April 13, 2017 • 40 mins
Bats have been demonized through history. Our folklore and horror stories tell us they’re something to be afraid of because they’re 'creatures of the night' with weird abilities like echolocation. And recent events tell us they carry diseases that could kill us. But bats could also have super immune systems that allow them to live long lives, avoid cancer and fight off viruses. What can we learn from them? Robert and Christian explore...
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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, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Christian Segre. Hey, Robert,
I got a superhero question for you, Batman. Why doesn't
he have any disease related abilities or or like an
(00:25):
improved immune system? So, so, you know, Batman has been
around for like over seventy years, we largely know bats
as being disease carriers, right, and yet he doesn't seem to,
I mean outside of like I guess like he has
a little pellets on his pouch that he occasionally uses
to throw gas at people, but I don't think it's
like he's throwing a bowl at them. Yeah, it's interesting
(00:46):
when you start taking apart Batman, right, because in what
ways is Batman actually like a bat at all? Or
or perhaps more telling, in what ways, was was he
even initially like a bat? Because I know a number
of talented writers and artists have had a had a
chance over the years to build on the Batman mythos
and occasionally incorporate bits of bat science. But was maybe
(01:08):
you can answer this, was he essentially just a dude
in a mask? Because this this recently, I watched a
large portion of the the really bad nine nine Batman
and Robin series is like a serial black and white
forty nine. So this is pre uh the TV show.
I don't I don't think I've seen this riff tracks
(01:28):
has been installments of it, and it's it's really bad.
It's from several different vantage points. It has, uh, there's
some anti Japanese sentiment that's in there. It has this
just terrible villain that's just called the Wizard, that's like
a just an old dude in a black robe, and
and it's just it. It's the the campus versions of
(01:49):
Batman and Robin as well, you know what you would like.
And we have never talked about this off air before.
It is just popping in my head. Now, have you
ever heard of bat manga? It's so um Japan's version
of Batman done as manga. It's there's some really old
stuff and there's a whole book that Chip Kid put
together that's a collection of the bat manga comics, so
(02:12):
you get an idea of what Japan's iteration of Batman
and Robin were like. But then also just like photographs
of all of the collectibles, the Japanese collectibles related to Batman. Anyways,
It's fascinating because when you mentioned this Batman villain, the Wizard,
Like when you think of your like top rogues for Batman,
the Wizard isn't really high up there. Uh, and the
(02:35):
batmana stuff is very similar. He's got all these like
totally bizarre characters that he interacts with. From a Western perspective,
the thing that's interesting to me about the Wizard is
that it seems like somebody would have brought the Wizard
back just for the sake of doing it. Like it
seems like the kind of thing like a Grant Morrison
would say, Hey, nobody's brought this character back. What's some
(02:56):
sort of crazy counterculture span I can put on it? Yeah,
you know, you're right. Actually, so it's funny you mentioned
that Grant Morrison did bring back one of the weird
villains from The Batman. So yeah, I think his name
was like Mr. Deathman or something like that. It's like
a guy in a skeleton costume. Um. Anyways, Yeah, he
doesn't really have bat abilities right, Like, so, uh, he
(03:20):
doesn't really fly. He glides for the most part, does
not have powered flight, which is the big deal with that. Yeah,
and we're gonna talk a lot about that today. I
guess he has the bat plane that could kind of
count sometimes, but yeah, exactly. Um, he does use like echolocation.
I think that's become like more of a thing since
(03:42):
those Christopher Nolan movies. Yeah, I feel like that's definitely
a case where Invented Riders came in and said, hey,
we should make him behave a little like a bat
solce thrown. Yeah, those Arkham video games like, you can
use the echolocation stuff pretty frequently. They call it detective mode,
and you can basically like everything around you, kind of
like a radar fashion. I wonder has anyone ever decided
(04:04):
to have Bruce Wayne and Batman is essentially a fruit
bat where when he's not fighting crimes, just setting around
ian mangoes all day. Right, Yeah, I don't you know.
If anybody would do it would be Morrison and likewise
you have down here. If he was a fruit bat,
can he lack tape? That would be great too. That
would put a new maternal spin on it because of
just to throw out the quick snapshot of the science, uh,
(04:28):
certain varieties of male fruit bats lactate in order to
help we're the young, like most males. Uh well, let
me say that male humans can lactate is well under
the reser scenarios. But the male fruit bat in this
case is the only example of a mammal that regularly
lactates to help real young. Yeah. The only thing I
(04:50):
can think of that's even moderately close to that is
again Morrison introduced a bat cow. You know, like Batman
and Superman have like pets. He has like a dog
and a cat, and like Superman has a horse and
stuff like that. Is this really a thing? Yeah, totally.
Superman has a horse. Yeah, comment the super horse. I
(05:12):
think Supergirl rides, ok, yeah, and it flies. But but
Batman had a cow. Uh in the Grant Morris in
line because I think, like Robin like, they infiltrated some
criminal headquarters where they're like abusing cows, and Robin like
saved one of the cows and brought it back to
Wayne Manner and it had like the markings on its face,
(05:34):
like the way that its coloration on his face was
looked like a bad symbol. Alright, like that, but all right,
let's bring it back to sort of reality for a
second year. He doesn't really have any disease related abilities.
And I'd say, like, if you walk up to most
people in the street and you say, like, hey, bats
what are the first three things you know about them? Right,
they'd be like, they fly, they have echolocation, and they
(05:55):
their carriers of disease. Right. Um, So yeah, I don't know.
Maybe when you and I get our hands on the
Batman franchise in ten or twenty years, will finally be
able to write that like Batman as the Black Plague. Well,
I guess it comes down to the idea that certainly
you have comic book characters that are embodiments of disease.
But there, you know, I think almost all villains. I
(06:17):
can't think of a hero off the top of my head.
I'm sure there's somebody. There's this really silly one. Oh God,
I can't remember what her name is, Infectious Lass. I
think she's one of the legions of the Legion of Superheroes.
That's the only one I can think of. But why
are we talking about this? Why are we talking about bats? Well,
if you're a long time listener stuftable in your mind,
(06:38):
you know probably for the last year I've been casually
saying we should do an episode on bats, we should
do an episode on bats, And then we did the
Patient zero episode, and we were talking about bats there
because of how they spread disease, zoonotic disease. We specifically
talked about the case of Dr lu Jian Lun, who
was a sixty four year old doctor in China's Guangda
(07:00):
Province UH, and he apparently transferred UH STARS I believe
it was to sixteen other guests staying on the same
floor of like a hotel UH and this seemed to
be a case of super spreading. We talked about this
a lot in the Patient zero episode. We get into
the idea of how STARS was sort of a bat
(07:22):
disease right that it was a zootic infectious disease. It
jumped from one species to another UH. This step involved
the virus being able to transmit then from human to
human without an animal reservoir like a bat. So it
was believed that STARS originated in bats and then spread
to other animals like civic cats, and then the civic
cats infected humans. Another thing that we talked about related
(07:45):
to bats was that they've got all kinds of diseases
that they're related to the Bola hepatitis c Stars and
also perhaps mers UH. In the case of Stars, it
was thought that it spread to humans in by bats
infecting horses in Brisbane, Austra Alia. Then two people caught
that virus from the horses, possibly from scratches, are being
(08:06):
exposed to infected blood. Both died horrible deaths UH and
other diseases. So they think maybe pigs have become infected
by eating saliva colored fruit that bats have just dropped,
and then the pigs infect humans. So it doesn't seem
like a lot of these zoonotic infection cases that bats
are biting humans and humans are getting the disease. It's
(08:27):
like various ways bats are infecting other animals and then
those other animals are infecting humans. They're just a major
conduit in the chain. Yeah. So um. We received a
little bit of listening mail about this, asking for clarification,
people who were concerned primarily about like the conservation of bats,
and the idea that maybe we didn't give the full
story and that that would subsequently lead to more fearmongering
(08:50):
of bats, right, and far be it from us. That
is the last thing I want to do. In fact,
I have to just as a subjective thing before we
really get into bat I've spent some time in Austin,
Texas recently, and if anybody who's gone there and that
they know about the Batbridge, yeah, and man alive. I
love the Bat Bridge. It's so much fun. If you've
(09:12):
never been, I forget I thinks the Congress Street bridge
in Austin. But you go there certain times a year,
certain times a night, millions of bats live under this
bridge and they all fly out from under the neath
this bridge all at the same time. You get to
see them for about like thirty minutes, just the swarm
of them up in the air, flying around and then
going off to various parts of Austin to you know,
(09:34):
collect their food for the night, basically before they go
back to sleep under the bridge during the day. Again. Uh,
I like bats, Like if a bat was caught in
my home, like, my reaction wouldn't be killing, It would
be like, oh, let's capture that guy and then let
him back outside. Yeah. I U. I have to say that.
