Ologies with Alie Ward - Chiropterology (BATS) Encore with Merlin Tuttle

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

“People fear most what they understand least." Words of wisdom from explorer/American treasure/bat expert, Dr. Merlin Tuttle. As your internet dad/host takes care of her surgically recuperating husband this week, we revisit her visit to Austin. In 2019, Alie headed to the bat capital and sat down with the legendary chiropterologist to discuss wild field stories and close calls and caves and comebacks and bat chatter and what a bat actually is and how big they get and what's up with their smushy noses, why folks are so frightened by them, the evolution of flight, echolocation, getting a bat out of your house, how they sleep upside down, which ones guzzle blood, and the latest on white nose syndrome -- which is not a drug problem. Sit back with a cup of tea or something stronger and get ready for adventure. Indiana Jones can get bent because Dr. Merlin Tuttle is the hero this nation needs.More Spooktober episodes! alieward.com/ologies/spooktober2021Learn more about bats & Dr. Merlin Tuttle's photography & work in conservation:www.MerlinTuttle.orgA donation was made to: www.MerlinTuttle.orgDr. Merlin Tuttle's bat books: www.merlintuttle.org/category/books/Social media links:www.instagram.com/merlintuttlephotowww.twitter.com/merlinsbatswww.facebook.com/MerlinTuttlesBatConservationSponsor links: alieward.com/ologies-sponsors More links up at alieward.com/ologies/chiropterologyBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes, masks and STIIIICKERS!Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologiesFollow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWardSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh hi, it's me from the future. It's been two years since we made this episode. I still love this oligist. We're still friends. He just turned 80 and I actually missed his surprise party in August. Jared had popped his ACL and got a small fracture on his femur. I wasn't able to go, but actually, speaking of, he just got surgery with a knee specialist in San Francisco. So we're up taking care of him and taking a few weeks off, which is why this is an encore episode. But next week in the after, we have new Spooktober episodes you've never heard before. So stay tuned for those next week. Also, if you need more spooky content, check the link in the show notes for the Spooktober episodes because there's everything from body farms to vultures and evil spirits and changing

leaves. We have episodes for all of it. So put on a scarf and pour something that has some pumpkin spice in. Listen to those. Okay, but now enjoy this encore of chiropterology. One of the best ever episodes of oligies with your new favorite scientist for real. Oh, hey, it's your friend's new baby who looks kind of like a turtle, but in the best way. Allie Ward, back with another episode of oligies, we're rounding the corner to finishing Spooktober. And I meant for this to be the last Halloweeny episode. But guess what? I talked to this oligist for three freaking hours and I'm making it a double. So buckle up for bats because holy guano, it's bueno. I loved every second I spent with this expert. This episode, next week's episode, some of my favorites. Okay, but before

we get into it, a few thank yous up top, including everyone on Patreon, patreon.com slash oligies, who supports the podcast, y'all are the foundation of funding for it. Thank you to everyone wearing oligies merch from oligiesmerch.com. Thank you to all who make sure they're subscribed, who rate the podcast and keep it up in the charts. Of course, you folks who leave reviews for me to read like a weird lurking monkey, so I can pick a new one each week, such as the Narn Goddess, who says from disaster to perfection, from entropy to order somehow, this podcast encompasses the sacred, the profane, and the mundane in a way that makes us delight in every revelation. And finally, at the end of the day, we emerge from each episode icky and radiant, like a shiny penny barfed up

by a hagfish. It's absolutely delightful. As are you, the Narn Goddess. Thank you for that. Also, Rory Watts, who says imposter syndrome is super real, and that they love hearing stories of queer scientists and makes their little by heart so happy. So anyway, your reviews, I read them, and I love them. And thank you. Okay, now, chiropterology. Are you ready for the best etymology, maybe ever? As soon as I saw this word, I was like, well, I'm going to have to start a podcast. The word origin, I feel like it rivals pharaoh equinology, which was iron horses, the study of trains as like the best first date awkward dinner party stuck in an elevator for a few hours, killing time trivia ever. Okay, you ready? Probably not. But here we go. So Cairo means hand. So think

a chiropractor practices with their hands. So Cairo hand and putair, like pterodactyl means wing. So chiroptera bats have handwings. They have handwings. The wings are made of hands. So as mammals, these little critters fly around on the flupy membranes of webbings between their long ass bony fingers. They've been haunting the night for as long as 60 million years. They make up 20% of all mammal species. There are over 1400 recognized species of bats. And we will cover all of them. No, we won't, but we're going to do our best. So I heard of thisologist through a CBS Innovation Nation story I did about bat houses called bat BNBs. And as soon as I heard his name and saw a picture of him in the 1970s with a pushbroom mustache and a headlamp feeding fruit

to a megabat, I thought, I need to meet this person. I need to befriend them at all costs. And I've been like a 13 year old girl on a mission to meet her kpop idols. I would accept no other bat expert for this topic. So he's been working in this field for over five decades, has written several books for lay people about bats, including the secret lives of bats and America's neighborhood bats. And I'll link those on my website and in the show notes. He has published so many academic papers on bats. I wouldn't know where to begin listing them. He has lectured all over the world. So in September, I got myself to Austin, Texas, and I headed to thisologist's home office. Okay, I'm in front of Merlin's house. Total residents. This is so exciting. Okay.

I have my hotel coffee. I'm sweating. It's a million degrees in Austin. I just, I look sweaty. So nervous. I met his wonderful wife, Paula, in the driveway. She led me in. Hi, Missy. Hello. How are you? Dr. Tuttle, it's lovely to meet you. I'm Ali Ward. This is a dream come true to talk to you about bats. I can't even tell you. This is far from his first media appearance. This dude is America's chiropterology darling. The go-to for bat questions the world over. He's even appeared on David Letterman in 1984 because of his bat knowledge. This is this bat, and you see how small he is. This bat is the one that sends thousands of otherwise mature, grown, brave men cowering, running, and tear every year. I know of two cases in the last few months in

Wisconsin. One man broke his leg, falling downstairs, getting away from one of these guys. One broke his arm, swinging a tennis racket around a door jam. Sure, you can touch him. I don't want to hold him. You got to admit. So I winged it. Oh, I was nervous. We talked for three hours. So this episode is broken into two weeks, and we cover what is a bat? How big are they? How small are they? Will they attack you? Why are people so scared of them? How do they evolve to fly? How do they sleep upside down? How scary are caves? Which ones guzzle blood? How do they protect us from mosquitoes? Can you train a bat? Why are they so cute? What's the deal with guano, the latest on white nose syndrome, which is not a drug problem? What is the best time and place to see bats? And how can

you help bats by letting them crash in your place? Kind of. So hang tight for part one and get ready to have a new favorite bat expert with conservationist, explorer, icon, national treasure, and chiropterologist, Dr. Merlin Tuttle. Do you make people address you as Dr. Bat ever? No, but there are a lot of people on this planet who know me only as the Batman. That's not a bad nickname to have. When I was working years ago studying bats in the backwoods of Tennessee, the hillbilly moonshiners were always watching out for reveners. And when I would drive into the final hollow where they had their moonshine, which I pretended not to know where it was, in route to my bat caves, I would hear them yell across the hollow to each other,

the Batman's are coming. And I don't think they ever knew my real name. That's pretty appropriate. It was funny. You know, these guys, they had a code of ethics among themselves that was very strict. You know, you turn in a fellow to the reveners or something and you deserve to die on the spot. These weren't, these were tough guys. But the moment I started studying bats in a cave near where they were making moonshine, they were down trying to figure out who I was and what I was doing. And I welcomed them and showed them how I put bands on the bats and explained that some of them are coming all the way from Florida to the Virginia Tennessee border to go hibernate in that cave. And they

were so excited they ended up bringing their wives down to see me ban bats the next night. And I ended up being really good friends with them. And the next winter is I was still coming every 10 days to trap at the entrance. I was leaping out in my car. And they became very concerned, you know, I shouldn't be out there in the snowy cold. And so they started inviting me to come. They're very poor. The home that they had was so poor that if you, they said we couldn't more than three of us go in the kitchen at the same time or the floor might fall in. And I stayed with them a few nights. But then I realized that Huckel, the primary moonshiner among them, slept with a sawed off shotgun in his bed in case the reveners came at night. And I decided,

I didn't want to sleep in the middle of a possible battle. Oh, no. Oh, my gosh. As the Batman, you weren't about to do any crime fighting. Oh, my gosh. And so your work is probably primarily nocturnal when you're out doing field work. Or how much of it is nocturnal? How much of it is a lot of it's nocturnal more than I would like it these days. Someone calling the bat line. That's the bat phone, huh? Well, I mean, if it wasn't probably considered unethical or illegal, it would be fun for you to listen in on one of these calls from somebody who's terrified, thinks they're about to die of rabies because the bat got near him last night. So he unplugged the bat phone and we continued.

