May 4, 2010 • 17 mins
As the only flying mammals, bats play unique roles in our world's ecology. Yet in caves across North America more than a million bats have fallen prey to a mysterious affliction known as white nose syndrome. Tune in and learn more in this podcast.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Wow, hey, guys, welcome to the podcast.
This is Alison I don't know if the science editor
how stuff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb,
science writer at how stuff works dot com. And we're
(00:23):
talking about bats this week. Um, that's in danger. My
last encounter with bats really because I mean, I know
they're around, but I don't really see them. Um. But
the last time I really had an experience with bats
was when I was on my honeymoon. Um and my
wife were in Yalapa, Mexico, near Puerta Viata, and it's
a beautiful place and they have all these like huts
(00:45):
that you stay in, and um, we we noticed when
we got in that they were at the top of
the hut. Say, these like plastic screens, um, blocking off
the outside and the first without I guess they you know,
just forgot to put a window up there that you know,
maybe it is raining. We found out later it's such
an optimist dress. Uh. I found out later that these
(01:06):
were to keep the fruit bats from coming in because
the fruit bats will like fly around on the island
and they'll apparently get like eat just gorge themselves on
fruit and then go shack up wherever they can find cover,
and if they can get inside one of these huts,
they'll do it, and they'll just hang up in there
and then just crap all over the place during during
the during their stay there. So like people would were
(01:28):
staying here, you know often I'm thinking on you know,
romantic getaways or their their honeymoon or some special vacation,
and it takes a lot of trouble to get there
if you're going this like little boat is this really
jarring open boat ride to get there, and then you know,
you put your stut luggage inside, leave to hit the beach,
come back and there's backuana over everything. Yeah, that's not
the way to kick off on honeymoon. But luckily our
(01:51):
we didn't encounter that. We just encountered plagues of crabs
every night. Oh, like the crabs you mentioned an amazing
infestation about like that, Like lots and lots of crabs.
It's like crawling around. You had to just get in
the bed at night and just not get out. Yeah,
my my bad experiences are are not nearly so exciting. Um.
I remember growing up in the Northeast we'd be hanging out,
(02:11):
maybe playing a game of kickballs. The sun was setting
and the bats would start to come out, being primarily
nocturnal creatures, and we did this weird thing where we
would throw our shoes up into the air to see
if the bats would go after them, and they would,
you know, they would fly flat out and dive bomb
for shoes. But they never and they never picked him up.
I mentioned our shoes probably I never saw that, you know,
(02:33):
fly away with one of my shoes on. But yeah,
that was pretty much my bad experience. I've heard of
people jumping on trampolines before, and if they're jumping on
them eyed or around dusk, that their their hair will
fly up in the air and the bats will come
in like dive in their hair. That that's enough to
if you need another reason not to jump on a trampoline,
there you go. So Unfortunately for the insect eating bats,
(02:57):
there's a pretty serious bat plague going around that you
may have heard about because it's been around I think
since two thousand five, two thousand and six in the winter.
They basically a caver discovered this right here, Yeah, as
a caver up in upstate New York. I think in
a house cave near Albany, New York, and this caver
took the first known pictures of them of bats with
(03:19):
what they're calling white nose syndrome. Yeah, they're just there's
a number of bats in there. They've got this white
stuff in their nose. Some of them were kind of emaciated,
some of them were dead. And people get to figure
out that there's something wrong here. Yeah, and it's not
just something, it's it's a pretty darn big deal because
more than a million bats have died so far, and
(03:39):
at least three endangered species, the the Indiana bat, their
Virginia figured bat, and possibly the gray bat are at risk.
And so this, this white nose syndrome is causing a
lot of trouble in northeastern bat populations. And the syndrome
is actually related to a fungus. And you like, you
like the name of particular fungus, So why don't you say, Oh, yeah,
(04:02):
it's if I can pronounce it, it's uh Geo Micys destructions. Yeah,
pretty pretty serious name. Could be it could be the
name of a metal band. So it's thought to be
a non native pathogen that it was recently introduced to
the United States and it's actually, um, it's related to
geo mic s panora, which causes skin infections and humans.