On vacations, especially vacations to the Caribbean, which I've got
(09:56):
to go in on two of those in the last
couple of years, I've always both trips. I just really
enjoyed watching the bats when the sun began to go down. Um,
you know, they're just fascinating creatures. And uh, and when
I have captured them in the house before, not not
my house, but like a vacation house they staying. And
one time over a weekend they we found it. It
(10:20):
had somehow gotten trapped in the house and it was
trying to like get water out of the sink, and
I thought it was a tea bag at first. I'm
glad retrospect that I did not like gravitated or put
in my tea and have some horrible bat tea concoction.
But my son and I like made up, you know,
an activity out of freeing the bat from the house
(10:40):
and helping it get away. So yeah, bats are fascinating creatures.
Were certainly not trying to spread any fear about it.
In fact, this episode is about spreading some truth on
the matter. Yeah. In fact, we have actually gotten to
the point where between yes, bats carrying a lot of disease,
but they have these fascinating immune systems that we're starting
(11:01):
to look at the science of their anatomy how it
deals with these viruses and then how we might apply
that to human beings. Bats maybe the key to us
living longer lives and fighting off diseases that currently are
pretty dangerous to human beings. One day we may all
be batman and bad girls. Yeah exactly. And you know,
(11:22):
unlike Bruce Wayne, we will maybe carry viruses, but our
immune systems will be so fast that will just be
constantly compromising them. All right, Well, should we get down
to brass tacks the Yeah, let's just let's do a
little overview about bats. I think we should say. First
of all, like stuff to blow your mind. Before I
was on it did a bunch of bad episodes. You
(11:43):
and Julie have talked about them extensively. Um, so let's
just do a refresher. Okay. So, all told, they're about
five different species of bats in the world, and they
make up about a quarter of all mammal species. Uh.
There are forty five different species of bats that live
in the United States and Canada. Most bats species live
(12:06):
in the tropical regions of the world. Now, evidence for
bat like flying mammals appears as far back as that
you're seeing e box, some fifty million years ago. However,
the fossil record tracing bat evolution is incomplete, so based
on similarities of bones and teeth, most authorities agree that
bats ancestors were probably insect eating animals, possibly living in
(12:31):
the trees, and they likely the same group that gave
rise to shrews and moles. So bats are are not
rodents and they're not even uh closely related to that
group of mammals. Yeah, that's really important for what we're
going to discuss today too, because they're often compared to
rodents in terms of how the two different species act
as disease carriers. You think it's like a flying mouse. Yeah,
(12:54):
so most bats in UH in North America eat insects.
As a matter of fact, one at eats about two
thousand to six thousand insects each night. Wow. And just
a few other crazy cool facts about them. When it
comes to flying, it's it's easy to think, oh, it's
just it's a it's about with it's a mouse with wings.
It's like a cross between a mouse and a bird. Well,
(13:17):
it's more complicated and more amazing than that. So throughout
human history, we've only had a few evolutionarily distinct modes
of flight, and there are only three distinct modes of
vertebrate flight flight. There there's the terasarian flight that was
you know employed by the by by pterodactyls, pterodactyls, um taranodons, etcetera.
(13:42):
And then you have avian flight, and then you have
chiropter in flight, which is bats. So these are distinct
modes of flight that were that were that evolved separately.
And then on top of that there there's insect flight
as well. So four models all told. Now you once
had mega bats as opposed to micro bats, and these
(14:03):
are large bats that were the are that are found
in old world tropical rainforests such as Australia, Asia and Africa,
so dire bats. Yeah. And then the biggest bats in
the world, and the biggest bat in the world right
now is the Malayan flying fox found in Asia. It
weighs about two pounds and has a wingspin of about
six ft and it eats only fruit. See yeah, and
(14:24):
people are probably you know, scared of it, I would assume,
even though it's just you know, eating nectar, eating nectar
and pooping. I mean, yeah. Um, the flying fox comes
up a lot in this research. It's one of the
one of the species that's investigated. Now, the smallest bat
in the world is kitties hog nose bat, also called
the bumblebee bat, and it's found in Thailand. Weighs about
(14:47):
two grams that's about how much of dime ways, and
it has a six inch wings. But it's like a
hummingbird bat, any tiny little thing. All right, let's take
a quick break and when we come back, we will
jump into the disea. Okay, so we're back. So yeah.
So there is this just assumption by most people that
(15:10):
bats carry disease. Right, That's why most people freak out
when they find a bat in their house. It's like, oh,
it's gonna spread disease. It's probably got rabies or something. Right,
we've got a god. I remember this when I was
like five years old. We were at my uncle's house
and there was a bat in the attic and he
had a tennis racket and was like chasing this bat
around the house with a tennis racket, trying to trying
(15:31):
to kill it. And I, even at five, I was like,
why just open the window, man, let this back. Anyway,
bats are a refuge for some of the world's most
lethal diseases to humans. That is true. And that includes rabies, Ebola,
Marburg and stars. Now, because there are many high profile
epidemics that are traced to bats, we call these bat
(15:53):
born viruses, and there's a whole line of investigation related
to bat born viruses. They're similar the way that they
carry diseases, similar to rats or mice, and that they
are known as disease reservoirs. But again, they are not rodents,
so these are very different species. Now, while they seem
adept at harboring and spreading disease, others argue that this
(16:17):
notoriety for bats isn't justified. Most of the time, reservoirs
like bats rarely show symptoms of the disease that they're
actually infected with. This is why they came up as
a topic when we were talking about patient zero. Other times,
the virus infects a new, more vulnerable species like us
human beings. This is why most research says that bats
(16:39):
were responsible for the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Now,
what's weird is that bats don't seem to die as
quickly from these viruses. In Ghana, for instance, sixty eight
percent of fruit bats over ten years old had antibodies
in their system for the rabies LESA virus, but they
were all in good health. The same goes for those
(17:01):
that were carrying a bowla. There was only one presumed
bat to human transfer of the disease. So there's this
this fear that the bats are going to spread the
disease to us, right, and yet there's very little evidence
that there's bad to human transfer. Uh, but more along
the lines like we were talking about earlier, that it's
more like bats. In fact, other animals were encroaching upon
(17:23):
bat habitats. Therefore we get infected as it transfers from
animal to animals. Zoonotic infection now obligatory Simpsons reference. UM.
I remember there being an episode where it's it's explained
that Mr Burns Uh is still alive because he has
all of these illnesses that are I think these a
graphic that shows like all these illnesses trying to squeeze
(17:46):
through a door at the same time, and none of
them can get through, and that's why I can't die
from any of them. That's fascinating. So I can't help
but think of that, yeah, kind of Uh. In Australia,
thirty flying foxes. I told you they'd come up add
antibodies to the Hendra virus, and this indicated that they
had been infected with it at some point, but only
(18:06):
three percent at any given time we're actually carrying it,
so that's a small amount compared to the amount that
had been infected. The infected bats themselves had low levels
of this pathogen, indicating that they were somehow keeping it
at bay. Subsequently, it's really rare for the Hendra disease
to pass even from bats to horses. However, in eleven
(18:30):
it leapt over in twenty four cases, and the theory
for that is because the bats were stressed out uh
and that the this caused a surge in the level
of viruses that the bats were carrying and subsequently made
it easier for them to pass it on to horses.
This is going to be important later when we talk
about uh massive culing of bats when people go, oh,
(18:51):
their disease carriers. We've got to wipe them out, go
destroy their colonies, right or else they're going to give
us these diseases. That could only make things worse because
then you're stressing out the bat population, which makes the
diseases become even more powerful. Now, I want to throw
in a note on vampire bats here as well. So Um,
the author of Bill Shoot has a wonderful book titled
(19:11):
Dark Banquet that deals with vampiric organisms in general, but
a lot of it deals with bats. It's also a
vampire the gathering RPG men. It could be if you
want to do a very science oriented campaign. He also
has a book on cannibals out that I have not
read anyway. In the book, he points out that vampire
bats introduced the additional threat of a disease promoting wound.