Going back in your history, you were born in Hawaii, right? And now when did you make the move from the island to the mainland? And did you grow up around caves at all? I grew up going into lava tubes in Hawaii. My father was very interested in exploring the old lava tubes. But there aren't any bats in caves in Hawaii. I didn't discover bats until I was at least nine years old living in California. I really first discovered them when a classmate in the fourth grade brought a dead one to school. Cool. We were all curious and looked at it and I took it home and made a study skin out of it. At age nine, a mammologist came to my school to speak about his research on small mammals in the jungles of Central America.

And I immediately, I never forget, I thought, wow, you mean scientists actually get paid to go have fun adventures in the jungle? That's what I want to do. That's amazing. So you were inspired from just being a wee one. So from age nine, I got acquainted with the scientist who lectured at my school. He told me about a book I could get that would teach me how to be a mammologist. And I started preparing study skins and trading specimens with museums. Oh my gosh. So even in high school, you were starting to work on this kind of in an almost professional sense, right? Well, I actually was only age of nine when I started doing this.

Oh my God. I started taking accurate field notes and really getting serious. Actually, I published my first two or three papers based on high school work. You're like the doogie howzer of bats. Douglas doogie howzer is a whiz kid. You're like a wonder kind, like a baby bat genius. Did you ever, did you ever waver in terms of what you wanted to do? Did you ever say like, maybe I'll go into farming or maybe I'll be a nurse or was it bats from age nine? Well, it starts way back before that. I mean, I was clearly a nature buff, you know, from the beginning, from the time I could talk. I mean, when I was less than two years

old, I knew when a bonnard butterfly was about to hatch from its pupa, I'd rear the caterpillars on a plant stuck in water in the window. And when a pupa would be about to hatch, I'd run around the house telling my parents, you know, come quick, come quick. The butterfly is about to come out. Oh my God. So I mean, and by the time I was five, my father was big time interested in seashells and collecting. And so by that time, I probably knew nearly all the scientific names of the seashells of Hawaii. Oh my God. And then later I got into snakes and, oh man, I could tell you stories endlessly about terrorizing my mother and all her friends with my snakes getting loose. And then I published, I think, two papers on shrews before I did anything

on bats. Oh, so people, it's okay to like a lot of things. Maybe over time, you'll realize a common thread between your interests or a way to link them or do both, or you'll just figure out which one you truly love the most. But the time I was nine, there was no question I was going to be a mammologist. And so all the way through high school, I was out. In fact, this is an interesting part of my story. And well, all through college, I barely graduated from college. In fact, I was terrified the last semester of college. I found out at the last minute that if I didn't have a sea average in my minor, I couldn't graduate and I was taking biochemistry and about to flunk it. Oh no. And so I stayed around the clock. I'd study for like an hour and then take

a 20 minute nap and study for an hour and take a 20 minute nap. The reason I was terrified, I had a job. I was going to go directly from college to being co-director of a $400,000 field project for the Smithsonian. Oh my God. All you needed was just that piece of paper. This was based on the fact that while I was near flunking out of school, I was becoming a well-recognized mammologist, hanging out with leading mammologists in the field, learning from them, skipping classes while I did it. Oh no. And so the funny thing was I finally did graduate, got my job at the Smithsonian. But I'd been warned that I'd never make it into graduate school on my lousy grades. Merlin got a bachelor's in zoology at Andrews University in Michigan, but he was so focused on

field studies of bats that he said they had to twist some arms to get him admitted to graduate school at the University of Kansas. He was admitted on academic probation and his admission was so conditional. The school said they might not even keep him past his masters, even if he wanted to. But he got his masters, sure enough, in Systematics and Ecology, studying the Zuo Geography of Peruvian Bats, and then he stayed for his PhD in Ecology and Evolution. His dissertation was on gray bats, and he graduated with honors, becoming Dr. Merlin Tuttle in 1974. I gave a commencement address this spring at a school where I point out that, you know, don't sit around and wait for somebody to tell you how you're going to get the biggest job opportunities,

the most pay, that kind of thing, because it's always going to change. Whatever everybody's telling the students today is the big job opportunity area will probably be glutted five years from now. Pick what you're passionate about, and if you're passionate about what you've chosen, you're probably going to be in the top 5% of people doing it, and you'll get a job regardless of where the job market goes. If you're really passionate about something, you're smart enough to be a success at it. It's not about IQ. It's about dedication and endurance and passion. Oh, you thought this was just about bats? Oh, no way. Never. No. There's so much self-help in here. Oh, get your heart ready. And I've definitely got the passion. And now what is it about bats? What drew you to them

in terms of all the mammals that you could study? Well, I started out studying small mammals in general, particularly shrews. Shrews are very interesting. Are they? Oh, very. Don't worry. I have my eye on a shrew expert. Dr. Leslie Carraway in Oregon, come for you. Anyway, when it comes to mammals, how many really fly? We just have bats and sort of gliding squirrels, right? Only bats truly fly. Okay. That's what I thought. Is that one thing you love about them? Well, I think I could have studied almost anything that happened to get in my way long enough to keep me focused for a while. I went through periods when I loved snorkeling on coral reefs, and I could have easily been a marine ecologist. I went through a phase where I collected and

identified, I think, 160 species of mosses and liverworts. I love nature, but I think one of the things that's really made me much more successful than I could have been otherwise studying bats is I first loved the whole picture, all living things, and had a fascination for them. And so it was much easier then for me to understand where my animals fit and what their roles were in that system. Sure. So you understood the whole puzzle, and so every piece in a puzzle becomes really interesting and vital. Yeah. And you know, I get internally, at least rather upset at people who are just focused on a species or a group, and you've got to save these, and it doesn't matter how many others you trample on, these have got to be saved. And it's not that way. Bats aren't safe

until all living things are safe. They're all interlocked, interdependent, and so are we. We don't get out of that. Merlin, come for the bats and stay for the poetic existentialism. He's the best. Speaking of existence, how do bats define themselves? What is a bat? How do you define a bat? I know that's a stupid question, but... Well, they nursed their young. Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, thought that bats were true primates because they had pectoral instead of inguinal breasts. Primates? Okay, this is the flying primate hypothesis, and it relates to the flying fox, which is a fruit-eating megabat, as opposed to the smaller insect-munching microbats. So, side note, none of them are blind as a bat.

These little winged fluff muffins have pretty good eyesight, and microbats use incredible echolocation sonar to hunt for bugs. But revered Australian neuroscientist and vision researcher Jack Pettigrew, who sadly passed away earlier this year, had made an interesting discovery about megabat brains and vision. He discovered that all flying foxes have cross-in over neurons between the eyes and the midbrain. You have thousands of neurons that go between your eyes and your midbrain, and in primates they cross over between the two sides, and in no other mammal do they. So, that was the diagnostic, you know, if it has crossing over, it's a primate, if it doesn't, it's not. That was accepted for most of the history of paleontology,

and then Jack found that all flying foxes had to cross in over neurons like primates, and all of a sudden they threw out the rule. I had the good fortune of having to speak with Jack about a month before he passed away, and he said, well, Maron, it's not going to happen while you and I are still alive, but it will happen. There'll be a day when they finally decide that flying foxes are primates. Oh my god, I had no idea that they were even up for consideration for it. I thought it was just such an honor to just be nominated. Neuronal evolution, you don't evolve thousands of new neuronal pathways just overnight.