That also would make a good I think a band
(04:24):
name saying yeah, what was the other band name that
you're that you came up with? Oh? Um? Yeah. The
the place where a the area of the cave where
the bat that holds up and for the winter is
called hybernacular or it's a hybernaculum hybernacular, it's the plural.
But yeah, that's like if you if you're out there
right now and you have a death metal band and
(04:45):
you're like, what are we gonna call ourselves hyberna hybernaculum,
that's what you need to go with. Yeah, okay, so
um back to geo mics destruct ends the other band name.
So so far, white nose syndrome has only been found
in the insect eating cave hibernating bats. They haven't found
it in bats that use like buildings or other manmade structures.
Um and biologists don't think it's actually gonna be found
(05:07):
in urban environments. Bats with this particular syndrome, aside from
looking like they've been eating powdered donuts, are doing lines
or whatever it is these bats have been up to.
They have they have skin ulcers that the fungus causes,
and like Robert said before, they're you know, really really skinny.
And what happens is they're hibernating patterns are disrupted. Yeah,
(05:28):
they started flying out to like eat bugs in the
dead of winter. Yeah, this is going to happen. Right,
That's not gonna happen. You know what this reminded me
of I am sometimes I read to one of my
kids this. Don't you ever hear the book Blueberries for
sal Okay, So there's this book and salad, her mom McCloskey,
Robert McCloskey, one like a caldicot. I don't know. It's
(05:49):
one of these classic kids books. So they go out,
you know, and they're they're picking blueberries, um sound and
her mom and there's a mother bear and a baby
bear who are eating berries just to start up for
the winter. And so I kind of just imagine, you
know what, if you know, grizzly bear woke up out
of its hibernation and you know, started crashing around the
winter trying to find these berries, It's not going to happen, right,
(06:10):
So the same deal with the bats, so they're not
gonna be able to find their favorite prey, which is insects.
So it's disrupting their behavior as well as it's like
hurting their minds as well as their bodies. I say,
the fund is ultimately could cause them to to die
by way of starvation. So biolog just likely think that
um white nose syndrome is spreading from environments to bats,
(06:33):
and then from bats to bats because they live in
these crazy close quarters, you know, with thousands upon thousands
of bats, and they're they're keeping actually encouraging cavers to
uh spelunkers to stay out of these caves as well, right,
because we might be part of the problem spreading it
from one cave environment to another. Yeah, so the US
for Service cracked down. They closed like thousands of caves
(06:54):
and two thousand nine and they're trying to also see
about like raising some in captivity to sort of safeguard
the popular lations. But left we heard it hasn't actually
been working all that well. Yeah, the National Zoo which
awarded some funds to raise a Virginia big eared bats,
one of the endangered species of bats that they're worried about, say,
they had a population of forty and I think they
(07:15):
are left with eleven. It's just really tricky, like they
don't know how to raise bats in captivity. They're having
trouble getting the bats to eat from these you know,
trays with little worms on them. Yeah, it's just not
not their natural way of doing things at all. Yeah,
we don't really have enough to get a bunch of
kids um or you know, your childhood friends out there
(07:36):
throwing bugs up in the air form. That's what's gonna work.
Shoes shoes full of worms. So they think about white
nose syndrome is that there's no cure for it, so
we really just have to contain its spread. Right. Another
tricky thing about bats is that they're really susceptible to
extinction because of the way they reproduce. Each female has
one baby bat like per per cycle, so I mean
(07:57):
it's per year, per year, so it's uh, you know,
you one female bat dies, that's going to really cut
into the into their population. Uh. They're also long living.
They live about what thirty years, so so yeah, they're
some Some animals that reproduced at a greater rate wouldn't
be as though as hard hit by this like a bunny. Yeah, bunnies. Yeah,
(08:19):
so it's really unfair. Why are there no bunny diseases
going around? White bunny knows? Isn't there that one? What
is it called tolmia? What happens when you live in Atlanta?