(19:33):
The host survives the feeding, but the wound invites additional
organisms and infections. The bigger concern though, is going to
be raybies. So it's not the most deadly or the
most common batborn illness, but if the infection takes hold,
it's essentially fatal in humans and and and rather infamous
as well. Um, you know of all the pathogens affecting
(19:57):
humans and in bat populations overall, um rabies sero prevalence,
that's a number of persons in a population who test
positive for specific disease can reach fift And you have
some notes here about Trinidad. We were talking a little
bit about this earlier because of some Trinidadian folklore, there's
bats all over the place down there. Yeah and uh.
(20:18):
And this is an account that to Shoot mentions in
his book that I think is interesting. It definitely involves
both bats and disease, but also superstitions attempts to call
bat populations. So in Trinidad, bat transmitted rabies killed eighty
nine people and thousands of cattle between n and nineteen
(20:38):
thirty four. In thirty four, that's when the Trinidadian Medical
Department rolled out its anti rabies unit, and their job
was to respond to vampire bat attacks net and destroy
the vamps. So they they painted uh that they did
this by not only killing the bats on the side,
but they also painted poisonous paint on vampire bat decimating colonies.
(21:01):
It was a rough situation. Well, and I immediately think
to the current science and wonder, I wonder how much
they stressed out the bat population, further spreading disease. The
human think they certainly did, And Shoot points out that
superstition played apart in this as well. So local Trinidating
and the folklore told of creatures called suk unts, and
(21:24):
these are crones or hags that can shed their skin
at night and become a fiery, blood sucking ball and
you sprinkle rice on your doorstep to keep them away. Now,
there were also conservationists at the time, and they could
they combated the folklore and the general you know, fear
of disease associated with bats by spreading the message that look,
there are only two out of fifty eight bat species
(21:47):
on the island that are vampires, and if those two
only the common vampire bat or does Modus rotundus is
a significant rabies threat. Okay, So that yeah, so that
definitely sounds a situation where the fear of bats sort
of got the better of the human population and maybe
made the problem worse. So we've we've really outlined here
(22:09):
that Okay, these bats carry all these diseases, they don't
seem to be affected by it too much. What's the deal?
And you know, subsequently, why then does it transfer? Okay, well,
it seems like bats have superimmune systems. Again, something you
would think that Batman would have his power, right, like,
like that would be a cool power. He just never
(22:29):
gets I guess Batman just never gets sick anyway, because
but it's not like any villains are trying. Yeah, well,
that's kind of why the bats turns out have such
great immune systems. There's two schools of thought here, okay,
on whether bats actually carry a disproportionately high number of viruses.
The first school of thought goes like this, bat related
(22:51):
epidemics arise because there are so many species of bats,
and there's so many individual bats, that the emergence of
all these various diseases isn't surprising. Like Robert said at
the top, there's more than bats species. Bats comprise more
than twenty of the mammals on Earth. A single colony
can sometimes have millions of bats living in it, and
(23:13):
there may be a massive amount of bat diversity right.
And study on the Indian flying fox that giant bat
fifty five viruses were detected in its system. Fifty were
previously unknown, so they're carrying a lot. That's just one species.
We may be hearing about bat born epidemics more often
(23:37):
simply because of how humans are interacting with bats. Right,
We're encroaching it on their habitats. Subsequently, they suffer from
the stigma of being disease written and likewise, bats are
surveyed more often and are easier to catch than other
mammals too, so subsequently we're again interacting with them more,
maybe for studies. So some conservationists argue that the viruses
(24:00):
they carry aren't actually emerging infectious diseases, but they're simply
just new to us as human beings. And let's remember
to bats live in those packed colonies, right, so it's
super easy for them to pass viruses onto one another.
They also can fly thousands of kilometers, which subsequently makes
it easier for them to deliver viruses to further distances. Okay,
(24:24):
that's the first theory. Here's the second, like wolverine healing
factor immune systems theory. Okay, bats have a special physiology
and lifestyle that makes them exceptionally good at hosting viruses.
Bats live between three and ten times longer than other
(24:45):
mammals their size, and we used to think that this
was because of hibernation, but there's there's been a lot
more research into this lately. If you inject a bat
with bacterial toxins that would normally trigger an immune response
in mammals, a bat will have no fever and no
spike in white blood cells. Now, research published in shows
(25:08):
that while bat genomes contain many of the same ingredients
as other mammals. Bats use these genomes differently. Bat genes
coding for proteins detect and repaired damaged DNA, and they
are much more prevalent than we had previously thought. So
this new line of thinking is that bat genes are
(25:28):
doing something that helps them survive and reproduce, and that
they subsequently pass these awesome genes along to subsequent generations.
So those same DNA repair genes that I was talking
about are frequently the targets for invading viruses. In fact,
key genes and DNA damage repair are also involved in
(25:49):
tumor development and immunity, and this might be why bats
are evolving in such a way. Now here's a crazy anecdote.
Bats almost never developed tumors. Perhaps this is because these
repair genes are just constantly outpacing malignant growths. They almost
never get cancer. When you give them tumor causing drugs,
(26:11):
they're less likely to develop cancer than other mammals, So
that's pretty wild. In humans and mice, defenses like these
repair genes, those are activated in response to a threat, right,
So uh, sort of like we're talking about in our
other episode this week. You know, it's a stimulised system.
If you have a trigger, it activates it. In this case,
(26:34):
in bats, it seems to be perpetually turned on. Their
immune system is just always on, and that might be
why the viruses they carry are kept below a point
where they can actually harm their host. Also, bats seem
to have lost an entire branch of their immune system
that's made up of inflammas homes. These are the receptors
(26:57):
and sensors that induce inflammation, so they've all to turn
down their inflammatory response to various threats, including viruses. So
basically bats are just like, ain't no big thing I've
got I've got fifty viruses in me right now, right now.
Why you're probably going, well, why bats and not me? Right?
The thought here is is because of the high metabolic
(27:20):
rate bats have to keep up to maintain their energy
they produce while they're flying. Otherwise, the stress of flying
itself would damage their cells and their DNA if it
wasn't so quickly detected and repaired. So the ability to
carry all these lethal viruses may come actually as a
co evolutionary accident. Bats are the only mammals that are
(27:42):
capable of powered flight, which is super demanding in terms
of energy, and it subsequently is very tough on their metabolism.
A bat's heart can beat over a thousand times a
minute if they need it to, and their metabolic rate
in the air increases thirty four times. When you compare
that to rodents, again not the same species, but exercising rodents,
(28:03):
they only jump up to eight times their metabolic rate.
When your metabolism is as ramped up as bats are,
it spews out free radicals, and these are energetic particles
that can damage cells and kickstart inflammation. So it's possible
that bats evolved specifically for flight and that that just
(28:24):
casually also allows them to avoid overreacting to viral infections. Now,
another note on vampire bats. I think we've touched on
this in the past, and we've discussed real world vampires,
but but this makes the vampire bat situation even crazier.
They have this crazy metabolism to deal with the costs
of high costs of powered flight, and they're depending on
(28:45):
the nutrient deprived feast of blood power everything. Right. This
is like if you met somebody and you sit and
you ask them, hey, what are you into and what
do you do for a living and they say, well, uh,
I have I have a hobby of mine is just
collecting really expensive wines, and my profession is hot dog
photography only hot dog photography. And you're like, ooh, I
(29:07):
don't know, guy, that sounds like you've got a really
expensive hobby and and an extremely specific career here that
I can't imagine pays the dividends necessary. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
the idea about the bat immune system seems to be
supported when we look at their mitochondria. It seems that
(29:29):
their mitochondria has undergone more evolutionary changes than the mitochondria
that's in other mammals. Individual bats have an assortment of
mitochondria rather than the way that most organisms like us
have just carbon copies of it. This seems to help
them deal with the damaging free radicals that are produced
during flight, all of which can explain their long lives.
