with the fruit bats,
then things work out better inthe long term. That part seems
solid. I would probably put itin the maybe, like the A- range.

(46:29):
It seems pretty good. Probably afew things that could be a
little better. You mentionedsome of the stuff in the rule
book, where it's talking aboutthe superpowers of like all bats
as a unit, as opposed to, likethis particular bat. But
overall, I think it seems prettygood. And I mean, this was done,
like, without necessarilyconsulting the scientists, just
like, hey, this is a cool story.Let's do the research. Let's
make this work. I mean, that maydeserve some extra credit to

(46:50):
bump up to A.

Brian (46:51):
That's a good point. I mean, I guess we think that most
of the people that are designingscience games aren't necessarily
communicating with scientists atthe design scientists at the
design stage, right,

Jason (47:00):
yes, but most of them are also working off of general
level science, as opposed to,like, this very specific
research study that came out.Okay,

Brian (47:07):
so let's see, in terms of the things here, I think that
there is the reforestationcapacity of the fruit bats. So
that is being represented. Thereis the, I don't really know if
it's specifically representingthe ecological advantages of
fruit bats, in the sense oflike, it doesn't really explain
the gold mechanic. It does saythat gold mining is bad. And I

(47:27):
mean, I did find a study thatthe sort of local, small scale
gold mining is involved with alot of removal of top
vegetation. Because, again,they're not going deep, they're
going shallow. So you're cuttingdown way more vegetation, way
more trees to do it. They areusing mercury to extract the
gold from the soil. And that,you know, is presumably what
we're talking about, thepollution. It's it is a damaging

(47:50):
process. So I'd say those twothings, the bat reforestation
and the pollution associatedwith gold mining. I think it
does a good job there. I don'tsee anything wrong with an A-,
like you've said before, Jason,like you say a lot. They're not
trying to represent a lot ofscience here, but I think what
they are trying to do, they'redoing pretty well. And that
whole thing about theecholocation, that's just a tiny

(48:11):
little note in the accompanyingbooklet, and it's not even in
the rule book, but it does. Iwish more people knew that only
some bats echolacate, that's allOkay, so I'm fine with A-. What

Marielle (48:23):
Okay. So disclaimer, I'm obviously not entirely
unbiased in this.

Brian (48:29):
We wouldn't expect you to be. I'm sure you have strong
opinions.

Marielle (48:32):
So if I, if I think back to how it was playing the
game for the first time, as Isaid, it's like, I haven't been
involved in this game at all upuntil the time that they said,
it's like, we have this game totake this idea and make a game
out of it, and not just make itinto, as you said, like a, like
a small bad game, but like awell designed game that takes
this front and center. I thinkthat's really cool. I also think

(48:55):
it was really kind of how itemerges from using this kind of,
like bits of knowledge. Is like,hey, let's train families to
make better use of bats thanjust bush meat. I think that
comes across really well whenplaying it's something that is a
fun way of playing the game. SoI'm fine with that. Okay,

Brian (49:12):
so what do you think A- then, oh, wait, no, we said we
have a different grading scheme.What was it? Again?

Marielle (49:16):
Yes. So I work in Sweden, as I said, and there you
grade students on based on whatthis they have like, there's
fail, there's pass, and thereis, like, very good, like, pass
with distinction, and an A-, ithink would fall for us with a
distinct a pass withdistinction.

Brian (49:33):
So you think this is, this is a pass with distinction?

Marielle (49:36):
Yeah, if we're kind of aligned on the general like,
science rating, then I think,Okay,

Brian (49:41):
well, I think we should definitely use your version of
the grading I mean, you, you'refree to use whichever grading
scale you find the mostconvenient, so we don't all have
to use the same rubricnecessarily. What about fun? I'm
not kidding. I was thinking, Ohmy God, I am not going to enjoy
this game. And I don't know howmuch that colored my
perspective. I actually reallylike this game. It's fun. It's
quick to play, maybe, like, youknow, I'm not the most tactical

(50:04):
player, so I'm not superconcerned about it, but it's
enjoyable. It's a lot of fun to,sort of like, make all your your
little choices. And the otherthing that surprised me is it
really does play quick. I mean,it's a half an hour game and
you're done. It takes, it takeslonger to set up the game than
it does to play the game, whichI guess does happen sometimes.
So am I gonna pull it off theshelf and play it again?
Absolutely, I am. I think I'vegot a couple people I want to

(50:26):
play it with. In particular, wegot some people coming in this
weekend. I think we might try toplay with so I'm giving that an
A. That's that is my metric forhow fun it is. Is am I going to
get it off the shelf and play itagain? So it's an A, or I'm
sorry I pass with distinction.

Jason (50:37):
I'm definitely gonna give it a pass. I think I need to
play it a few more times to seeif it is passed with distinction
or not. Because the the one timewe played like I got sort of a
feel for it, I'd want to do somereplaying on it.