Like capital of public health? Um? So, the bottom line
about this fungal infection is that they're not sure if
by itself it's causing the bats to die. They've tested
(08:39):
some infected bats because they want to know if the
infection is occurring with other stuff like viruses or bacteria
or parasites, but they haven't found anything yet. It could
be something that's affecting their they're immune function and making
them more suscepted, susceptible to this white fungus. And the
other thing is just because they've tested for known organisms,
(08:59):
does I mean that there's not some new virus out
there that is a at work in the bats and
the insect eating bats, Which is another reason to keep
cabs and spelkers away because you never know when one
of these are gonna make the jump from one species
to another. Oh, they're so far they don't think that
white nose syndrome is harmful to humans. So far. I'm
just saying, no, don't be doing that. I don't want
(09:21):
you to go spreading false alarm. So I do want
to talk a little bit about fungal infections because they're
pretty freaking interesting. Um. The thing about them, like we
were just saying, is that they're opportunistic, right, So of
course the fungus can cause diseases in people who have
regular old immune systems. Um, Like there's one in Arizona.
You know that's transmitted through the dust. You know, if
(09:42):
you breathe in the soil, it's it's transmitted by that.
You wind up with pulmonary problems and breathing problems whatever.
But a lot of times you'll find fungal infection occurring
people with subpart immune system. Say you have a person
with AIDS whose white blood cell count has fallen pretty
darn low all of a sudden, some running them all. Um,
fungal infections, say, like thresh is going to start giving
(10:05):
you all sorts of headaches. But one of the most
feared fungal infection stems from Cryptococcus so after TV cryptococlemaningius
has emerged as one of these like crazy fungal infections
that is really just dealing the final blow to patients
with AIDS. So it's kind of a cain if you
imagine this um in bats, you know, imagine that there's
something at work in the in the bats immune system,
(10:27):
and then maybe this white nose syndrome is dealing the
final blow. The bottom line is they don't know. I mean,
at least in people with fungal infections, they can treat
them with anti fungals or you know, if you have AIDS,
you can treat them with anti ritro vils. But how
are we going to do that with bats? Good luck?
You might be asking yourself if you're not just a
natural animal lover and bat lover, um, like, why do
(10:49):
we care? Why are we sinking money into this um?
And the reason is that bats, in addition to just
being you know, fantastic, they eat a lot of insects.
That's um. I mean, they they play an important role
in the ecosystem. And what they do is they eat
lots of insects and they also inspired Batman. Well yeah,
but Batman will still be here. These guys go the
way of the But the little brown bat, one of
(11:13):
the most common North American bat species, can catch and
eat as many as twelve mosquitoes in one hour. The
famous colony of Mexican treetail bats that lives underneath the
Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas will eat up to
thirty thousand pounds of insects in a single night. That'd
be like, um, I mean, I don't even know the
mathematical proportions there, but I mean it sounds like like
(11:36):
if you just hit the buffet every evening and just
loaded up on like General Sis chicken. Yeah, these guys
are still flying around for the whole night. Yeah, I mean,
I don't think humans could walk if they ate this much,
noting the kmmoto dragon could maybe do it, definitely, the
Commodo dragon could do it. Agriculturally speaking, Um, a lot
of these are pasts that harmer crops. So if you
(11:57):
don't have bats there too to take care of them,
then how are you gonna get rid of them? What
are you gonna spread more DDT around? Which, in addition
to being rather harmful um to the environment, yet a
number of these insects have have evolved resistances to it. Yeah,
So you remove the bats from the equation and things
could get a little dicier agriculturally speaking, But I should
(12:18):
stress that it's not exactly bats alone or controlling mosquito
populations or insect populations. It is sort of a multi
pronged approach. Yeah, I mean it's again, it's like they're
a part of the ecosystem. The ecosystem is like this
big Jenga puzzle, and if you start removing a little,
um little blocks from the Jenga tower, then the tower
(12:38):
is gonna get unstable. Yeah, especially if you play Jengo
with your feet. Yeah, which have you read that that
we tried one, So it's really hard. Yeah, it sounds
like a disaster. Yeah, but you know it's Jengo, so
it's not like anything's kind of like it sounds like
an analogy. It's like when you just playing Jenga with
your feet on that way. Yeah, maybe, well, suicide from
(12:59):
agricult actual implications. There are also implications for public health,
as you might imagine. So mosquitoes like to carry diseases
such as malaria or rest nile. So all of a sudden,
if you have a booming mosquito population, um, we could
see an uptick in those kind of diseases and humans. Yeah,
I mean you can actually purchase bat houses to encourage
(13:19):
bats to live in your property so they'll eat the mosquitoes.