(29:53):
The tumor resistance and more. Bat mitochondria also might be
like these crucial command centers that sent and decide whether
a cell should fight or just self destruct. So they've
got they've really got this, like, uh, you know, to
use the same metaphor that we're using in this week's
Demon episode, like they've got a great home security system
(30:14):
when it's all like you know, in terms of dealing
with viruses, dealing with the metabolic breakdown in their system, etcetera.
Another hypothesis that's related to bat flight, though generate, is
that they generate so much heat that it actually mimics
a fever. Now, you know, fever's combat infection by raising
our body temperature to levels that will kill or disable
(30:36):
any invading pathogen. But maybe bat's body temperatures are so
high when they fly that they're just inadvertently killing viruses off. Yeah,
this is an interesting take on on bat immunities. Um,
there's a two thousand fifteen study Publishment Biology Letters that
that hypothesize that a lot of it, I could come
down to these drastic temperature changes over the course of
(30:59):
just a single day. So a bat sleeps in the day,
temperature drops to conserve energy, then slows the pathogen spread
in the process, and then it goes out to hunt,
in which case it's temperatures exceed a hundred degrees fahrenheit.
And this which basically involves a daily fever to increase
the activity of certain immune sets. Yeah, so the fascinating
(31:22):
stuff that uh, is not incorporated into Batman lawyer. Batman
doesn't have a fever, or he's not like burning up
with he's burning up with rage at the death of
his parents. That's true. Now here's another interesting thing about
bat metabolism. So they're heterotherms, meaning they can exhibit characteristics
of both warm and cold blooded organisms. But they're distinct
(31:42):
from all other heterotherms in that, no matter what the
season they're resting temperature and metabolic rate is dependent on
a non ambient temperature. They're the only mammals in which
the resting metabolism is a direct function of the body
temperature rather than the ambient temperature. And that came from
an article by Raymond J. Hawk, the metabolic rates and
(32:04):
body temperatures of bats. And some of you are probably wondering, well, okay,
bats fly, but so do all those other creatures that
you mentioned earlier. What about birds? You know, do birds
have the same superpower? Well, birds are also long lived,
and that's possibly because flight enables them to just evade predators.
But uh, it's also because flight increase their chances of
(32:26):
developing a mechanism to reduce cellular damage. Very similar, right,
So the metabolic thing is similar. I don't know necessarily
that the body temperature thing equals out, probably because uh,
we're talking about mammals versus birds, totally different anatomies. Either way,
some scientists still worry that bat born viruses are so
(32:47):
lethal because they've evolved to withstand the bats incredibly active
immune system. But if they transferred humans, right, so, like
rabies or a bola, these viruses are super well at
whip to defeat our weaker immune systems. So subsequently, that's
why we have such a hard time dealing with these Wow.
(33:07):
So in in the Dune universe, the bat would be
like a hell world where you where you evolve and
develop a highly effective mode of shock troops. Yeah. Alright,
let's take another break, and when we get back, we're
going to close out by talking about, hey, don't kill
those bats because we might be able to use them
(33:27):
to lead to improvements in our health. Alright, we're back,
so so hit me, Christian, how how can we potentially
become more bat like? Am I gonna need a telepod
and a bat and we're going to splice ourselves together
into a man bat? Yeah? You know, that seems like
one way that would work pretty well. But it would
you know, like like with Man bat you would kind
(33:50):
of like lose total control of your personality and probably
murder your wife. But uh, and you wouldn't want to
do the Batman thing because, like we said, Batman, it's
just a guy in a cost you him. He's got
some gadgets. He's not really uh you know, cranking up
the metabolism. He isn't ever great immune system man Bat
for anyone listening is not familiar is of the the
(34:10):
bat human hybrid in the Batman comics. I remember, he's
kind of what you think of when you first hear
Batman's that, like he would it's like a wear bat
with like a ripped blue jeans totally. Yeah. Yeah. Um. Now,
as a result of recent viruses, whole bat colonies are
being killed off in the name of public health, as
(34:31):
we mentioned earlier, and experts say, look, we shouldn't be
afraid of bats because the viruses they carry comparatively hardly
ever transmit to human beings. In fact, killing bats may
make things worse. Like I mentioned, the stress on the
remaining bats could actually raise their viral loads, which could
lead to more transference to other animals. But what if
(34:56):
bats could hold the key to improving human health and
allowing us to live longer. Well, if we look at
knowledge and we try to figure it out how their
immune systems work, and that leads to the development of
drugs that would improve our health and lifespan, that's one
way that we could do it. So we basically reverse
engineer those proteins and then we turn it into medicine,
(35:18):
or we could use gene editing technology to make human
genomes more like bats, which would give us similar immune
system properties. Although I have to wonder if there would
be some kind of like drawback with that in the
sense that like, if your metabolism was that fast but
(35:38):
you weren't flying all the time, wouldn't you just be
constantly like hungry, I mean, so you'd have to eat
a lot more. Um. Maybe that's where we start eating bugs.
Researchers are also trying to identify the proteins that specifically
allow bats to control inflammation and other processes that are
(35:59):
associated with disease. So it's possible that we could one
day use these proteins or a version of them to
treat disorders where inflammation is a problem, like, for instance,
rheumatoid arthritis or heart disease. So we could use these
to stop viruses like a bola also from killing us. Like,
if we figure out how the bat system works, then
(36:23):
we apply it to the human anatomy system, we could
potentially be resistant to a bola and rabies in the
same way that they are, or maybe other viruses that
we haven't even discovered yet. So to bring it back
to Batman, you do have to to I guess acknowledge
that Batman, if nothing else, he's long lived, He's resistant
to illness and death. You have if you've taken to
(36:45):
account of the character hit comic book stands for the
first time in nine and assuming Wayne was what at
least twenty at the time, He's still going strong today
at close to a hundred over a hundred years old. Yeah,
Ben Affleck doesn't look good day over nine. Yeah, I
mean that speaks to the power of the mythology I
(37:07):
think of Batman in popular culture for sure, but yeah,
it's definitely it seems like Batman and other superheroes are
certainly long lived, but there's no explanation in the the
the meta text of why Batman has been around for
so long right, even in like some of them, Like
there's a do you remember Batman Beyond that cartoon that
(37:28):
was like set in the future. Yeah, and he's so
now you have the old Bruce Wayne. Because this is
gonna be my next question. What is the oldest depiction
of Bruce Wayne and or Batman in a comic book
or cartoon? Yeah, I think it's that um and in
that Even then, he's still kind of a badass, uh
in the bat Dog comes up in that because he's
(37:49):
got a um ace. The bath Hound hangs out with
him in the cave all the time. But there's also
another depiction. I think it's in Kingdom Come, which is
a sort of alternate universe story. Again older Batman, but
he like we're more like sort of like an Iron
Man armor version of like the Batman's suit that allows
him to go out and uh fight crime and deal
(38:12):
with other superheroes and stuff. Old dude in a power
armors basically Yeah, okay, interesting, alright, but none of it
had to do with his metabolism or gene editing. Alright, Well,
well there you have it. We've talked about the bats,
bats and diseases. We've gone back and forth a little
bit about Batman, and now we we leave it to you,
(38:35):
we ask you for feedback. Yeah, so you know, let
us know. I want to make sure that we gave
bats a fair shake. Let us know if you feel
that that was the case. Let us know if you
like bats or if you you know, you think we're
totally wrong here and you're like, all bats must be annihilated. Right. Also,
look to Facebook because we're probably going to be doing
(38:55):
a Facebook live about I would imagine Demons and Bats
that week that these episodes come out related to trailers
of movies that have bats in them. Do you remember
that bat movie that had Um Lou Diamond Phillips in it,
who was literally called just bats. No, I don't think
remember that came out in the nineties. It was a
pretty terrible horror movie. We might have to pull that
one out, man. I can think of at least a
(39:17):
couple of that related to our films for the Path.
It would be fun to discuss. I think. I think
we've got a good trailer talk coming up for us.