Those are the slowest parts to evolve. Your fingers may get longer, shorter, things like that, but your neurons are pretty stable. So, when you find thousands of neurons that are doing the same things they do in primates, you should at least take a good look at what that might mean. Yeah, and now when it comes to the evolution of bats, what are their ancestors, what are their relatives, what are these beautiful, furry, fuzzy sky puppies as they're called come from? That's probably a pretty debatable subject. When I started studying bats, we recognized just a little over 800 species. Now it's almost 1400. Now are more and more people maybe going into areas that haven't been explored or caves or do we have better technology? Why

such a jump in the number of species? Well, for a very long time bats weren't very studied. I mean, you could go through a whole major in biology and all you'd find out about bats was there was this order of chiropractor and they flew and everybody ignored them. And bats haven't always been the easiest thing to study even if you wanted to study them. But with modern technology, we're coming up with a whole lot more ways of looking at bats. Okay, so a bat is a mammal covered in fur that gives birth to live young and makes milk and each one has a little belly button and it's the only mammal capable of true flight. Also, you know how their wings are really just big webbed hands? So imagine if you had a stubby clawed thumb and then your fingers got longer

and longer until your pinky was as long as your whole body and webbed and then you were like later losers and flew away. How badass are you? So badass. Also, bats used to be classified by their coat color, which Merlin says was bunk because some bats are bright orange in the wild and brown in captivity. Others change color after they're weaned. So yes, actually speaking of, let's talk about teeny tiny bat babies. Shall we square me a little smush faced seashell-eared fuzzy wrigglers? Can you walk me through a little bit of a life cycle of a bat? Well, it's very different for different kinds of bats. Most bats produce just one puppy year and that's part of why they're so easily threatened with extinction. They form the largest aggregations

of any mammal except homo sapiens. Oh, wow. And they not only form these huge aggregations in very vulnerable places like caves, but they only produce one puppy year per mom. They're programmed for long lifespan. 40 plus year old bats have been found. What? That's crazy. I didn't know that they could live that long. They're the longest lived mammals on the planet for their size. That's nuts because normally it typically isn't their metabolism of smaller mammals. Typically shorter and they live they live less time. Do they have different hearts? Rodents. Rodents are lucky to get in two years. Right. Yeah. So how are they doing it, do you think? Well, bats are just totally different and it largely centers around these long lifespans and if you're going to be as sophisticated

and live as long as they do, you'd better be sophisticated socially and have a lot of smarts. In fact, when I first banded gray bats, I had big time suspicions that they were having friendships that, you know, like these four or five bats knew each other and would travel around each together because I had groups of up to several bats that I had caught all at the same time. Like, let's see, I found a little cluster of them in a cave and I can't put a hand net under them. They dropped in, I caught them and I banded them. Well, I have caught some of those groups five, 10 years later, sometimes hundreds of miles away, still together. No. They have they have bat packs? I could tell because I banded my bats at known ages when they were just

learning to fly coming out of a certain case. I know where they came from. I knew how old they were and I knew that some of these bats weren't just mom, you know, mom, pup or sister, brother, sister. And so that led me to a lot of wondering, but it was only in the last few years that there was a paper published done on some really good research that could document that kind of thing, concluding that bats have social systems strikingly similar to those of whales, dolphins and primates. Oh my gosh, do you think they can communicate with their sonar to each other? Well, bats have a much bigger repertoire of communication ability than certainly than we do. Really? How are they communicating? They can hear our low frequencies and they can hear

extremely high frequencies. They have a much broader range of hearing. In fact, a years ago, I studied frog eating bats and when I discovered that a bat ate frogs, the herpetologists all laughed and they didn't believe it because they'd never seen a bat chasing a frog. And the hearing specialist, the foremost hearing physiologist in America, nixed my first grant proposal to study it because they said that it was impossible for a bat to hear the low frequencies of frog calls. I'm sorry sir, but you're wrong. They ended up doing research on how they did it. Oh my god. Okay, side note, a research institute just called the Bat Lab in Tel Aviv has been analyzing 15,000 different noises that bats make and they made a recent

discovery that a lot of the time they're nestled together in colonies, kind of a mix between a cuddle party and a rush hour commuter train from New Jersey. Those noises are bats bickering. Yep, just bitching at each other like, Jesus Eric, move over. Who farted? Who ate a grasshopper and farted? So yes, bat squeaking is so much drama in a language you can't understand. Holy shit, do I wish that nature had subtitles. So do you think that they are forming these social associations for survival and just psychological well-being? Well, you know, if you're going to live 40 some years and you're going to have a complex lifestyle, I mean, look, the gray bats that I stayed, for example, you'll have a hibernation cave where maybe a half million or even a million

or more come to hibernate in one site. Some of the destination caves, one of them had an entrance so small and well concealed that after I'd been going there years, I would still sometimes park my car and spend 20 minutes looking for the cave entrance. Oh my god. And you got to understand that these bats probably can't detect much with their echolocation more than maybe 30 feet or so in front. That's not a whole long ways. Yeah. They're having to cross terrain that is changing constantly. I mean, we're cutting down forests, we're building cities, we're doing everything under the sun to change things on them. You got to be pretty damn sophisticated to figure all just your travel routes out. You know, there was a paper published a long time ago that showed that

there was a species of bat that didn't eat frogs that homed in on ponds where frogs were calling just as an indicator of where they would find the most insects. Oh god. That's amazing. Merlin says bats are important in controlling agricultural pests too, like the corn earworm moths. And on top of that, they are excellent meteorologists. So if you see a bat, just kindly stop it and say, excuse me, pardon me, will I need an umbrella tomorrow? I mean, if you can stop them, we'll speed demons. They can fly thousands of feet above ground, catch tailwinds and go 100 miles, close to 100 miles an hour. So they can really, you know, if they can figure out where the storm disturbances or things are happening, they know where the insects are happening.

And we've probably got a lot more to learn about that. But just to illustrate how important the bats can be to crop protection, the bats just from bracken cave alone, a cave that I spent 20 years getting protected near San Antonio, just those bats, 10 to 20 million of them, eat between 100 and 200 tons of insects in a night. A night? In a night. Oh god. And now get this, one of those bats, just one, can eat enough corn earworm moths to prevent them from laying 20,000 or more eggs. That's enough to force the Texas farmer to spray multiple acres with pesticides at a cost of $74 an acre. You said you weren't good at math, but I'm starting to doubt that. You're better at math than you say you are. That's amazing. So the importance of them

for pest control is huge. Nationally, it's been conservatively estimated to be worth $23 billion a summer. Oh my gosh. But the sad thing is that we're just looking at the tip of the iceberg of what should be. Most of America's bats were probably lost before we were born. Really? Now what caused that decline? Was it loss of habitat? Uh, loss of habitat is a big factor. Loss of habitat is what, of course, happens when people get scared and starts burning their caves. Merlin told me that two decades ago, in one part of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park, he was able to convince park officials to remove a concrete door that they'd put up at the entrance of a cave and make it friendlier to the bats who used to

live there. And the bats were like, oh, shit. Well, okay. Thank you. And the park staff were really proud this time to show me that in 20 years, we'd gone from right at zero to 300,000 bats in that cave. Oh, that's amazing. It's not too late to restore bats, but it's too late if we don't change our attitudes. And it all gets down to attitudes. People fear most what they understand least. We all fear more taking off on a plane than riding to the airport in a taxi. And yet the taxi is far more dangerous. It just seems to be the way we are. And it's been very easy to scare people about rabies and bats, disease and bats. Did you know that you're actually almost twice as likely to die of a coke vending machine falling on you as

you are a bat rabies in America? I believe it. I believe same with sharks. Sharks kill like five people a year. Rylan says way more people die of food poisoning at picnics, from dog attacks, maybe even from falling coconuts. In America, your chance of dying by rabies is about two million times less likely than your death by diabetes. And no lie, I left over confetti cake for breakfast. I should have been terrified of it and thrown it at a wall and run screaming based on those odds. If bats were even fractionally as dangerous disease-wise as they're purported to be, people like me would have been dead deans ago. Yeah. Have you ever had a bat bite you? Ever had a bat bite me? I'm probably the world's foremost authority on bat bites.

What is it like when they bite you? Now, I'm not a guy to brag about being bit. I don't want to encourage people to be careless and get bit by any animal they don't know or even one they do know. But here's the key. I've never been bitten by a bat that wasn't biting in self-defense because I was handling him and he was frightened. I have never been attacked by a bat. I've been surrounded by millions at a time for days at a time in their caves. I've personally photographed more than 300 species in every part of the world where they exist and I've still not seen an aggressive bat. And yet what you hear in these people wanting to scare us because there's big money in it, we hear that bats are sneaking around biting people in their sleep without them knowing it.