You know. I would like to have one, actually, yeah,
I really want to get one of those. And I
want to get an owl house because I like hav
an owls. About maybe a woodpacker house. I don't know.
Whatever I can have flying around eating bugs is good.
So what can we do about white nose syndrome? Well,
you know there are a couple of things. Um, we
could try to contain the spread, as the US Force
(13:39):
Services done, you know, closing caves and things like that.
And we can always throw some money at the problem. Yeah,
and encourage your your lawmakers to support funding, and we
can try to learn how to raise endangered bats and
captivity fast as the Smithsonian Zoo is doing with sort
of mixed Look. Hey, actually you can even blog about it.
There's the There was a white nose blog hosted by
(14:01):
the US Fish and Wildlife Service. I did check it out.
There was only one entry. It was really cute though.
She was a biologist and she was she put you
know her the bats like that would really be more
interesting for blogging. It was a biologist blogging about bats.
Try saying that ten times fast. And you also can
can help out in the in the bat fight. You
(14:22):
can report active winter or summer roosting sides. You can
if you see bats flying around in the winter like
a bunch of them, not like a loane bat, but
like a bunch of bats, you need to contact somebody,
your local wildlife service. And you know, you could always
build a bad house, especially since that we most of
these cases have been isolated caves. The more bad houses
(14:42):
the better. So in case all of this doesn't really
make you care about bats, then we are. Our final
point is what about that i guano? Baguano, as it
turns out, is an amazingly useful substance. Yeah, it plays
a vital role in cave ecologies. Um, I imagine everybody's
seen the television series Planet Earth from a few years back,
(15:05):
same people who made Life, Yeah, I which we wrote
a whole lot of content around. But there's a whole
episode about the ecology inside a particular cave and there's
like just a mountain of bat guando and and like
their insects live live that live off the guano and
live in the guano. Um, yeah, take that away, you know,
remove the bats from the equation, and there are a
number of other species that depend on the bats. It's
(15:26):
like the snake. Like the snake. There's a snake that
jumps out of like like like he's blind and he
like here's the bat flying by, and it will just
strike out and like grab it bat out of midair.
It's amazing. That is pretty amazing. Yeah, So bat guano
is actually pretty useful for its nitrogen. It's pretty nitrogen heavy,
and that's pretty useful when it comes to you know,
(15:47):
say making a bomb, making household cleaner. Oh yeah, Actually
two things on that. First of all, I remember correctly,
there's a part in Coral McCarthy's Blood Meridian where they
they're being trailed by these by one tribe or another,
these bunch of this ragtag bunch of cowboys and uh
and they they're completely out of ammo and they end
(16:07):
up like hitting up a cave and like scraping up
all this back wando um. And then they then they
think they go to like a volcano, and then they
start and they get some more ingredients to make gunpowder,
and they like put it all together the last minute
and fight off the villains slowing their all villains in
that book. But then, um, and as far as it
being a cleaning agent that I guess could maybe be
(16:27):
used to uh to one's advantage in places like Lapa.
You encourage the bats to come in to use the
restroom on everything, and then you've got a natural cleaning
agent right there, right then you don't have to hire
somebody to do it. You just you know, and get
the bats, get them to scrub, and then you've got
it taken care of. Good points, Robert. So if you
(16:50):
want to hear more, you can come check out the
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our podcast for the week or about, and learn about
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is shoot just a comment too. We love to hear
from you, um, whether you have a question about bats
or white nose syndrome or a suggestion for a podcast,
send us an email at science stuff at how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
(17:18):
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house stuff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Wow, hey, guys, welcome to the podcast.