So if you like watching those, or if you've never
seen one before, tune in on Facebook. You don't have
to watch it when it's live. It'll sit on our
Facebook page. Usually Robert, Joe and I sitting around for
about thirty minutes talking about the science related to this
week's episodes, tying into our favorite monster movie trailers, so
(39:42):
you can find that on our Facebook page. You can
also contact us through Facebook. We're also on Twitter, We're
on tumbler, We're on Instagram. We've also got stuff to
blow your Mind dot com, where there's all those bat
podcasts that Julie and Robert did in the past. If
you want to just binge listen to bad information, we
got it. And if you want to get touch with
us the old fashioned way, just hit us up at
(40:03):
blow the Mind at house stuff works dot com 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, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Christian Segre. Hey, Robert,
I got a superhero question for you, Batman. Why doesn't
he have any disease related abilities or or like an
(00:25):
improved immune system? So, so, you know, Batman has been
around for like over seventy years, we largely know bats
as being disease carriers, right, and yet he doesn't seem to,
I mean outside of like I guess like he has
a little pellets on his pouch that he occasionally uses
to throw gas at people, but I don't think it's
like he's throwing a bowl at them. Yeah, it's interesting
(00:46):
when you start taking apart Batman, right, because in what
ways is Batman actually like a bat at all? Or
or perhaps more telling, in what ways, was was he
even initially like a bat? Because I know a number
of talented writers and artists have had a had a
chance over the years to build on the Batman mythos
and occasionally incorporate bits of bat science. But was maybe
(01:08):
you can answer this, was he essentially just a dude
in a mask? Because this this recently, I watched a
large portion of the the really bad nine nine Batman
and Robin series is like a serial black and white
forty nine. So this is pre uh the TV show.
I don't I don't think I've seen this riff tracks
(01:28):
has been installments of it, and it's it's really bad.
It's from several different vantage points. It has, uh, there's
some anti Japanese sentiment that's in there. It has this
just terrible villain that's just called the Wizard, that's like
a just an old dude in a black robe, and
and it's just it. It's the the campus versions of
(01:49):
Batman and Robin as well, you know what you would like.
And we have never talked about this off air before.
It is just popping in my head. Now, have you
ever heard of bat manga? It's so um Japan's version
of Batman done as manga. It's there's some really old
stuff and there's a whole book that Chip Kid put
together that's a collection of the bat manga comics, so
(02:12):
you get an idea of what Japan's iteration of Batman
and Robin were like. But then also just like photographs
of all of the collectibles, the Japanese collectibles related to Batman. Anyways,
It's fascinating because when you mentioned this Batman villain, the Wizard,
Like when you think of your like top rogues for Batman,
the Wizard isn't really high up there. Uh, and the
(02:35):
batmana stuff is very similar. He's got all these like
totally bizarre characters that he interacts with. From a Western perspective,
the thing that's interesting to me about the Wizard is
that it seems like somebody would have brought the Wizard
back just for the sake of doing it. Like it
seems like the kind of thing like a Grant Morrison
would say, Hey, nobody's brought this character back. What's some
(02:56):
sort of crazy counterculture span I can put on it? Yeah,
you know, you're right. Actually, so it's funny you mentioned
that Grant Morrison did bring back one of the weird
villains from The Batman. So yeah, I think his name
was like Mr. Deathman or something like that. It's like
a guy in a skeleton costume. Um. Anyways, Yeah, he
doesn't really have bat abilities right, Like, so, uh, he
(03:20):
doesn't really fly. He glides for the most part, does
not have powered flight, which is the big deal with that. Yeah,
and we're gonna talk a lot about that today. I
guess he has the bat plane that could kind of
count sometimes, but yeah, exactly. Um, he does use like echolocation.
I think that's become like more of a thing since
(03:42):
those Christopher Nolan movies. Yeah, I feel like that's definitely
a case where Invented Riders came in and said, hey,
we should make him behave a little like a bat
solce thrown. Yeah, those Arkham video games like, you can
use the echolocation stuff pretty frequently. They call it detective mode,
and you can basically like everything around you, kind of
like a radar fashion. I wonder has anyone ever decided
(04:04):
to have Bruce Wayne and Batman is essentially a fruit
bat where when he's not fighting crimes, just setting around
ian mangoes all day. Right, Yeah, I don't you know.
If anybody would do it would be Morrison and likewise
you have down here. If he was a fruit bat,
can he lack tape? That would be great too. That
would put a new maternal spin on it because of
just to throw out the quick snapshot of the science, uh,
(04:28):
certain varieties of male fruit bats lactate in order to
help we're the young, like most males. Uh well, let
me say that male humans can lactate is well under
the reser scenarios. But the male fruit bat in this
case is the only example of a mammal that regularly
lactates to help real young. Yeah. The only thing I
(04:50):
can think of that's even moderately close to that is
again Morrison introduced a bat cow. You know, like Batman
and Superman have like pets. He has like a dog
and a cat, and like Superman has a horse and
stuff like that. Is this really a thing? Yeah, totally.
Superman has a horse. Yeah, comment the super horse. I
(05:12):
think Supergirl rides, ok, yeah, and it flies. But but
Batman had a cow. Uh in the Grant Morris in
line because I think, like Robin like, they infiltrated some
criminal headquarters where they're like abusing cows, and Robin like
saved one of the cows and brought it back to
Wayne Manner and it had like the markings on its face,
(05:34):
like the way that its coloration on his face was
looked like a bad symbol. Alright, like that, but all right,
let's bring it back to sort of reality for a
second year. He doesn't really have any disease related abilities.
And I'd say, like, if you walk up to most
people in the street and you say, like, hey, bats
what are the first three things you know about them? Right,
they'd be like, they fly, they have echolocation, and they
(05:55):
their carriers of disease. Right. Um, So yeah, I don't know.
Maybe when you and I get our hands on the
Batman franchise in ten or twenty years, will finally be
able to write that like Batman as the Black Plague. Well,
I guess it comes down to the idea that certainly
you have comic book characters that are embodiments of disease.
But there, you know, I think almost all villains. I
(06:17):
can't think of a hero off the top of my head.
I'm sure there's somebody. There's this really silly one. Oh God,
I can't remember what her name is, Infectious Lass. I
think she's one of the legions of the Legion of Superheroes.
That's the only one I can think of. But why
are we talking about this? Why are we talking about bats? Well,
if you're a long time listener stuftable in your mind,
(06:38):
you know probably for the last year I've been casually
saying we should do an episode on bats, we should
do an episode on bats, And then we did the
Patient zero episode, and we were talking about bats there
because of how they spread disease, zoonotic disease. We specifically
talked about the case of Dr lu Jian Lun, who
was a sixty four year old doctor in China's Guangda
(07:00):
Province UH, and he apparently transferred UH STARS I believe
it was to sixteen other guests staying on the same
floor of like a hotel UH and this seemed to
be a case of super spreading. We talked about this
a lot in the Patient zero episode. We get into
the idea of how STARS was sort of a bat
(07:22):
disease right that it was a zootic infectious disease. It
jumped from one species to another UH. This step involved
the virus being able to transmit then from human to
human without an animal reservoir like a bat. So it
was believed that STARS originated in bats and then spread
to other animals like civic cats, and then the civic
cats infected humans. Another thing that we talked about related
(07:45):
to bats was that they've got all kinds of diseases
that they're related to the Bola hepatitis c Stars and
also perhaps mers UH. In the case of Stars, it
was thought that it spread to humans in by bats
infecting horses in Brisbane, Austra Alia. Then two people caught
that virus from the horses, possibly from scratches, are being
(08:06):
exposed to infected blood. Both died horrible deaths UH and
other diseases. So they think maybe pigs have become infected
by eating saliva colored fruit that bats have just dropped,
and then the pigs infect humans. So it doesn't seem
like a lot of these zoonotic infection cases that bats
are biting humans and humans are getting the disease. It's
(08:27):
like various ways bats are infecting other animals and then
those other animals are infecting humans. They're just a major
conduit in the chain. Yeah. So um. We received a
little bit of listening mail about this, asking for clarification,
people who were concerned primarily about like the conservation of bats,
and the idea that maybe we didn't give the full
story and that that would subsequently lead to more fearmongering
(08:50):
of bats, right, and far be it from us. That
is the last thing I want to do. In fact,
I have to just as a subjective thing before we
really get into bat I've spent some time in Austin,
Texas recently, and if anybody who's gone there and that
they know about the Batbridge, yeah, and man alive. I
love the Bat Bridge. It's so much fun. If you've
(09:12):
never been, I forget I thinks the Congress Street bridge
in Austin. But you go there certain times a year,
certain times a night, millions of bats live under this
bridge and they all fly out from under the neath
this bridge all at the same time. You get to
see them for about like thirty minutes, just the swarm
of them up in the air, flying around and then
going off to various parts of Austin to you know,
(09:34):
collect their food for the night, basically before they go
back to sleep under the bridge during the day. Again. Uh,
I like bats, Like if a bat was caught in
my home, like, my reaction wouldn't be killing, It would
be like, oh, let's capture that guy and then let
him back outside. Yeah. I U. I have to say that.
