Short Wave - Animal Slander! - "Blind As A Bat" And "Memory Of A Goldfish"

Episode Date: January 10, 2020

Host Maddie Sofia and reporter Emily Kwong evaluate what truth there is to the popular phrases "blind as a bat" and "memory of a goldfish." Hint: The phrases probably weren't born out of peer-reviewed science. Tweet Maddie at @maddie_sofia and Emily at @emilykwong1234. Plus, encourage our editor to make this a series by sending fan mail to [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Water in the quiet. Be seated. Hey, everybody. Emily Kwong here with Maddie Safaya. Hey, Maddie. Hey, you. So it's been a week.

The news has been pretty sad. Yeah, this week has been a heck of a year. You know what I mean? I would say. So we thought it might be nice to have a little fun today. Maddie, you're going to unveil a new series. Yes. All right.

Well, series is a strong word. Okay. A second episode hasn't technically been approved by our editor yet, but yes, a new series. Drum roll, please. Animal slander. What is that? What? Sayings about animals that are just plain wrong. Like, oh, okay, like blind as a bat? Exactly. That's a phrase people say about another person to suggest that they have terrible vision, which, first of all, it is not cool to make fun of a person based on their physical abilities. And second of all, it isn't even true. Bats aren't blind.

Maddie, you're giving away the entire episode. Yeah, that is, to be fair. So, yeah, let's just get to it. To kick off the definitely new series, I talked to an expert on bats. To debunk the notion of being blind as a bat. Correct. And an expert on fish. Guess what garbage saying is out there about fish?

Fly as a fish. Fly as a fish? No. What would that even mean? All right. Today on the show, animal slander. Blind as a bat and memory of a goldfish. Okay, Maddie, so we're going to run through two phrases.

One is blind as a bat. Yes, and memory of a goldfish. Okay. So I'll give you the lowdown on what's right about them and what's wrong. It's mostly just wrong. First up, blind as a bat. People here in the United States say blind as a bat to indicate that someone has really bad vision. Yes, which we've established is just a messed up thing to say anyways.

But for more on why it is factually wrong, I spoke to you. Yuan Ekloff from his laundry room in Sweden. That's where I am, yeah, in my laundry room, actually. It's not very echoing. Yeah, yeah. Okay. It's hard for bats in here, I think. Yeah.

I'm compassionate. Anyways, back on track, Yuan wrote his PhD thesis on vision in different types of bats when he was at Gothenburg University in Sweden. And so I asked him as a person who has studied bat vision, how many of them are truly blind? I would say none? Straight up. None?

Zero. Kwong. It's all a lie. Exactly. We talked about how one of the reasons people might think bats are blind is because scientists figured out that a lot of bats use this technique called echolocation. That thing where animals use sound to tell what's around them. Exactly.

So they send out a little chirp. It bounces off something, comes back to them. And that tells them stuff like how far away. something is. Think sonar. But I always thought, at least in school, I was taught that that echolocation is how bats are getting around. Right. That's true for a lot of bats. But you got to know, Kwong, that there are over a thousand species of bats out there. And so that's really only part of the picture. Bats are also out here using sight, sense of smell, regular old hearing to get around, often using combinations of those strategies or senses. And you one told me that

even some bats that rely heavily on echolocation can still see something like the size of a centimeter from about a meter away. If you hold up your thumb in front of you, they could see it clearly. That being said, he says a lot of bats mainly use their eyes for long distances. They don't need their eyes to look up close. They need their eyes to figure out where they are, look at the horizon, see the trees and the skyline, stuff like that. And fruit bats, okay, they can see even better than that. They're big. They have these big old eyes. And U-Wan says they pretty much just rely on their eyes and sense of smell to hunt for fruit. And most fruit bats don't use echolocation at all. And the ones that do use this weird kind of crappy version of echolocation. Wild. Okay. Anything else, Safaya? Indeed. Uh-huh. Tell me more. Uwan told me this isn't the first time people have been wrong about bat vision. He said that where he grew up in Sweden, there was a lot of like folklore about bats having great vision.