This is Alison I don't know if the science editor
how stuff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb,
science writer at how stuff works dot com. And we're
(00:23):
talking about bats this week. Um, that's in danger. My
last encounter with bats really because I mean, I know
they're around, but I don't really see them. Um. But
the last time I really had an experience with bats
was when I was on my honeymoon. Um and my
wife were in Yalapa, Mexico, near Puerta Viata, and it's
a beautiful place and they have all these like huts
(00:45):
that you stay in, and um, we we noticed when
we got in that they were at the top of
the hut. Say, these like plastic screens, um, blocking off
the outside and the first without I guess they you know,
just forgot to put a window up there that you know,
maybe it is raining. We found out later it's such
an optimist dress. Uh. I found out later that these
(01:06):
were to keep the fruit bats from coming in because
the fruit bats will like fly around on the island
and they'll apparently get like eat just gorge themselves on
fruit and then go shack up wherever they can find cover,
and if they can get inside one of these huts,
they'll do it, and they'll just hang up in there
and then just crap all over the place during during
the during their stay there. So like people would were
(01:28):
staying here, you know often I'm thinking on you know,
romantic getaways or their their honeymoon or some special vacation,
and it takes a lot of trouble to get there
if you're going this like little boat is this really
jarring open boat ride to get there, and then you know,
you put your stut luggage inside, leave to hit the beach,
come back and there's backuana over everything. Yeah, that's not
the way to kick off on honeymoon. But luckily our
(01:51):
we didn't encounter that. We just encountered plagues of crabs
every night. Oh, like the crabs you mentioned an amazing
infestation about like that, Like lots and lots of crabs.
It's like crawling around. You had to just get in
the bed at night and just not get out. Yeah,
my my bad experiences are are not nearly so exciting. Um.
I remember growing up in the Northeast we'd be hanging out,
(02:11):
maybe playing a game of kickballs. The sun was setting
and the bats would start to come out, being primarily
nocturnal creatures, and we did this weird thing where we
would throw our shoes up into the air to see
if the bats would go after them, and they would,
you know, they would fly flat out and dive bomb
for shoes. But they never and they never picked him up.
I mentioned our shoes probably I never saw that, you know,
(02:33):
fly away with one of my shoes on. But yeah,
that was pretty much my bad experience. I've heard of
people jumping on trampolines before, and if they're jumping on
them eyed or around dusk, that their their hair will
fly up in the air and the bats will come
in like dive in their hair. That that's enough to
if you need another reason not to jump on a trampoline,
there you go. So Unfortunately for the insect eating bats,
(02:57):
there's a pretty serious bat plague going around that you
may have heard about because it's been around I think
since two thousand five, two thousand and six in the winter.
They basically a caver discovered this right here, Yeah, as
a caver up in upstate New York. I think in
a house cave near Albany, New York, and this caver
took the first known pictures of them of bats with
(03:19):
what they're calling white nose syndrome. Yeah, they're just there's
a number of bats in there. They've got this white
stuff in their nose. Some of them were kind of emaciated,
some of them were dead. And people get to figure
out that there's something wrong here. Yeah, and it's not
just something, it's it's a pretty darn big deal because
more than a million bats have died so far, and
(03:39):
at least three endangered species, the the Indiana bat, their
Virginia figured bat, and possibly the gray bat are at risk.
And so this, this white nose syndrome is causing a
lot of trouble in northeastern bat populations. And the syndrome
is actually related to a fungus. And you like, you
like the name of particular fungus, So why don't you say, Oh, yeah,
(04:02):
it's if I can pronounce it, it's uh Geo Micys destructions. Yeah,
pretty pretty serious name. Could be it could be the
name of a metal band. So it's thought to be
a non native pathogen that it was recently introduced to
the United States and it's actually, um, it's related to
geo mic s panora, which causes skin infections and humans.