Merlin and other bat researchers like veterinarians have gotten pre-exposure vaccination against rabies. That just protects them against defensive bites from some unfamiliar critters they handle. So unprotected people bitten by any animal, of course, should get advice regarding a possible need to be vaccinated and to have the animal tested for rabies. Just be safe. If I'm trying to scare you into taking your rabies shots, I'll tell you that almost every person in America who gets rabies gets it from a bat. True. But did you know that's only one and a half people a year out of the whole U.S. and Canada combined? One and a half people a year. One and a half people per year. I mean, you risk, you put your life at greater risk driving one mile in a motorized vehicle

than your annual risk of rabies in America. And the good news is that for anybody who simply doesn't handle bats, the odds of contracting rabies or any disease from a bat are right at zero. So we recorded this at Merlin's kitchen table in Austin, which is of course known for its caves and bats and attractive people in bands. Look at the Congress Avenue Bridge right here in Austin. When hundreds of thousands of bats started moving into that bridge, public health people warned that they were rabid, dangerous, would attack people. People signed petitions demanding that they be eradicated. They're right on the verge of doing it when I came here and convinced the city that they might be better off saving the bats. Today, decades later, we're still waiting for the

first person to be attacked. We're still waiting for the first person to contract a disease. The bats are simply eating tons of insects nightly and bringing millions of tourist dollars every summer. You can't find a better, safer neighbor. Now, what about people who want to put up bat boxes in front of their, you know, on their house? Well, it's a great idea. If you're going to go to all that trouble or expense, so just be sure you do it right. If you go to my website, there's a resource on my website at MerlinTuttle.org that tells you how to recognize a good bat house from one that isn't good and even list several producers that make good ones that I have personally tested. Okay, side note. A bat house is a relatively flat, usually wooden structure about the size of a

suitcase and you can mount it on your house or barn about 12 to 20 feet off the ground. So little flying critters can nestle up and roost in it like little snuggly furry sardines. Well, I'm the one that first introduced bat houses to America. You did? Was that a hard sell? The hard sell was with my colleagues. Really? I had several leading colleagues who actually one of them even published a scientific paper claiming that bat houses didn't work and it was unfortunate that without naming me specifically that some people were promoting them to raise money despite the fact they didn't work and all of these people that made those kind of claims ended up using them as research sites for their students when they worked. Did they ever issue a public formal apology? No.

They might still owe you one. So I didn't want to take up too much of Merlin's time and I thought I'd just move on to the Patreon questions but as we have established, Merlin is the best and he was in no hurry to wrap up the bat facts. Before we get there though, let me point out you know that there's a lot of interest in people find out that they couldn't have margaritas without bats. Oh really? Mexico's tequila and and mescal industries which those products sell for billions of dollars annually could be lost without bats to pollinate the agaves which produce those products. The whole chewing gum industry might never have existed if it wasn't for the chiclay tree that is bat seed dispersed. Okay side note there was a study done recently in Indonesia

which is one of the top three suppliers of cacao beans and researchers found that bats saved farmers nearly 800 million dollars a year by eating bugs so every time you see chocolate wink at it and say hey bats thanks you did this you did this to my mouth and I'm grateful. The whole world price of chocolate could go up without bats. And now what areas of the country tend to have more bats because I know you're here in Austin where there are tons of caves so bats and spelologists I imagine are friends. Yeah we're we're lucky here in Texas because clear back from the civil war it was known that bats had some value they mined the guano for salt peter to make gunpowder in fact one of the biggest

declines ever in American bats came during the war of 1812 when extensive bat caves were mined for salt peter for gunpowder. Who's taking care of the guano in the caves like you've got let's say a million bats in a cave there's some droppings what's normally digesting that. Well now you've come to a whole new area we could have spent most of our time talking about bats are the primary producers of energy in a cave ecosystem no less than plants are on the surface. Oh wow and there are thousands and thousands of different kinds of microorganisms a study done in Bracken cave I think there was at least a thousand species and maybe a couple hundred genera of bacteria in a tablespoon full of guano from there and most of them weren't

known from any place else and among those they found a whole bunch of them they had biotechnological significance see when the domestic insects in that cave feed on the bat droppings their poop ends up creating a lot of ammonia and they found enzymes that are breaking down ammonia feeding on ammonia and they could be used to detoxify some of the worst chemical waste of industry in America they also found bacteria that were feeding on chitin which leads to a whole bunch of interesting possibilities if you're feeding on chitin you could be used to convert seafood waste by products you know the the shells of lobsters and and shrimp and things like that you could convert that using these bacteria to gas a hole what PS what is gas a hole I had to look this up

and it's a blend of gasoline and ethanol boom kind of like if your gas tank took some shots of everclear that was made from usually leftover agricultural starches and this fuel may offer lower levels of certain emissions everclear into your own personal gas tank of your stomach does increase emissions of 3 am pizza barf so watch out for that but anyway bats and caves and science in the future but it wouldn't be terribly surprising if someday someone found that they had the billion dollar bug from a cave system where it wasn't found anywhere else and wouldn't have been if hadn't been for the bats still being there now what is it like to do field work in caves and what is that what is the night of field work look like to you and did you ever

feel claustrophobic are you kidding well the day that I made a wrong turn and crawled down a real tight squeeze for a hundred feet I felt very claustrophobic I'd been told that there was a hundred thousand bats in this place where they'd escape noticed by people and to get there oh it was horrible there was a little passage so small you had to lie on your belly or your back with your arms either going down along your sides or up ahead pinned and squeezed through and you had to siphon water out of the tunnel before you could go in oh god and it was 43 degree temperature blowing through this and back then we didn't have wet suits or anything so I'm going through just dressed with long johns and a jumpsuit on and so I get good

and soak and wet I come out the other side and the cavers have told me there's a real tight squeeze on the other side but don't worry it opens up on the other side where the bats are I'm going in so I go into the real tight squeeze don't worry it opens up on the other side where the bats are but I missed the tight squeeze that they found I found another one in my tight squeeze didn't have any end oh my god and I ended up I don't know how long I was in that thing but back in those days we had six volt batteries that I would hang in a pistol off a pistol belt on my side as I crawled down this is my arms pinned up and from me I couldn't even reach back to do anything about my battery once I got in there and realized that it wasn't gonna I wasn't gonna

come out on the other side in a few feet I caught my battery in a tight spot and pulled it loose from my headlights I didn't even have a light it was better doc and then I'm squeezing through places so tight I'm practically breaking ribs oh my god and I know that there is no way I'm gonna come out alive if I don't find a place to turn around so I have to keep going ahead and I went ahead for like about a hundred feet it seemed like a mile and finally found a place where if I had I swear if I'd been one inch taller I wouldn't have been able to turn around oh my god oh man I'm freaking out I'm having an anxiety attack listening to this that made me much more careful about what I crawl into how when you got through when you were able to thank god turn

around and get through because then you had to do the tight squeeze again I wasn't even sure I could get back through it all oh my god what was it like when you got out and by the time I got out remember by that time I would have been hypothermic I you know just absolutely teeth chattering and oh man what was that like when you got out how did you celebrate that night did you just go straight home I would go I've been like I'm done for the day uh or did you go through the next tight squeeze to where the bats were I actually did go see where the bats were before I left unstoppable well I wouldn't go through all that misery and not not find out the bats were actually there oh now how was that tight squeeze was that easy well it was a tight squeeze for about four feet

like they said and then it opened up oh my god so you went through 25 times what you needed to really 50 times that you needed to see how to come all the way back oh how are the bats well I have found a lot of undiscovered parts of caves by looking for bats because a lot of our bats nowadays only survive where people can't find them and so by sometimes following where you see bats disappearing you can find caves that nobody knew about so they're kind of like the tour guides into unknown caves come follow me we started earlier to talk about what's happened to American bats what the cause of decline is a major major cause of decline is loss of hibernation caves the mammoth cave system alone had millions probably tens of millions of bats hibernating in

early visitors reported that you could go for miles and the walls were solidly covered with bats in the winter oh my god and they've lost those resources and now they have to travel much farther to find a place to overwinter when they get there it's often too warm or too cold and the stress is amounts so they have to wait squander energy faster than they should all this makes them vulnerable to what else may happen that's a threat you know it's like you've got a pie here and every time you take a piece out of it you've got that much less energy left for survival so you know it's my opinion that many of the deaths that have occurred in recent years from the fungus that causes white nose syndrome may very well not have occurred had the bats not lost

key hibernation sites and were already suffering at the edge of their energy limits right and now and that was a question i was going to get to you which i'm glad you brought it up but what is exactly white nose syndrome this is a a fungal infection it's a fungal infection that appears to have been inadvertently introduced from europe it's found all across europe and asia the bats in europe and asia rarely are harmed by it they may have been harmed by it a long time ago but they've evolved immunity and it's been said that some human undoubtedly brought it who went to a cave in europe and then went to a cave in america but truthfully we don't know how it got here i think it's more probable that a bat came across from europe in a shipping container they're published