In the folklore, for example, people thought that bats must have very good eyes. Otherwise, how can they fly when it's dark outside? They could even use the eyes to make potions and medicine to enhance their own vision. So people actually used bat blood to try to improve their own vision? Yeah, they tried. So basically, we've always been wrong about bats. Clearly, we cannot get it right. Okay, what's next?

Our next slanderous animal phrase is memory of a goldfish. I'm so curious about this one because I've heard that a goldfish remembers things for three seconds. Slander! Really? Wrong. All the way wrong. Completely wrong. Yes.

In order to address this slanderous nonsense, I talked with Ryan Wong. He's an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. He studies fish behavior, learning, memory, that kind of stuff. And he told me this idea that fishes have three second memories or 30 seconds. second memories is just wrong. And so there are definitely lots of different studies out there and many different species of fish that show that fish have really complex learning abilities and also have the ability to remember this information for long periods of time. So how long of a time are we talking about? So with our friend the goldfish, weeks at least. Wow. In one experiment, goldfish were

trained that if they pushed a lever at a certain time, they'd get food. So not only were they remembering that pushing the lever meant they would get food, they were also able to determine pretty well how much time had passed. And lots of other experiments with goldfish show that they can use spatial memory to solve mazes. I knew they had to be smarter. Wild, right? Mm-hmm.

So Ryan himself studies a different type of fish called a zebra fish. And he told me the basics of one of his fish memory experiments. All we do is where we expose a fish to, let's say, a white box. Hopefully, the idea being is that they're going to learn that this white box is going to be an indicator of a potential fearful thing. So what this stimulus is is actually a chemical that is released when fish scales are kind of damaged. And so they basically can isolate that chemical. And whenever the fish sees the white box, they put that chemical in the water.

Oh, so fish that are already in the water when they see or know the white boxes there, they're receiving that chemical. Right. So they learn to associate that white box with something scary, essentially. And so when this type of fish gets scared, it either freezes or swims kind of erratic. around. So the first step is associating that white box with fear. Then what we try to do is we test to see how long they actually can remember that. So how do we do that? What we can do is we can just stop giving them that alarm substance. So they stop having this what's called a reinforcement stimulus that's there. Basically, they stop putting that little stimulus in there and try to figure out how long the fish still remembers that that white box is scary town USA. And so even when the scary alarm chemical is not there, they acted scared when they were. were confronted with the white box. For how long? So Ryan tested them for one day after and then four days after. So for four days after that, they still thought that that white box was scary. And he told me that it probably would last even longer. They just stopped testing it four days. And other

experiments that are kind of similar show that zebrafish can remember stuff for weeks or months. Which sounds like it suggests that fish, at least zebrafish, have much longer memories than we give them credit for. Absolutely. All kinds of fish. This is fish slander. When you're saying fish can't Remember stuff. You're just wrong. You're just wrong. And I will say, though, Emily, neither you on or Ryan seemed as mad as I was about this animal slander. Really? Yes. In fact, both of them were annoyingly kind and optimistic about these situations. Would you say it fills you with an unbridled rage?

Well, that's a leading question, Maddie. So I think, yes, I think it definitely is, it can get a bit annoying. But it's one of those things where it gives us the opportunity to help sort of of educate sort of the people out there to help them realize that there really is no strong scientific evidence to support that they actually have short memories or poor ability to learn. It's actually in the opposite case. That is such a dignified response. You're a dignified response.

Okay. I'm sorry, I'm still jazzed up. You're passionate about these critters, aren't you? I'm passionate about accurate information, Emily Kwan. We share that in common, Maddie Safaya. Well, that's it for this installment of Animal Slander. Thanks for listening. So you're willing this series into being with this episode.

If you've got an idea for the next episode of Animal Slander, send us an email at shortwave at npr.org. Again, I'm not sure this is an actual series. This episode is produced by Rebecca Ramirez and edited by Viet Le and we had some engineering help from Ted Me Bay. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Maddie Safaya. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR. What are these phrases are there? I'm not a lot.

Well, I'm hoping some listeners send in some because I don't know. have a lot more.