That also would make a good I think a band
(04:24):
name saying yeah, what was the other band name that
you're that you came up with? Oh? Um? Yeah. The
the place where a the area of the cave where
the bat that holds up and for the winter is
called hybernacular or it's a hybernaculum hybernacular, it's the plural.
But yeah, that's like if you if you're out there
right now and you have a death metal band and
(04:45):
you're like, what are we gonna call ourselves hyberna hybernaculum,
that's what you need to go with. Yeah, okay, so
um back to geo mics destruct ends the other band name.
So so far, white nose syndrome has only been found
in the insect eating cave hibernating bats. They haven't found
it in bats that use like buildings or other manmade structures.
Um and biologists don't think it's actually gonna be found
(05:07):
in urban environments. Bats with this particular syndrome, aside from
looking like they've been eating powdered donuts, are doing lines
or whatever it is these bats have been up to.
They have they have skin ulcers that the fungus causes,
and like Robert said before, they're you know, really really skinny.
And what happens is they're hibernating patterns are disrupted. Yeah,
(05:28):
they started flying out to like eat bugs in the
dead of winter. Yeah, this is going to happen. Right,
That's not gonna happen. You know what this reminded me
of I am sometimes I read to one of my
kids this. Don't you ever hear the book Blueberries for
sal Okay, So there's this book and salad, her mom McCloskey,
Robert McCloskey, one like a caldicot. I don't know. It's
(05:49):
one of these classic kids books. So they go out,
you know, and they're they're picking blueberries, um sound and
her mom and there's a mother bear and a baby
bear who are eating berries just to start up for
the winter. And so I kind of just imagine, you
know what, if you know, grizzly bear woke up out
of its hibernation and you know, started crashing around the
winter trying to find these berries, It's not going to happen, right,
(06:10):
So the same deal with the bats, so they're not
gonna be able to find their favorite prey, which is insects.
So it's disrupting their behavior as well as it's like
hurting their minds as well as their bodies. I say,
the fund is ultimately could cause them to to die
by way of starvation. So biolog just likely think that
um white nose syndrome is spreading from environments to bats,
(06:33):
and then from bats to bats because they live in
these crazy close quarters, you know, with thousands upon thousands
of bats, and they're they're keeping actually encouraging cavers to
uh spelunkers to stay out of these caves as well, right,
because we might be part of the problem spreading it
from one cave environment to another. Yeah, so the US
for Service cracked down. They closed like thousands of caves
(06:54):
and two thousand nine and they're trying to also see
about like raising some in captivity to sort of safeguard
the popular lations. But left we heard it hasn't actually
been working all that well. Yeah, the National Zoo which
awarded some funds to raise a Virginia big eared bats,
one of the endangered species of bats that they're worried about, say,
they had a population of forty and I think they
(07:15):
are left with eleven. It's just really tricky, like they
don't know how to raise bats in captivity. They're having
trouble getting the bats to eat from these you know,
trays with little worms on them. Yeah, it's just not
not their natural way of doing things at all. Yeah,
we don't really have enough to get a bunch of
kids um or you know, your childhood friends out there
(07:36):
throwing bugs up in the air form. That's what's gonna work.
Shoes shoes full of worms. So they think about white
nose syndrome is that there's no cure for it, so
we really just have to contain its spread. Right. Another
tricky thing about bats is that they're really susceptible to
extinction because of the way they reproduce. Each female has
one baby bat like per per cycle, so I mean
(07:57):
it's per year, per year, so it's uh, you know,
you one female bat dies, that's going to really cut
into the into their population. Uh. They're also long living.
They live about what thirty years, so so yeah, they're
some Some animals that reproduced at a greater rate wouldn't
be as though as hard hit by this like a bunny. Yeah, bunnies. Yeah,
(08:19):
so it's really unfair. Why are there no bunny diseases
going around? White bunny knows? Isn't there that one? What
is it called tolmia? What happens when you live in Atlanta?