On vacations, especially vacations to the Caribbean, which I've got
(09:56):
to go in on two of those in the last
couple of years, I've always both trips. I just really
enjoyed watching the bats when the sun began to go down. Um,
you know, they're just fascinating creatures. And uh, and when
I have captured them in the house before, not not
my house, but like a vacation house they staying. And
one time over a weekend they we found it. It
(10:20):
had somehow gotten trapped in the house and it was
trying to like get water out of the sink, and
I thought it was a tea bag at first. I'm
glad retrospect that I did not like gravitated or put
in my tea and have some horrible bat tea concoction.
But my son and I like made up, you know,
an activity out of freeing the bat from the house
(10:40):
and helping it get away. So yeah, bats are fascinating creatures.
Were certainly not trying to spread any fear about it.
In fact, this episode is about spreading some truth on
the matter. Yeah. In fact, we have actually gotten to
the point where between yes, bats carrying a lot of disease,
but they have these fascinating immune systems that we're starting
(11:01):
to look at the science of their anatomy how it
deals with these viruses and then how we might apply
that to human beings. Bats maybe the key to us
living longer lives and fighting off diseases that currently are
pretty dangerous to human beings. One day we may all
be batman and bad girls. Yeah exactly. And you know,
(11:22):
unlike Bruce Wayne, we will maybe carry viruses, but our
immune systems will be so fast that will just be
constantly compromising them. All right, Well, should we get down
to brass tacks the Yeah, let's just let's do a
little overview about bats. I think we should say. First
of all, like stuff to blow your mind. Before I
was on it did a bunch of bad episodes. You
(11:43):
and Julie have talked about them extensively. Um, so let's
just do a refresher. Okay. So, all told, they're about
five different species of bats in the world, and they
make up about a quarter of all mammal species. Uh.
There are forty five different species of bats that live
in the United States and Canada. Most bats species live
(12:06):
in the tropical regions of the world. Now, evidence for
bat like flying mammals appears as far back as that
you're seeing e box, some fifty million years ago. However,
the fossil record tracing bat evolution is incomplete, so based
on similarities of bones and teeth, most authorities agree that
bats ancestors were probably insect eating animals, possibly living in
(12:31):
the trees, and they likely the same group that gave
rise to shrews and moles. So bats are are not
rodents and they're not even uh closely related to that
group of mammals. Yeah, that's really important for what we're
going to discuss today too, because they're often compared to
rodents in terms of how the two different species act
as disease carriers. You think it's like a flying mouse. Yeah,
(12:54):
so most bats in UH in North America eat insects.
As a matter of fact, one at eats about two
thousand to six thousand insects each night. Wow. And just
a few other crazy cool facts about them. When it
comes to flying, it's it's easy to think, oh, it's
just it's a it's about with it's a mouse with wings.
It's like a cross between a mouse and a bird. Well,
(13:17):
it's more complicated and more amazing than that. So throughout
human history, we've only had a few evolutionarily distinct modes
of flight, and there are only three distinct modes of
vertebrate flight flight. There there's the terasarian flight that was
you know employed by the by by pterodactyls, pterodactyls, um taranodons, etcetera.
(13:42):
And then you have avian flight, and then you have
chiropter in flight, which is bats. So these are distinct
modes of flight that were that were that evolved separately.
And then on top of that there there's insect flight
as well. So four models all told. Now you once
had mega bats as opposed to micro bats, and these
(14:03):
are large bats that were the are that are found
in old world tropical rainforests such as Australia, Asia and Africa,
so dire bats. Yeah. And then the biggest bats in
the world, and the biggest bat in the world right
now is the Malayan flying fox found in Asia. It
weighs about two pounds and has a wingspin of about
six ft and it eats only fruit. See yeah, and
(14:24):
people are probably you know, scared of it, I would assume,
even though it's just you know, eating nectar, eating nectar
and pooping. I mean, yeah. Um, the flying fox comes
up a lot in this research. It's one of the
one of the species that's investigated. Now, the smallest bat
in the world is kitties hog nose bat, also called
the bumblebee bat, and it's found in Thailand. Weighs about
(14:47):
two grams that's about how much of dime ways, and
it has a six inch wings. But it's like a
hummingbird bat, any tiny little thing. All right, let's take
a quick break and when we come back, we will
jump into the disea. Okay, so we're back. So yeah.
So there is this just assumption by most people that
(15:10):
bats carry disease. Right, That's why most people freak out
when they find a bat in their house. It's like, oh,
it's gonna spread disease. It's probably got rabies or something. Right,
we've got a god. I remember this when I was
like five years old. We were at my uncle's house
and there was a bat in the attic and he
had a tennis racket and was like chasing this bat
around the house with a tennis racket, trying to trying
(15:31):
to kill it. And I, even at five, I was like,
why just open the window, man, let this back. Anyway,
bats are a refuge for some of the world's most
lethal diseases to humans. That is true. And that includes rabies, Ebola,
Marburg and stars. Now, because there are many high profile
epidemics that are traced to bats, we call these bat
(15:53):
born viruses, and there's a whole line of investigation related
to bat born viruses. They're similar the way that they
carry diseases, similar to rats or mice, and that they
are known as disease reservoirs. But again, they are not rodents,
so these are very different species. Now, while they seem
adept at harboring and spreading disease, others argue that this
(16:17):
notoriety for bats isn't justified. Most of the time, reservoirs
like bats rarely show symptoms of the disease that they're
actually infected with. This is why they came up as
a topic when we were talking about patient zero. Other times,
the virus infects a new, more vulnerable species like us
human beings. This is why most research says that bats
(16:39):
were responsible for the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Now,
what's weird is that bats don't seem to die as
quickly from these viruses. In Ghana, for instance, sixty eight
percent of fruit bats over ten years old had antibodies
in their system for the rabies LESA virus, but they
were all in good health. The same goes for those
(17:01):
that were carrying a bowla. There was only one presumed
bat to human transfer of the disease. So there's this
this fear that the bats are going to spread the
disease to us, right, and yet there's very little evidence
that there's bad to human transfer. Uh, but more along
the lines like we were talking about earlier, that it's
more like bats. In fact, other animals were encroaching upon
(17:23):
bat habitats. Therefore we get infected as it transfers from
animal to animals. Zoonotic infection now obligatory Simpsons reference. UM.
I remember there being an episode where it's it's explained
that Mr Burns Uh is still alive because he has
all of these illnesses that are I think these a
graphic that shows like all these illnesses trying to squeeze
(17:46):
through a door at the same time, and none of
them can get through, and that's why I can't die
from any of them. That's fascinating. So I can't help
but think of that, yeah, kind of Uh. In Australia,
thirty flying foxes. I told you they'd come up add
antibodies to the Hendra virus, and this indicated that they
had been infected with it at some point, but only
(18:06):
three percent at any given time we're actually carrying it,
so that's a small amount compared to the amount that
had been infected. The infected bats themselves had low levels
of this pathogen, indicating that they were somehow keeping it
at bay. Subsequently, it's really rare for the Hendra disease
to pass even from bats to horses. However, in eleven
(18:30):
it leapt over in twenty four cases, and the theory
for that is because the bats were stressed out uh
and that the this caused a surge in the level
of viruses that the bats were carrying and subsequently made
it easier for them to pass it on to horses.
This is going to be important later when we talk
about uh massive culing of bats when people go, oh,
(18:51):
their disease carriers. We've got to wipe them out, go
destroy their colonies, right or else they're going to give
us these diseases. That could only make things worse because
then you're stressing out the bat population, which makes the
diseases become even more powerful. Now, I want to throw
in a note on vampire bats here as well. So Um,
the author of Bill Shoot has a wonderful book titled
(19:11):
Dark Banquet that deals with vampiric organisms in general, but
a lot of it deals with bats. It's also a
vampire the gathering RPG men. It could be if you
want to do a very science oriented campaign. He also
has a book on cannibals out that I have not
read anyway. In the book, he points out that vampire
bats introduced the additional threat of a disease promoting wound.