records of quite a few bats have ended up in the us or uk uh just because they got on in a crevice in a shipping container the next thing they knew they were waking up out and see where they couldn't get off and then they ended up in a new country where's everybody oh my gosh and so maybe one that was infected with it uh spread it to a cave do they know the actual area where they first kind of identified it in on this continent yes it was a commercial cave in new york and um it's been said that that proved that it was human born but if a new fungus came to a state where would you expect it to be seen first in a commercial cave where people are going every day it doesn't mean that that that people started there it just means that it was more likely to be found there right correlation

of course is not causation so more peepers on bat noses could just have helped identify it faster we don't know there's been a huge focus on stopping its spread by telling people that they couldn't go in caves anymore uh and that hasn't even slowed the spread because bats are far more effective spreaders just bats that i banded in one cave in northern alabama ended up being found almost all the way into the state of kansas into missouri into oklahoma into arkansas mississippi florida west virginia virginia kentucky and north carolina they're like truckers they really they get around and now are they finding a place to sleep every night or rather every day are typically our our most bats nocturnal are they sleeping like on a daily schedule the only

truly diurnal or at least partially diurnal bats are on remote islands where there are very few birds of prey okay a bat in the daytime is pretty easy prey for a hawk when are they sleeping like let's say that they are out and about are they returning to the same cave unless it's a hibernation period or a migration period bats are very loyal to specific areas if you have four or five caves fairly close together they may very well move among those in my study i banded 40 some thousand gray bats and tracked them for 20 years so i got pretty good date on what the bats are doing they were very loyal to a home what i call a home area they'd have a nursery cave that was center focus then they'd usually have a few batch what i call bachelor caves within a few kilometers

around that one bachelor caves were they mostly dudes okay quick before the dudes let's divert to some lady bat facts so merlin says that before a female gray bat can breed for example she has to have access to some insect rich territories but those are usually guarded by the older females who probably chatter at them things like back off mackayla this is denise's mosquito patch she will cut you so mackayla will have to wait before breeding but in populations that have declined those turf wars don't happen so lady bats can breed easier and earlier if they have access to food stores kind of like if you had a sizzler all to yourself you'd be like look at all these croutons might as well have some kids but most gray bats wait a year or so before they

act they'll breed they'll mate the first fall but my belief is that probably they just if they don't get enough energy the next spring to produce a feed as they have resorb it which is known to occur in in bats oh wow they have wonderful birth control methods they they don't waste anything you know they resorb the embryo wow they can recycle it if they're like not a good time not i don't know what the gray bats resorb or not but some bats do i i know that whoopsie daisy let me just recycle those molecules i did not know that but any rate i knew one place where a banded female uh owned the same territory for at least four consecutive years oh my god she probably was allowing her offspring special access to her territory

so it's almost like a dynasty or or a legacy territory well they know each other that's so cool i loved i love that they think that like hey come here four or five of us were friends like come come check out my territory some of my insects like no go for it go for it we're good we're friends now you asked about you know are these all dudes at the bachelor's camps no they're dudes and gals that haven't yet uh conceived far enough to produce an offspring now do they tend to have the same mate year after year not gray bats oh gray bats might offend a few people's tastes uh they have what appears to be a grand old orgy every fall do please go on but there are bats that are monogamous really and apparently stick together for long periods of

time one will stay with the pup and babysit and the other will go out and hunt and bring rats and things back and and for the one that's babysitting oh my god now what is the biggest bat in the smallest bed you've got everything from giant flying foxes with almost six foot wingspans six foot wingspans yeah that's bigger than this table i had no idea they were that big yeah oh my god wow okay so they're huge all the way down to tiny little bumblebee bats which actually i'm leading a trip in november to show members of merlin tuttle's bat conservation these bats we're going to look at the flying foxes and the bumblebee bats on the same trip what where are they tylan they're both in tylan uh-huh god that's an amazing trip

you might just have to piggyback on that trip i'm gonna look at that info so in mid november merlin is leading a group through tylan to see painted bats flying foxes wee little bumblebee bats and more so is this man living his dream or what the answer is yes also it should be noted that merlin is an incredible bat photographer and his thousands of bat photos are kind of like if bats had a glamour shot studio set up in the jungle he has photos of huge eared bats and scrunch face bats and dog looking flying foxes and bright orange fuzzy little pups by the by why do some bats have long noses like an irish setter dog and others have a face that looks like they press to vagina against glass and it stayed that way well in general micro bats with the squish face

eat bugs and they rely on echolocation that comes from and bounces off their mouth and their nose leaf and yeah that thing's called a nose leaf anyway flying fox type mega bats by contrast tend to eat fruit which they don't have to hunt because fruit tends not to fly around and evade them so they don't have all those nose leaves also is now an okay time to list off some of my favorite bat names okay good just listen to these the little golden mantled flying fox patrizzi's trident leaf nose bat eastern small-footed myotis a mountain tube-nosed fruit bat a dragon tube-nosed fruit bat demonic tube-nosed fruit bat st. ijan's trumpeteered bat hoary wattle bat pungent pipistrel white-bellied yellow bat wrinkle-lipped free-tailed bat cinnamon dog-faced bat naked-rumped pouch bat

hammer-headed fruit bat oh by the way the last of which the hammerhead has a face kind of like a warped horse it looks like if you shrunk a moose tiny and then gave it wings if it were a star wars creature people would be like this is too much and that fills my heart with warm rays of golden sunshine one thing i find so interesting about bats is that their head shapes vary so so much like that isn't there a hammerhead bat that just looks like a balloon kind of oh i love those big male hammer-headed bats yes i never worked so hard in my life trying to get a picture of a bat i caught dozens of hammer-headed bats but i never got an alpha male no is that the alphas have bigger heads they have bigger heads well they're older and they're

more developed i've i definitely have the world's most nearly complete collection of bat photos yeah your bat photos are amazing but i still don't have a fully now i've got some pretty nice males but not the not the gorgeous one that i want so you've seen ones that you just haven't been able to photograph the reason i don't have the gorgeous one those alpha males are usually way the highest up in the safest place courting and they're not coming down to feed where i can catch them very much people are catching those are putting that's way up in the canopy of the forest oh my god and back when i was trying to catch mine we didn't yet have triple what we call triple high nets that we could raise up to where they are and so there are unprobably unphotographed like alpha male

hammerhead bats out there well people looking for Ebola in in them have photographed them and that's another sore point with me you'd think nowadays that it'd been documented clearly that bats are the source of Ebola and yet that's not true at all after all these years of speculating that came from bats and spending millions of dollars trying to prove it came from bats still in my opinion the best evidence doesn't go to bats really where do you think it came from well we don't have any proof yet okay the last time they said they had real good evidence that Ebola might come from bats they found a piece of RNA virus in an insectivorous bat's mouth in a mouse swab they said this was related to Ebola you know it was they couldn't

prove it but it was a genetic fragment that could be yeah but another virologist himself pointed out that that could just as easily come from the bat eating a mosquito or something that was carrying Ebola making the bat a controller instead of a vector oh my god what i point out is that even sick bats rarely become aggressive it is so rare that in 60 years of studying bats all over the world hundreds of species i have yet to see an aggressive batter to document one actually going out and attacking somebody i mean a vampire bat in latin america yes may sneak up and try to get a nip at night can i please have a bite that's not what we're talking about in the rest of the world yeah uh our bats simply if if i saw a bat that looked aggressive i would assume

immediately that had rabies i wouldn't know no joking about it and i'd i'd have be treated or have somebody treated if it seemed to have bitten anybody but even touching a rabid bat is not an exposure if you're not bitten or exposed to an open wound rabies side note is a virus that can be transmitted from animals to humans and it is potentially fatal if it's not treated but merlin says that a fear of rabies is very lucrative so post treatment for rabies which people have been known to get needlessly in a panic without even being bitten by or touching a bat just seeing one that treatment will run you 48 000 in some american emergency rooms dogs coyotes foxes skunks raccoons can also all carry rabies the bats are out there taking the heat let me

make one point abundantly clear for anybody who simply doesn't handle bats the odds of contracting any disease from any bat are very close to zero yeah oh i believe it we hear so much about bats but did you know that worldwide dogs count for 99 percent of human rabies about 60 thousand a year as opposed to probably 10 a year worldwide from bats you know we're kind of naturally a little bit frightened of anything we don't know about we don't know much about bats we only see about when he's in trouble dying or you know being defensive oh my gosh can i ask you listener questions sure yeah okay they have good questions okay before we get to your questions there were almost 350 submitted the most for any episode to date but first a word about some sponsors

who make it possible to donate to a cause each week this one was easy the merlin tidal bat conservation it's an organization that relies on a powerful combination of science field knowledge and photography to help save millions of bats to protect public health economies and worldwide ecosystems by teaching people to live harmoniously with bats and the founder is pretty dang cool guy so a donation went directly to that non-profit at merlin tidal.org and now you may hear some words from sponsors who made that possible. Okay back to the first half of your questions and next week a follow-up episode with the remainder of your questions and more field adventures from merlin okay first up