Like capital of public health? Um? So, the bottom line
about this fungal infection is that they're not sure if
by itself it's causing the bats to die. They've tested
(08:39):
some infected bats because they want to know if the
infection is occurring with other stuff like viruses or bacteria
or parasites, but they haven't found anything yet. It could
be something that's affecting their they're immune function and making
them more suscepted, susceptible to this white fungus. And the
other thing is just because they've tested for known organisms,
(08:59):
does I mean that there's not some new virus out
there that is a at work in the bats and
the insect eating bats, Which is another reason to keep
cabs and spelkers away because you never know when one
of these are gonna make the jump from one species
to another. Oh, they're so far they don't think that
white nose syndrome is harmful to humans. So far. I'm
just saying, no, don't be doing that. I don't want
(09:21):
you to go spreading false alarm. So I do want
to talk a little bit about fungal infections because they're
pretty freaking interesting. Um. The thing about them, like we
were just saying, is that they're opportunistic, right, So of
course the fungus can cause diseases in people who have
regular old immune systems. Um, Like there's one in Arizona.
You know that's transmitted through the dust. You know, if
(09:42):
you breathe in the soil, it's it's transmitted by that.
You wind up with pulmonary problems and breathing problems whatever.
But a lot of times you'll find fungal infection occurring
people with subpart immune system. Say you have a person
with AIDS whose white blood cell count has fallen pretty
darn low all of a sudden, some running them all. Um,
fungal infections, say, like thresh is going to start giving
(10:05):
you all sorts of headaches. But one of the most
feared fungal infection stems from Cryptococcus so after TV cryptococlemaningius
has emerged as one of these like crazy fungal infections
that is really just dealing the final blow to patients
with AIDS. So it's kind of a cain if you
imagine this um in bats, you know, imagine that there's
something at work in the in the bats immune system,
(10:27):
and then maybe this white nose syndrome is dealing the
final blow. The bottom line is they don't know. I mean,
at least in people with fungal infections, they can treat
them with anti fungals or you know, if you have AIDS,
you can treat them with anti ritro vils. But how
are we going to do that with bats? Good luck?
You might be asking yourself if you're not just a
natural animal lover and bat lover, um, like, why do
(10:49):
we care? Why are we sinking money into this um?
And the reason is that bats, in addition to just
being you know, fantastic, they eat a lot of insects.
That's um. I mean, they they play an important role
in the ecosystem. And what they do is they eat
lots of insects and they also inspired Batman. Well yeah,
but Batman will still be here. These guys go the
way of the But the little brown bat, one of
(11:13):
the most common North American bat species, can catch and
eat as many as twelve mosquitoes in one hour. The
famous colony of Mexican treetail bats that lives underneath the
Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas will eat up to
thirty thousand pounds of insects in a single night. That'd
be like, um, I mean, I don't even know the
mathematical proportions there, but I mean it sounds like like
(11:36):
if you just hit the buffet every evening and just
loaded up on like General Sis chicken. Yeah, these guys
are still flying around for the whole night. Yeah, I mean,
I don't think humans could walk if they ate this much,
noting the kmmoto dragon could maybe do it, definitely, the
Commodo dragon could do it. Agriculturally speaking, Um, a lot
of these are pasts that harmer crops. So if you
(11:57):
don't have bats there too to take care of them,
then how are you gonna get rid of them? What
are you gonna spread more DDT around? Which, in addition
to being rather harmful um to the environment, yet a
number of these insects have have evolved resistances to it. Yeah,
So you remove the bats from the equation and things
could get a little dicier agriculturally speaking, But I should
(12:18):
stress that it's not exactly bats alone or controlling mosquito
populations or insect populations. It is sort of a multi
pronged approach. Yeah, I mean it's again, it's like they're
a part of the ecosystem. The ecosystem is like this
big Jenga puzzle, and if you start removing a little,
um little blocks from the Jenga tower, then the tower
(12:38):
is gonna get unstable. Yeah, especially if you play Jengo
with your feet. Yeah, which have you read that that
we tried one, So it's really hard. Yeah, it sounds
like a disaster. Yeah, but you know it's Jengo, so
it's not like anything's kind of like it sounds like
an analogy. It's like when you just playing Jenga with
your feet on that way. Yeah, maybe, well, suicide from
(12:59):
agricult actual implications. There are also implications for public health,
as you might imagine. So mosquitoes like to carry diseases
such as malaria or rest nile. So all of a sudden,
if you have a booming mosquito population, um, we could
see an uptick in those kind of diseases and humans. Yeah,
I mean you can actually purchase bat houses to encourage
(13:19):
bats to live in your property so they'll eat the mosquitoes.