Brian (50:48):
So, Jason, by 20 points, you sort of got a feel for it?.
I think you figured it out, man.But okay,

Jason (50:56):
I just want to try it out a few more times where I could
be playing the game and get intothe groove of it, other than
just learning at a time it'sgonna be somewhere in their a
range, A, A minus. I don't knowexactly where it would fall.
Okay, it probably doesn'tmatter. It's like, would I play
this again? Yes, that's probablythe only thing that
actuallymatters.

Brian (51:10):
That's true. And Marielle, I know that you said
you're not like a committedBoard Game Nerd, but you're
there for it. So did you want togive it a fun grade, too?

Marielle (51:18):
Yes. So I'm probably more in the camp Brian when it
comes to how I play board games,more like for the fun rather
than for for the winningspecifically. And as I said, I
am biased. But having havingplayed another another couple
games that kind of like go inthis direction, for example,
another one of Uwe Rosenberg's,which is Caverna, I think I like

(51:39):
it for the fun and notnecessarily for the competition.
And here, I think, compared toCaverna, for example, it is less
what happens less is kind oflike frustrating the other
players by your choices, justbecause there's so many
different choices on the board,some of which kind of like lead
into the same resources. So ifyou if you're less of a naughty
player, to frustrate otherpeople's

Brian (52:01):
strategy. It's great you're less like Jason, who
likes to mess with people.

Marielle (52:05):
So for me, I enjoyed myself a lot. So I was actually
surprised. So I was alsothinking, like, oh, is this
gonna be as good? But I liked ita lot, so I'll, I'll go along
with the pass pass withdistinction. Oh, fantastic.
Yeah. And it's like, it's thelittle star, because I'm biased.
Maybe

Brian (52:22):
I think in this situation, you can be forgiven
for having some bias

Marielle (52:26):
Also can I just say wooden meeples? You get a bonus
point for that

Brian (52:30):
Actually, I think the little wild animal meeples are
some of my favorite meeplesever, just these like I do love
the idea of a generic animal,like nothing in particular, of
course. Now I know it's actuallythis Duiker but

Marielle (52:43):
I think I know which species you're referring to. I
would call it the "Diker", butjust because I'm Dutch, and I
kind of automatically do thatwhen I see something that looks
Dutch.

Brian (52:52):
Yeah, you're probably right.

Marielle (52:53):
And I think the bat of the little meep looks exactly
like the photos that I have inmy hand from this particular
species of antelope.

Brian (53:01):
Okay, nice. All right, so I guess with that, we should
maybe think about wrapping upthe recording. Marielle, Is
there anywhere where you'd likeanybody to be able to reach you
do you social media? I know it'snot like professors aren't
always amazing at that. I knowneither are we, but sometimes we
want to give people theopportunity.

Marielle (53:18):
Yeah, I'm not great with social media, also not a
professor. But what I would liketo share is maybe, for when we
published the study, we made awe, which was mostly Dina and
Teague, while they were out inthe field, together with film
team, a video abstract. So ifyou want to have a little look
more into what it looks like inthat particular area, although

(53:39):
that they made this in Kasanka National Park in Zambia. But if
you want to see a struggle atfruit bats and just how amazing
it looks when you have hundredsof 1000s of bats flying out from
a roost, then you should look,

Brian (53:52):
oh, my goodness. So we would love, I mean, try to stop
us. Show us the link. No, wewill definitely share that. Man.
We might, I might need to try tofigure out if I because we do
little videos that we put outfor these episodes, I put them
on, like, tick tock and stufflike that. Maybe I want to,
like, edit in just the tiniestlittle clip of that. That would
be fun. I might try. We'll seehow that goes. Anyway. Okay,

(54:13):
well, I'm really glad thatyou're able to find time to join
us and talk about this, youknow, unique game and this sort
of unique link between ascientific study and a game. I
guess with that, we're gonnawrap it up here. So I want to
thank our listeners for tuningin, though, until next time,
have a great month and greatgames, and as always,

Jason (54:29):
have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya. This
has been

Brian (54:32):
the gaming with Science Podcast, copyright 2025
listeners are free to reuse thisrecording for any non commercial
purpose, as long as credit isgiven to gaming with science.
This podcast is produced withsupport from the University of
Georgia. All opinions are thoseof the hosts, and do not imply

(54:54):
endorsement by the sponsors. Ifyou wish to purchase any of the
games that we talked about, weencourage you to do so through
your friendly local game store.Thank you, and have fun playing
dice with the universe.

All Episodes

S2E06 - Atiwa (Fruit bats)

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Law & Order: Criminal Justice System - Season 1 & Season 2

Dateline NBC

NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}S2E06 - Atiwa (Fruit bats)