Claire Meyer and Heather Densmore asked a similar question to this first one Sarah Iannucci wants to know can bats be trained? Absolutely really go to my website at merlin tidal.org mm-hmm go to videos and you will see a bat training me training you this bat weighs just four grams that's less than a u.s. nickel oh so small that I was convinced that there was no way you could have trained him he couldn't be smart enough to be trained and yet the first one I got uh I put it in my walk-in studio because I was going to photograph it there and I fed it mealworms hand fed it while I held it well I first took it in

after I'd caught it and then I left it over the night I came back the next day to do some photography as soon as I walked into my studio the bat flew down and started bumping me in the nose flying up and bumping me in the nose and I wouldn't tell this story if I didn't have proof recorded this bat is bumping me in the nose time after time in fact he did it so many times that my wife had time to go run grab another camera and say oh I got to get this here put your shirt on you know it was really hot and I was without a shirt on said this is going to be interesting put your shirt on and the bat's still doing it and and so I finally go I realized that the bat was trying to get my attention he wasn't attacking me yeah so I got a mealworm and as soon as I held

the mealworm up to him he flew right up and took the mealworm out of my hand oh my god now here's an animal weighs less than a nickel never seen a human only hours before never saw mealworm hours before never caught a non-flying insect probably in his life and now he all of a sudden remembers from the night before that I'm good for food and that it's better to come bump me in the nose if he wants to get my attention why why's he not bumping my shoulder or my knee or my hand you know some someplace else and if this seems almost unbelievable three years later we went to Taiwan and they caught a bat of that same genus a woolly bat that hadn't been named yet it was a new species side note woolly bats look like if you shrunk a buffalo and washed and conditioned and blow dried

its hair and then stuck huge beige cone ears on it just the fuzziest and they brought it to me to show them how to photograph a bat catching flying insects which is a real challenge and so it was they didn't it rained a lot and they didn't catch this bat until like two nights before I had to leave the country and I figured God help me I'll never be able to train this bat and do these things in that time and so I decided though I'd go through the motions had to so I take the bat into my studio and I came getting to eat mealworms out of my hand he will have nothing to do with cooperating at all so I finally let him go in there but I knew I couldn't keep a small animal like that without him having food or he'd die I mean it'd be very embarrassing to be a leading

conservationist killing a new new species before it got described oh my god so I released some moths to fly around in there with him came back a little while later to see if he'd eaten any of them I saw wings on the floor so I said okay I can keep him till tomorrow night anyway the next evening I come walking in knowing that there was no way I was going to photograph this bat because he's a total non-cooperator I unzip the corner and start to come in and then when I came in he started bumping me in the nose just like the one in barnio had done oh my god different you know totally different locality totally different species I wonder if that's how they nurse do you think that that's maybe how they get their mother's attention I have no idea but how would I relate

to his mother tell me about your mother his mother one is his mother wasn't as big as my nose oh my god so they can be trained and they can train you I have trained quite a few bats I can train them to go where I point and primatologists tell me that they haven't even been able to train primates to do that they've been able to train domestic dogs to go where you point but not primates wow and so when I was talking to a primatologist one time she was really excited when when I said that I could train bats to go where I pointed in fact I've trained them to I'd point where I wanted them to come catch prey take my hand back and then a camera film crew would start with a high-speed camera and the bat would wait wouldn't come until I heard the high-speed camera

come and then he would come oh my gosh that's better than most actors in LA can hit a mark on time I mean I had one of those bats that just knew field assistant over tamed I told him how important it was to get these bats over their fear of us and everything and he just overdid it so the next night my colleague Mike Ryan and I went out to do experiments and we couldn't do any experiments because the bat wanted to come sit on our shoulders and wait to be fed I finally just gave up didn't want to rough the bat up just gave up and went to turn our lab was in the jungle so I just went turned it loose back in the jungle and at least half an hour maybe 45 minutes later I don't remember exactly we had come out of the forest walked back to where I was staying and we're

staying under a floodlight talking and this bat came back and started coming for my hand and I actually for a second thought I was seeing my first bat attack I couldn't believe this thing had followed us back out of the jungle and was just wanting another handout did you have anything to feed it yeah we had some leftover minnows and uh and my assistant had kind of become better acquainted with that bat than I had he the bat had had one they have big ears this species does and one of his ears half of it was missing so my assistant noticed that and said oh that's a bat we just turned loose do you ever miss bats when you have to leave a certain field site are you like I'm going to miss that bat I have at times practically died of curiosity wondering

what would have happened if I'd had another week or another month or something to work with that bat what how smart would it have turned out to be mm-hmm I mean I normally don't work with the same bat uh a week would be a long time for me to work with one bat so yes bats can be trained boy howdy can they so Sarah Ionichi who asked this question had no idea how much I thought that that was going to be a big no I had no idea oh that was a great question then oh my gosh and after all these years of studying bats I am still discovering really cool neat new things about their intelligence I'm amazed at their intelligence oh and quick aside in the wild bats can use echolocation at precise angles to detect insects hiding still in leaves and also

they'll spy on other species to see where they get their food sources also per our discussion earlier they talk they talk to each other they're talking to each other and they're bitches and I love it I have another question from Catherine Hatcher who herself is anologist she's a first time question asker she said I want to know all about bat babies how are they born what is bat birth like can they fly right away tell me all the bat baby facts the pain on whether you're a species that bears twins or singletons twins are born much smaller than singletons but most bats produce just one pup a year and that one pup is about a third its mother's weight that'd be like a 30 or 40 pound baby born by a human mother that's a big one where I've watched them in caves

here in Texas and I might say normally I would be very upset if somebody told me they were going in watching mothers give birth in a cave because that would be very disturbing to the mothers and probably cause mortality but our free-tail bats here in Texas live in such a heavy-duty ammonia environment in the caves that most people wouldn't think of going in and and when I went in for long periods in photograph them I had to wear an ammonia respirator and at one point it leaked and I was hospitalized for 11 days with 35% lung capacity left oh my god oof so these bats are kind of like animals on the Galapagos Islands they're not very frightened of people because people don't usually come in and bug with them yeah and so I over a period of a week or so would get bats along one

wall accustomed to my presence so I could walk back and forth and photograph them without them panicking and dropping their young or anything and it was really cool the pup when it's first born has what appears to be a like a safety line like an astronaut getting out of a vehicle in space the placenta acts as its anchor to its mother oh wow and the umbilical cord is like a leash so that if he falls he can't really go very far and so he stays attached for a fair while I don't know exactly it's probably not exactly the same for each bat but they stay attached for a fair while and then the mother and the young quickly learn each other's scent and voice and after that this pup joins a cluster of up to 500 pups in a square foot and there are thousands of square

feet covered by pups in a cave like bracken cave oh my god now you can you imagine being a mom trying to find your baby this is like like a music festival like Coachella but it's like 60 000 babies and you'd have to find your baby right that's a nightmare well and and and you got all these other pups the calling the same you know calling their moms and all these moms calling back to their pups I mean when I was watching these things happen there would be thousands of adults flying by and all of a sudden you'd see one pup rear up and vocalize and then you'd see one of the adults turn and come back and come back to that one wow I know you want to know what a free tail bat sounds like so also Merlin says that they produce more milk for their size than a jersey cow would

because the pups need to grow fast and they're burning up so much energy clinging to a cold cave wall well their moms are out munching mosquitoes can you imagine having a 40 pound baby and then the next day that baby was able to cling to a rock face well you maneuvered like a fighter pilot in the sky using only your hands bats make humans look like earthbound leaky bags of garbage how long does it take a bat to learn how to fly well it's believed that I know for gray bats they can probably start flying in within 19 days or so oh okay but uh the free tail bats have longer narrower wings they're they're more like little jets as I pointed out they can go cruise at 100 nearly 100 miles an hour with tailwinds oh my god so with those jet like narrow wings it undeadly