(19:33):
The host survives the feeding, but the wound invites additional
organisms and infections. The bigger concern though, is going to
be raybies. So it's not the most deadly or the
most common batborn illness, but if the infection takes hold,
it's essentially fatal in humans and and and rather infamous
as well. Um, you know of all the pathogens affecting
(19:57):
humans and in bat populations overall, um rabies sero prevalence,
that's a number of persons in a population who test
positive for specific disease can reach fift And you have
some notes here about Trinidad. We were talking a little
bit about this earlier because of some Trinidadian folklore, there's
bats all over the place down there. Yeah and uh.
(20:18):
And this is an account that to Shoot mentions in
his book that I think is interesting. It definitely involves
both bats and disease, but also superstitions attempts to call
bat populations. So in Trinidad, bat transmitted rabies killed eighty
nine people and thousands of cattle between n and nineteen
(20:38):
thirty four. In thirty four, that's when the Trinidadian Medical
Department rolled out its anti rabies unit, and their job
was to respond to vampire bat attacks net and destroy
the vamps. So they they painted uh that they did
this by not only killing the bats on the side,
but they also painted poisonous paint on vampire bat decimating colonies.
(21:01):
It was a rough situation. Well, and I immediately think
to the current science and wonder, I wonder how much
they stressed out the bat population, further spreading disease. The
human think they certainly did, And Shoot points out that
superstition played apart in this as well. So local Trinidating
and the folklore told of creatures called suk unts, and
(21:24):
these are crones or hags that can shed their skin
at night and become a fiery, blood sucking ball and
you sprinkle rice on your doorstep to keep them away. Now,
there were also conservationists at the time, and they could
they combated the folklore and the general you know, fear
of disease associated with bats by spreading the message that look,
there are only two out of fifty eight bat species
(21:47):
on the island that are vampires, and if those two
only the common vampire bat or does Modus rotundus is
a significant rabies threat. Okay, So that yeah, so that
definitely sounds a situation where the fear of bats sort
of got the better of the human population and maybe
made the problem worse. So we've we've really outlined here
(22:09):
that Okay, these bats carry all these diseases, they don't
seem to be affected by it too much. What's the deal?
And you know, subsequently, why then does it transfer? Okay, well,
it seems like bats have superimmune systems. Again, something you
would think that Batman would have his power, right, like,
like that would be a cool power. He just never
(22:29):
gets I guess Batman just never gets sick anyway, because
but it's not like any villains are trying. Yeah, well,
that's kind of why the bats turns out have such
great immune systems. There's two schools of thought here, okay,
on whether bats actually carry a disproportionately high number of viruses.
The first school of thought goes like this, bat related
(22:51):
epidemics arise because there are so many species of bats,
and there's so many individual bats, that the emergence of
all these various diseases isn't surprising. Like Robert said at
the top, there's more than bats species. Bats comprise more
than twenty of the mammals on Earth. A single colony
can sometimes have millions of bats living in it, and
(23:13):
there may be a massive amount of bat diversity right.
And study on the Indian flying fox that giant bat
fifty five viruses were detected in its system. Fifty were
previously unknown, so they're carrying a lot. That's just one species.
We may be hearing about bat born epidemics more often
(23:37):
simply because of how humans are interacting with bats. Right,
We're encroaching it on their habitats. Subsequently, they suffer from
the stigma of being disease written and likewise, bats are
surveyed more often and are easier to catch than other
mammals too, so subsequently we're again interacting with them more,
maybe for studies. So some conservationists argue that the viruses
(24:00):
they carry aren't actually emerging infectious diseases, but they're simply
just new to us as human beings. And let's remember
to bats live in those packed colonies, right, so it's
super easy for them to pass viruses onto one another.
They also can fly thousands of kilometers, which subsequently makes
it easier for them to deliver viruses to further distances. Okay,
(24:24):
that's the first theory. Here's the second, like wolverine healing
factor immune systems theory. Okay, bats have a special physiology
and lifestyle that makes them exceptionally good at hosting viruses.
Bats live between three and ten times longer than other
(24:45):
mammals their size, and we used to think that this
was because of hibernation, but there's there's been a lot
more research into this lately. If you inject a bat
with bacterial toxins that would normally trigger an immune response
in mammals, a bat will have no fever and no
spike in white blood cells. Now, research published in shows
(25:08):
that while bat genomes contain many of the same ingredients
as other mammals. Bats use these genomes differently. Bat genes
coding for proteins detect and repaired damaged DNA, and they
are much more prevalent than we had previously thought. So
this new line of thinking is that bat genes are
(25:28):
doing something that helps them survive and reproduce, and that
they subsequently pass these awesome genes along to subsequent generations.
So those same DNA repair genes that I was talking
about are frequently the targets for invading viruses. In fact,
key genes and DNA damage repair are also involved in
(25:49):
tumor development and immunity, and this might be why bats
are evolving in such a way. Now here's a crazy anecdote.
Bats almost never developed tumors. Perhaps this is because these
repair genes are just constantly outpacing malignant growths. They almost
never get cancer. When you give them tumor causing drugs,
(26:11):
they're less likely to develop cancer than other mammals, So
that's pretty wild. In humans and mice, defenses like these
repair genes, those are activated in response to a threat, right,
So uh, sort of like we're talking about in our
other episode this week. You know, it's a stimulised system.
If you have a trigger, it activates it. In this case,
(26:34):
in bats, it seems to be perpetually turned on. Their
immune system is just always on, and that might be
why the viruses they carry are kept below a point
where they can actually harm their host. Also, bats seem
to have lost an entire branch of their immune system
that's made up of inflammas homes. These are the receptors
(26:57):
and sensors that induce inflammation, so they've all to turn
down their inflammatory response to various threats, including viruses. So
basically bats are just like, ain't no big thing I've
got I've got fifty viruses in me right now, right now.
Why you're probably going, well, why bats and not me? Right?
The thought here is is because of the high metabolic
(27:20):
rate bats have to keep up to maintain their energy
they produce while they're flying. Otherwise, the stress of flying
itself would damage their cells and their DNA if it
wasn't so quickly detected and repaired. So the ability to
carry all these lethal viruses may come actually as a
co evolutionary accident. Bats are the only mammals that are
(27:42):
capable of powered flight, which is super demanding in terms
of energy, and it subsequently is very tough on their metabolism.
A bat's heart can beat over a thousand times a
minute if they need it to, and their metabolic rate
in the air increases thirty four times. When you compare
that to rodents, again not the same species, but exercising rodents,
(28:03):
they only jump up to eight times their metabolic rate.
When your metabolism is as ramped up as bats are,
it spews out free radicals, and these are energetic particles
that can damage cells and kickstart inflammation. So it's possible
that bats evolved specifically for flight and that that just
(28:24):
casually also allows them to avoid overreacting to viral infections. Now,
another note on vampire bats. I think we've touched on
this in the past, and we've discussed real world vampires,
but but this makes the vampire bat situation even crazier.
They have this crazy metabolism to deal with the costs
of high costs of powered flight, and they're depending on
(28:45):
the nutrient deprived feast of blood power everything. Right. This
is like if you met somebody and you sit and
you ask them, hey, what are you into and what
do you do for a living and they say, well, uh,
I have I have a hobby of mine is just
collecting really expensive wines, and my profession is hot dog
photography only hot dog photography. And you're like, ooh, I
(29:07):
don't know, guy, that sounds like you've got a really
expensive hobby and and an extremely specific career here that
I can't imagine pays the dividends necessary. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
the idea about the bat immune system seems to be
supported when we look at their mitochondria. It seems that
(29:29):
their mitochondria has undergone more evolutionary changes than the mitochondria
that's in other mammals. Individual bats have an assortment of
mitochondria rather than the way that most organisms like us
have just carbon copies of it. This seems to help
them deal with the damaging free radicals that are produced
during flight, all of which can explain their long lives.
(29:53):
The tumor resistance and more. Bat mitochondria also might be
like these crucial command centers that sent and decide whether
a cell should fight or just self destruct. So they've
got they've really got this, like, uh, you know, to
use the same metaphor that we're using in this week's
Demon episode, like they've got a great home security system
(30:14):
when it's all like you know, in terms of dealing
with viruses, dealing with the metabolic breakdown in their system, etcetera.