You know. I would like to have one, actually, yeah,
I really want to get one of those. And I
want to get an owl house because I like hav
an owls. About maybe a woodpacker house. I don't know.
Whatever I can have flying around eating bugs is good.
So what can we do about white nose syndrome? Well,
you know there are a couple of things. Um, we
could try to contain the spread, as the US Force
(13:39):
Services done, you know, closing caves and things like that.
And we can always throw some money at the problem. Yeah,
and encourage your your lawmakers to support funding, and we
can try to learn how to raise endangered bats and
captivity fast as the Smithsonian Zoo is doing with sort
of mixed Look. Hey, actually you can even blog about it.
There's the There was a white nose blog hosted by
(14:01):
the US Fish and Wildlife Service. I did check it out.
There was only one entry. It was really cute though.
She was a biologist and she was she put you
know her the bats like that would really be more
interesting for blogging. It was a biologist blogging about bats.
Try saying that ten times fast. And you also can
can help out in the in the bat fight. You
(14:22):
can report active winter or summer roosting sides. You can
if you see bats flying around in the winter like
a bunch of them, not like a loane bat, but
like a bunch of bats, you need to contact somebody,
your local wildlife service. And you know, you could always
build a bad house, especially since that we most of
these cases have been isolated caves. The more bad houses
(14:42):
the better. So in case all of this doesn't really
make you care about bats, then we are. Our final
point is what about that i guano? Baguano, as it
turns out, is an amazingly useful substance. Yeah, it plays
a vital role in cave ecologies. Um, I imagine everybody's
seen the television series Planet Earth from a few years back,
(15:05):
same people who made Life, Yeah, I which we wrote
a whole lot of content around. But there's a whole
episode about the ecology inside a particular cave and there's
like just a mountain of bat guando and and like
their insects live live that live off the guano and
live in the guano. Um, yeah, take that away, you know,
remove the bats from the equation, and there are a
number of other species that depend on the bats. It's
(15:26):
like the snake. Like the snake. There's a snake that
jumps out of like like like he's blind and he
like here's the bat flying by, and it will just
strike out and like grab it bat out of midair.
It's amazing. That is pretty amazing. Yeah, So bat guano
is actually pretty useful for its nitrogen. It's pretty nitrogen heavy,
and that's pretty useful when it comes to you know,
(15:47):
say making a bomb, making household cleaner. Oh yeah, Actually
two things on that. First of all, I remember correctly,
there's a part in Coral McCarthy's Blood Meridian where they
they're being trailed by these by one tribe or another,
these bunch of this ragtag bunch of cowboys and uh
and they they're completely out of ammo and they end
(16:07):
up like hitting up a cave and like scraping up
all this back wando um. And then they then they
think they go to like a volcano, and then they
start and they get some more ingredients to make gunpowder,
and they like put it all together the last minute
and fight off the villains slowing their all villains in
that book. But then, um, and as far as it
being a cleaning agent that I guess could maybe be
(16:27):
used to uh to one's advantage in places like Lapa.
You encourage the bats to come in to use the
restroom on everything, and then you've got a natural cleaning
agent right there, right then you don't have to hire
somebody to do it. You just you know, and get
the bats, get them to scrub, and then you've got
it taken care of. Good points, Robert. So if you
(16:50):
want to hear more, you can come check out the
blogs on the homepage, where you can find out what
our podcast for the week or about, and learn about
other bits of weird science e news. Yeah, any know
is shoot just a comment too. We love to hear
from you, um, whether you have a question about bats
or white nose syndrome or a suggestion for a podcast,
send us an email at science stuff at how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
(17:18):
other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com. Want
more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the
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