takes longer to learn to fly but just imagine the problems faced by a young bat as it learns to fly you're down in a pitch dark cave there are thousands probably tens of thousands of other bats flying at the same time many of those are beginners like you how would you like to go out to the airport and learn to fly with a whole bunch of other beginner pilots trying to take practice takeoffs and landings is that why they say bat out of hell just get me out of there and here's the thing a pilot gets to practice on a nice long horizontal runway where you know if he even if he's 100 yards off he's probably still okay these bats from the moment a pup first drops from the ceiling to practice its first flight

it's going to be moving at 10 to 30 feet per second gravity sucks then that first flight the cave is only about 60 feet wide so within a within a couple seconds he's on a direct collision course with the proverbial brick brick wall oh these poor little pups and he has to make that flight while avoiding multiple potentially fatal collisions per second he has to do a perfectly timed barrel roll and with millimeter per split second precision get his feet out front to grab the wall and not bash his head on the wall that brings me to a question a lot of listeners had do they sleep upside down how do they sleep while clinging to things chute Kenny Juan Pedro Martinez Amber Cooper Heather Circle and Laura does bebeck all wanted

to know about this hanging from the feet situation they have a real cool system where the tendons lock when you pull down on the claws of hanging to their ceiling that tends to lock the tendons so they don't use any energy hanging on wow so it takes energy for the bat to open its talent so it opens them finds a spot to grip and then when it relaxes hanging by its own weight clamps those talents closed and then it's upside down night night for the sky fuzzies so it's kind of like putting a you remember those things you'd put on your car steering wheel the club you just like lock it on there it is I didn't I always wondered that because it always seems like once you relaxed and slept you just go well and people also ask a lot why doesn't the blood all rush to

their heads yeah why doesn't it the better case is why doesn't the brother rush to our feet what happens when all of a sudden you feel faint get your head down right so so we're the ones that ought to be explained what the problem is that's a very good yeah and when you lose enough blood to your head such as for example by being spun in a giant centrifuge your noggin is like yeah no I can't brain right now and things go dark but bats are like watch this I have so much blood and my smush face right now I'm headed to dream town to get some z's with 400,000 of my closest friends farting grasshoppers on me speaking of large populations a few of you including ab 7.0 wanted to know how big these pajama parties get Bailey good wants to know where in the world

is the largest population of bats the largest remaining known population is at bracketing cave just 20 miles from the center of San Antonio oh so Texas so and I'm very proud to report that after some 20 years of working with many others to do it I managed to lead the charge that got that cave protected with hundreds of actually several thousand acres around it as a nature reserve that is amazing to think that there are so many bats in existence that wouldn't be here without you it's still one of my all-time favorite places on the planet it is just an incredible experience to see that many bats come out of anything I mean how many bats some estimates are around 15 million bats that's like the population of humans in Los Angeles all in one cave system and when they

emerge at night to feed it's like a winged commute hour on the 405 but flappier a way more beautiful and no honking speaking of what about urban bats oh jacob roscoe brinbell joyski le v and michelle l pagram all asked how bats live in cities and a bunch of austin-based or at least austin loving folks such as anna thompson nathan wilgroth jonathan harden ruby ostrech chelsea craft Courtney ross brian worton jackie and ian friend to bats derrick alan hi first time question submitter gale rosen michelle lee and sarah huet wanted to know about the congress bridge and why it's so great for bat watching particularly in the spring and the late summer it's really spectacular just come to our bridge yeah there's any bridge yeah julie nobel uh who i believe

julie nobel said omg talk about the bat bridge please that is all if you go to the congress if you go to my website again merlin tuttle dot org go to my photo gallery it's divided into catching prey right rearing young all those kind of things go to the subsection called emergencies and you'll see some of my pictures of the huge numbers coming out of the congress avenue bridge and how close the art of people without anybody ever being harmed one of the reason austin is known as the largest urban bat colony is because of merlin tuttle because of merlin so when the congress avenue bridge was reconstructed in 1980 the underside happened to be perfect for roosting but the city was not into having millions of bats in its midst and merlin who was

a founder of bat conservation international until his retirement thought that austin was perfect for a perceptual makeover of the beligur bat now over a million maybe up to a million and a half mexican free-tail bats emerge from the bridge during peak bat season they eat 10 to 30 thousand insects a day they bring in millions of dollars a year from bat tourism merlin tuttle ladies and gents merlin tuttle one kid brings a dead bat to school and the world is forever changed now this next question was asked by my pal dr. joe hanson of pbs fame um dr. joe hanson wanted to know about the chiroptorium yes david bamberger built that uh out toward johnson city in texas he was a rancher who joined my board directors years ago when i first got involved

in bat conservation and he worked helping us with protect bracken cave and one day he said merlin i don't have any caves on my ranch but i'd sure like to have something you know where i could show people bats on my ranch you think we could build a cave or something that bats would come to and i said yeah i said you know there are abandoned mines and railroad tunnels and things all across america that big bat colonies have moved into cool if we build it right to come up with a proper range of temperature the bats will probably come if you build it he will come so he hired a really good uh engineer architect whatever the combo should be and i designed what what it should be like to get the right temperature and darkness for the bats and the engineer architect

designed something that wouldn't fall down and uh so then he named it the chiroptorium and uh it's interesting i told him to watch out that when the bats first came don't go run in to see them because they might give you a bad report and not come back for a while because those first ones would be scouts well he ran in to see them and they left didn't come back for a while don't be sad don't be sad don't be sad it turned out okay but he now has between half a million and a million bats there and that it's totally artificial cave wow does he get to claim them as dependents on his taxes or pets maybe not i'll tell you what he does do now he goes in once one at least last time i talked to him he was going to start this going in once a year with a

front inloader on a small tractor and harvesting the guano and using it on his ranch oh yeah so a ton of people had questions about that okay so when it came to bats a lot of folks on patreon wanted to talk shit and by that i mean they had guano questions such as julie bear who brought it to my attention that back guano is used as a sculptural medium thank you julie bear wow okay wow also there were other questions about guanos safety and uses asked by squark teresa bossa nova and valerie tarenhawk debon robertson erin ryan morgan schulte and emmanuel sanchez wants to know how dirty and unsafe is guano really and is that a myth that guano is unsafe well i don't know that anything can be said to be safe right

for example i point out when people tell me how dangerous bats are because one and a half people persons a year in the u.s and canada combine die of bat rabies and i point out that 20 to 40 times that number die of dog attacks every year and then i say but before anybody thinks i'm prejudiced and advocating against dogs let me just point out that we still love our wives and spouses but our spouses kill us off at the rate of over a thousand times what die of bat rabies oh man that's a good point so i mean anything we do has some risk probably the biggest risk we all take every day is getting in our car and driving to work but we don't think of it as a risk because we do it every day and so if you ask if something

you know has any risk i have a hard time with that because there's nothing that doesn't have a risk yeah what i can say is i personally have more than once sat and eaten lunch on old dried up guano pile in a cave oh no in the in a winter cave that's the warmest place to seat yourself because it insulates you from the hard rock that's colder would indiana jones be tough enough to sit on a guano pile no freaking way i rarely think about needing to take extra precautions to sterilize my hands when i come out of a bat cave but i can tell you i'm almost religious about coming home and washing my hands carefully after i've been to see a doctor in a hospital yeah i mean the most dangerous animal on this planet for you to meet and get a disease from is another human

going on a date is probably way more dangerous than sitting on a pile of dried corn what about what kind of boots do you need if you're mucking through caves what kind of boots you must have a favorite kind no no just any sturdy hiking boot all right i figured you'd need some kind of knee to high rubber waiters now if i'm going in bracken cave or one like that that has millions of free tail bats living near the entrance where they attract domestic beetles then i'll wear rubber almost high almost knee high boots to keep the domestic insects from climbing up and buying okay let's talk about bats inside your house which was on a lot of your minds lauren kelly first time question asker evan jude donnasue oragonian westley winks and rike

sarmiento and julie nobel who side note julie nobel dressed as me for halloween week at her office and carried a number one dad mug and i saw a picture and it made my whole damn day anyway this is a hot topic bats inside your house michelle lee and a few other people had this question which was so great um recently a bat found its way into a friend's living room and a lot of time was spent trying to chase it out a door window my question what is the best way to guide a bat outside without hurting it i guess the first thing i'd suggest if it's not too difficult would be to open the doors and windows to the outside and shut off all doors to the rest of the house lower the lights to a level where it's not real bright but don't turn them out where you