Another hypothesis that's related to bat flight, though generate, is
that they generate so much heat that it actually mimics
a fever. Now, you know, fever's combat infection by raising
our body temperature to levels that will kill or disable
(30:36):
any invading pathogen. But maybe bat's body temperatures are so
high when they fly that they're just inadvertently killing viruses off. Yeah,
this is an interesting take on on bat immunities. Um,
there's a two thousand fifteen study Publishment Biology Letters that
that hypothesize that a lot of it, I could come
down to these drastic temperature changes over the course of
(30:59):
just a single day. So a bat sleeps in the day,
temperature drops to conserve energy, then slows the pathogen spread
in the process, and then it goes out to hunt,
in which case it's temperatures exceed a hundred degrees fahrenheit.
And this which basically involves a daily fever to increase
the activity of certain immune sets. Yeah, so the fascinating
(31:22):
stuff that uh, is not incorporated into Batman lawyer. Batman
doesn't have a fever, or he's not like burning up
with he's burning up with rage at the death of
his parents. That's true. Now here's another interesting thing about
bat metabolism. So they're heterotherms, meaning they can exhibit characteristics
of both warm and cold blooded organisms. But they're distinct
(31:42):
from all other heterotherms in that, no matter what the
season they're resting temperature and metabolic rate is dependent on
a non ambient temperature. They're the only mammals in which
the resting metabolism is a direct function of the body
temperature rather than the ambient temperature. And that came from
an article by Raymond J. Hawk, the metabolic rates and
(32:04):
body temperatures of bats. And some of you are probably wondering, well, okay,
bats fly, but so do all those other creatures that
you mentioned earlier. What about birds? You know, do birds
have the same superpower? Well, birds are also long lived,
and that's possibly because flight enables them to just evade predators.
But uh, it's also because flight increase their chances of
(32:26):
developing a mechanism to reduce cellular damage. Very similar, right,
So the metabolic thing is similar. I don't know necessarily
that the body temperature thing equals out, probably because uh,
we're talking about mammals versus birds, totally different anatomies. Either way,
some scientists still worry that bat born viruses are so
(32:47):
lethal because they've evolved to withstand the bats incredibly active
immune system. But if they transferred humans, right, so, like
rabies or a bola, these viruses are super well at
whip to defeat our weaker immune systems. So subsequently, that's
why we have such a hard time dealing with these Wow.
(33:07):
So in in the Dune universe, the bat would be
like a hell world where you where you evolve and
develop a highly effective mode of shock troops. Yeah. Alright,
let's take another break, and when we get back, we're
going to close out by talking about, hey, don't kill
those bats because we might be able to use them
(33:27):
to lead to improvements in our health. Alright, we're back,
so so hit me, Christian, how how can we potentially
become more bat like? Am I gonna need a telepod
and a bat and we're going to splice ourselves together
into a man bat? Yeah? You know, that seems like
one way that would work pretty well. But it would
you know, like like with Man bat you would kind
(33:50):
of like lose total control of your personality and probably
murder your wife. But uh, and you wouldn't want to
do the Batman thing because, like we said, Batman, it's
just a guy in a cost you him. He's got
some gadgets. He's not really uh you know, cranking up
the metabolism. He isn't ever great immune system man Bat
for anyone listening is not familiar is of the the
(34:10):
bat human hybrid in the Batman comics. I remember, he's
kind of what you think of when you first hear
Batman's that, like he would it's like a wear bat
with like a ripped blue jeans totally. Yeah. Yeah. Um. Now,
as a result of recent viruses, whole bat colonies are
being killed off in the name of public health, as
(34:31):
we mentioned earlier, and experts say, look, we shouldn't be
afraid of bats because the viruses they carry comparatively hardly
ever transmit to human beings. In fact, killing bats may
make things worse. Like I mentioned, the stress on the
remaining bats could actually raise their viral loads, which could
lead to more transference to other animals. But what if
(34:56):
bats could hold the key to improving human health and
allowing us to live longer. Well, if we look at
knowledge and we try to figure it out how their
immune systems work, and that leads to the development of
drugs that would improve our health and lifespan, that's one
way that we could do it. So we basically reverse
engineer those proteins and then we turn it into medicine,
(35:18):
or we could use gene editing technology to make human
genomes more like bats, which would give us similar immune
system properties. Although I have to wonder if there would
be some kind of like drawback with that in the
sense that like, if your metabolism was that fast but
(35:38):
you weren't flying all the time, wouldn't you just be
constantly like hungry, I mean, so you'd have to eat
a lot more. Um. Maybe that's where we start eating bugs.
Researchers are also trying to identify the proteins that specifically
allow bats to control inflammation and other processes that are
(35:59):
associated with disease. So it's possible that we could one
day use these proteins or a version of them to
treat disorders where inflammation is a problem, like, for instance,
rheumatoid arthritis or heart disease. So we could use these
to stop viruses like a bola also from killing us. Like,
if we figure out how the bat system works, then
(36:23):
we apply it to the human anatomy system, we could
potentially be resistant to a bola and rabies in the
same way that they are, or maybe other viruses that
we haven't even discovered yet. So to bring it back
to Batman, you do have to to I guess acknowledge
that Batman, if nothing else, he's long lived, He's resistant
to illness and death. You have if you've taken to
(36:45):
account of the character hit comic book stands for the
first time in nine and assuming Wayne was what at
least twenty at the time, He's still going strong today
at close to a hundred over a hundred years old. Yeah,
Ben Affleck doesn't look good day over nine. Yeah, I
mean that speaks to the power of the mythology I
(37:07):
think of Batman in popular culture for sure, but yeah,
it's definitely it seems like Batman and other superheroes are
certainly long lived, but there's no explanation in the the
the meta text of why Batman has been around for
so long right, even in like some of them, Like
there's a do you remember Batman Beyond that cartoon that
(37:28):
was like set in the future. Yeah, and he's so
now you have the old Bruce Wayne. Because this is
gonna be my next question. What is the oldest depiction
of Bruce Wayne and or Batman in a comic book
or cartoon? Yeah, I think it's that um and in
that Even then, he's still kind of a badass, uh
in the bat Dog comes up in that because he's
(37:49):
got a um ace. The bath Hound hangs out with
him in the cave all the time. But there's also
another depiction. I think it's in Kingdom Come, which is
a sort of alternate universe story. Again older Batman, but
he like we're more like sort of like an Iron
Man armor version of like the Batman's suit that allows
him to go out and uh fight crime and deal
(38:12):
with other superheroes and stuff. Old dude in a power
armors basically Yeah, okay, interesting, alright, but none of it
had to do with his metabolism or gene editing. Alright, Well,
well there you have it. We've talked about the bats,
bats and diseases. We've gone back and forth a little
bit about Batman, and now we we leave it to you,
(38:35):
we ask you for feedback. Yeah, so you know, let
us know. I want to make sure that we gave
bats a fair shake. Let us know if you feel
that that was the case. Let us know if you
like bats or if you you know, you think we're
totally wrong here and you're like, all bats must be annihilated. Right. Also,
look to Facebook because we're probably going to be doing
(38:55):
a Facebook live about I would imagine Demons and Bats
that week that these episodes come out related to trailers
of movies that have bats in them. Do you remember
that bat movie that had Um Lou Diamond Phillips in it,
who was literally called just bats. No, I don't think
remember that came out in the nineties. It was a
pretty terrible horror movie. We might have to pull that
one out, man. I can think of at least a
(39:17):
couple of that related to our films for the Path.
It would be fun to discuss. I think. I think
we've got a good trailer talk coming up for us.
So if you like watching those, or if you've never
seen one before, tune in on Facebook. You don't have
to watch it when it's live. It'll sit on our
Facebook page. Usually Robert, Joe and I sitting around for
about thirty minutes talking about the science related to this
week's episodes, tying into our favorite monster movie trailers, so
(39:42):
you can find that on our Facebook page. You can
also contact us through Facebook. We're also on Twitter, We're
on tumbler, We're on Instagram. We've also got stuff to
blow your Mind dot com, where there's all those bat
podcasts that Julie and Robert did in the past. If
you want to just binge listen to bad information, we
got it. And if you want to get touch with
us the old fashioned way, just hit us up at
(40:03):
blow the Mind at house stuff works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
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