can't see the bat one of the worst mistakes people make i can't tell you how many times i've had this call where somebody calls me and and they saw a bat and they fled the house to go get help they come back and nobody can find the bat so they have no idea if it left on its own they have no idea if it's still there and i've seen people you know move out of their house for a week because they didn't know if the bat was still there no no the bat is not going to attack you if you're in the room with a bat you will have the feeling that it might be trying to attack you because here's why aeronautics nerds open your big bad ears because this is some good stuff picture yourself is piloting a small aircraft and you fly up to a dead-end corner you have to turn around

to a u-turn to get out of it when you do that you drop your airspeed to just about zero and you start falling so you have to swoop down at a fairly sharp angle to regain flight speed and and be able to continue flying so if you're in the middle of that room and the bat's going back and forth the corner is trying to find a way out and he's swooping down each time to regain flight speed you know what this happens in in a room like that it happens with mosquitoes and things let's say you're outside it used to happen here in austin bat people used to report all the time about being attacked and barely escaping a bat in my first question did he actually get you no no i was real lucky well how do you know he wasn't chasing a mosquito and you flew before

and you ran away before you found out that he wasn't after you oh could that be possible and i've even investigated cases where they got scratched on a rose bush on the way to their house flee in the bat and then went and got their rabies shots because the bat actually got them oh no i've investigated maulings oh get ready for the story oh my word oh my word a tennessee valley authority dam in alabama shut down one time because the workers wouldn't go to work because the guy had been mauled by a bat in the dam mauled mauled they called and i had a consulting contract with them at the time they insisted on me coming down and settling problems and i said there's no need for me to come down it's inconceivable that this guy got mauled by a bat

you know there's another explanation you don't need me to come up with that oh no no nobody's gonna believe this until we get somebody an expert down here so i get down there and the guy has very little real skin left from about his elbow halfway to his wrist down his arm i mean it's just almost raw flesh it's really a mess and it's obvious something did a bad hell of a job on him yeah but at a glance i knew there was no bat in the world could or could or would have done that yeah so i wanted to get somebody to take me down to show me the scene of the crime and oh god it was terrible trying to get somebody to volunteer to go with even me but finally we went down what happens they had lockers and when they come to work they put their private things

in a locker well this guy had left his locker open while he didn't hang in it during the night the bat ended up going into finding the locker and going to sleep in there the guy comes in the morning reaches in to do something the bat panics and tries to fly out the guy thinks he's being attacked yanks his arm out and the top of that locker looked like a damn saw blade oh my god it hadn't been finished properly and you can still see his skin hanging on the on the top of the locker no and and the funny thing was after all that you know at first they had to practically restrain him he's so mad he was going to attack me for dying his story and then when it was even clear to him what had happened then he was really blankety blanked off

at his medical doctor for being so stupid as to believe his story and give him rabies shots did they finish his locker properly put some duct tape on it or something well i left at that point i'd solved the immediate problem batman out one question was understandably echoed over and over by folk such as heather circle elizabeth illian elizabeth mcgloughlin amanda revera deepy nervison reamon j doige hail hullings bob clark georgia hidey stushenoff karina peterson quen bode melissa cowan tangy goat erica smith and katie throneberg who asked variations of why on earth are they so darn cute why are bats so stinking cute are bats not the cutest why are

bats so darn cute why are they so dang cute and katie's question why do they look so cute in diapers slash little blanket burritos bats you want to know why they're cute it's a great question uh a few people ask why they look so cute when they're wearing little blanket burritos and just why in general bats are so cute well the bats are thinking looks so cute those are baby flying foxes and remember we talked about whether fly whether some bats might be primates or not flying foxes have faces that look just like lemurs that are primates oh in fact leading experts have it before mistaken bat flying fox skulls for lemur skulls oh my gosh so we're seeing baby primates and we're identifying with them and they've got big

eyes and fox-like faces and you know most most flying fox posts money they're they're just by as cute as anybody thinks they're not cute just has a hard time seeing cuteness i mean they're as cute as any panda gotta be but they wrap those in little towels because they're more comfortable that way their mama normally keeps them wrapped in her wing and they actually feel more comfortable when they're wrapped in a towel like that and so that's the way they keep them that baby burritos uh policy semen's had a great question is there any evidence that our modern technological environment with its noise electromagnetism radar is messing with the bats ability to navigate we don't know there are so many things we don't know that it's just absolutely terrifying

and some of them are obtained equally or more to us one thing that hasn't come up here is what we don't know about what's happening with all the pesticides we're spraying on the world because we're losing bats and other insectivorous animals that once kept insects in check in the united states alone we now use approximately a billion tons of pesticides annually that's all coming back into our food and water and i tell people you know it start paying a lot more attention to natural controls like bats if you don't want to spend a whole lot more risk on pesticides killing you will people having bat boxes in their backyard or in their you know the top of their house will that help the bat population at all yes it will in fact

where we we mentioned the fungus white knows the causes white nose syndrome where that has already passed through and killed off a large number of bats several states are using relying on people's backyard bat houses to monitor recovery of the species oh wow and so if you have that you know as a hospitable measure then researchers can come and take a look and see how many people are having little bats are nesting in there i mean i i personally help monitor a site new york where we know that for like five or ten years at least they this family had at least 1200 bats every year in their bat houses and then uh as after white nose syndrome passed they only had 40 oh wow but now they're rebuilding and i believe i can't remember this year they're up toward 200

i bet and now what about someone who wanted to go see a bat or go bat scoping or what's the best time to see a bat and just enjoy a bat what kind of what kind of good binoculars or night vision or where should you sit how do you my and my mom and dad have some bats they've named them vlad they call them all vlad but they come out at dusk and they wait and watch on the porch and they're they're so excited to see them when they come out but if maybe you don't even realize your neighborhood has bats because you think they're night sparrows like how do you see a bat i have spoken to so many people who will tell me with amazement you know i've lived in my neighborhood for 20 years and i've never seen a bat and then i heard you speak the other night and now i see

bats sometimes it's just a matter of looking at the right time give me a break i gotta run oh yeah yeah no worries thank you so much for talking i love that okay so at this point two hours in we both needed a little intermission a bathroom break a sip of water so i figured this is a good time to stop and make you wait a week for more merlin in the meanwhile ask the smartest people the stupidest questions not only will you know more about what's snoozing in crevices and fluttering overhead you'll also come away with some pretty boss life advice now this conversation was so great it warranted a follow-up and so next week we will continue part two of chiropterology with merlin tuttle i swear he has more stories from the field that will boggle you and dazzle you

meanwhile you can find him at merlin tuttle.org he is on instagram he is on twitter the links will be in the show notes follow him immediately he is one of my favorite presences on social media bats for days and literally the best pictures that anyone has ever captured of them okay links in the show notes now if you need any allergies merch you can find it at alleyword.com thank you shannon feltas and bonnie dutch for helping manage that and do check out their comedy podcast you are that i am their guest this week talking all things halloween making some confessions i'll probably regret so that is you are that also another wonderful podcast started by anologist is sports and performance psychologist dr sarah shepherds brand new manage the moment podcast

which you can find anywhere you get podcasts i'll be her guest on november 25th so subscribe to that now um thank you to erin talbert who admin the facebook oligies podcast group hello to the non-facebook folk subredditors out there thank you to emily white and all the oligies transcribers in that facebook group helping to make transcripts available those are at alleyword.com slash oligies dash extras link in the show notes thank you to jared sleeper for all the assistant editing and of course to the human equivalent of a bat burrito steven ray morris who puts all the pieces together each week nick thornburn wrote and performed the theme music and stay tuned next week for more adventures in bats with dr murlan tuttle you know if you stick around to the end of the episode

though i tell you a secret and this week the secret is i was once dating this musician who had like long musician hair and we were hanging out at dusk near a lake just admiring the view all of a sudden this huge butterfly flew close to his long musician hair and he was like whoa that was a big ass butterfly and i was like bro that was bat and he did not like that information but bats in general are not trying to eat anyone's hair there was probably just a bug over his head but anyway later on this boyfriend didn't like that at parties i would bounce around and say hello to various friends and so once we were in a fight and he wrote a scathing song about me called social bat because i was like a social butterfly but larger because i talked to too many people at

parties anyway i think he wanted me to be offended but you know jokes on him because bats are cool as hell all right okay stay tuned for next week it's so good all right bye bye