The Joe Rogan Experience - #1932 - Merlin Tuttle

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

Dr. Merlin Tuttle is an ecologist, wildlife photographer, and conservationist who has studied bats and championed their preservation for over 60 years. He's the founder of Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation, home to his legacy and devoted to research, education and the conservation of bats. www.merlintuttle.org

the Joe Rogan experience well welcome to the show Merlin what a great name by the way thank you your parents named you Merlin did they make you get into magic at all my mother actually actually named me Merlin DeVere, and her hope was that she would get a kick out of me being a medical doctor, MD, Tuttle MD. But it didn't work out that way. Well, you're a bat scientist. How does one specialize in bats? How'd that journey start? does one specialize in bats how'd that journey start well i was always interested in anything in nature i start out at two collecting monarch caterpillars and watch them make cocoons and hatch into butterflies and and then i went into a snake phase in which my mother was not happy with that phase at five i was dragging in sometimes snakes four or five feet long, and they'd get loose in the house. Oh, no.

We moved into a new neighborhood one time, and a welcoming committee came over to welcome my mother to the neighborhood. And I had a few days before caught a 7-foot, 8-inch coach whip snake that I was really proud of, but it got out. And we couldn't find it in the house. We thought it had gotten out of but it got out and we couldn't find it in the house we thought it'd gotten out of the house the group sitting around welcoming my mother to the neighborhood and all of a sudden she sees everybody with a look of horror on their faces and they're heading for the door and this snake had reared up behind the couch it was looking for all the world like a cobra looking around and only one of those women would ever even speak to my mother again.

That's hilarious. You're crazy, son, with these snakes. So you are a bat scientist. Right. The Secret Lives of Bats is one of your books and the other one is The Bat House Guide. That's the most recent one. There's a lot of bats in Austin, Texas. That's right uh actually i moved to austin because there are a lot of bats here but there wouldn't be probably

still a lot of bats if it hadn't been for my moving when i first began to be interested in conserving bats austin was making more negative publicity about bats than any other place probably in the world. There are news headlines from coast to coast saying that hundreds of thousands of rabid bats were invading and attacking the citizens of Austin. And was that nonsense? Absolutely. Why do you think people have this fear of bats?

Fear of the unknown. I mean, you're probably not totally unaffected i mean i know i am when i i'm much more nervous about taking off in a plane than riding to the airport in a taxi and yet the taxi is far more dangerous than the plane statistically speaking right right but we fear what we don't know. And it's very, very few people know much about bats. And so they're easily misunderstood and scared. And in those days, if a bat tried to catch a mosquito near somebody, the person would run like hell thinking that they're being attacked. And they'd never even look around to see the bat catch the mosquito and go on his way. In fact, I had one guy that claimed the bat actually did attack him, and when I looked at the evidence of the attack, I found these big scratches on his arm that a bat

couldn't have inflicted, and turned out he'd run too close to a rosebush on his way to the house and got bit by the rosebush and blamed the bat. So bats in Austin, what's interesting is this bridge near Lady Bird Lake. Right. Right, and that bridge is famously a home for millions of bats, right? Up to 1.5 million. That's a lot of bats. Right.

It's a beautiful thing when you watch them fly out. One of the first times I've ever come here, you can see Jamie has a photo of it happening. One of the first times I ever came here, we went next to it, and you could hear the bats. Right. You could hear them squeaking. Right.

And stuff in there. Well, when I first came to Austin, I had to face people who were signing petitions to have them eradicated. They were terrified of them. The health department had warned that they were mostly rabid and would attack people. Mostly rabid? Oh, yeah. And what were they basing this on? In the early 1980s, there were all kinds of planted stories in the news media

by pest control and health people that made money off of fear of bats. And like Family Circle and Good Housekeeping magazines were running articles like Three Years of Terror, Real Life Ordeal. magazines were running articles like three years of terror real life ordeal and one of these stories had the family trapped in their home for three days and nights with bats attacking the windows and doors trying to get them and so people were really frightened genuinely but all it took to overcome that is i ended up getting a bat of the kind that lives under the bridge, and I'd take him around and show him to people. And I remember one lady, actually it was Ms. Crenshaw, the famous golfer's mother.

She thought, you know, when she first heard I was conserving bats, she told her friends, you know, what next? Somebody's going to be trying to conserve cockroaches. But the first time I actually showed her a live bat in the hand she was like oh isn't he cute you know a whole different response and so bats once people meet them they're their own best ambassadors they're gentle animals that almost never bite anything except an insect or fruit, except in self-defense. And all I had to do was come to Austin and point out that this was a treasure not yet recognized. And because of convincing Austin not to eradicate the bats today, they bring millions of tourist dollars every summer to Austin

and they eat tons of crop and yard pests every night. So that's what's important for people to understand is they actually serve a very important purpose in the ecosystem, right? Yes. A major part of my success in conserving bats has been that I look at it from a standpoint not just that bats or other animals have rights or anything. It's a matter of like them or not, we need them. And if we understand them, we'll probably like them too. And so this eradication idea that people had, that would have been a disaster, like, ecologically.

If they did decide to eradicate the bats and they killed all those bats that were under the bridge? Well, what we forget is when people warn us about the supposed dangers of having bats around, the real danger is not having bats around. We could be practically buried in insect pests. Bats are the primary controllers of insects that fly at night, like mosquitoes. A recent study in Wisconsin showed that bats living in people's bat houses in their yards, they looked at the droppings of those bats and genetically analyzed to see what they were eating, and they found that those bats living in bat houses were eating 15 species of mosquitoes, nine of which carried West Nile virus.

Do we get West Nile virus in Texas? Is that common? I don't think it's real common. But it's possible? Yeah. So a bat house, and this is a photo of a bat house that you have on the cover of your book. I didn't even know that these were a thing. They're like bird houses, but it's a bat house.

Yeah, except that they're open at the bottom instead of a hole in the front with a floor. And so people put these up and construct them purposely so bats can live in them. Right. And how do you get a bat to get in there? Well, just like birds. They find them and can live in them. Right. And how do you get a bat to get in there? Well, just like birds. They find them and decide they like them. Oh, wow. Look at that picture.

That's crazy. That bat house was occupied by 105 bats within a week of the time it was put up. Oh, yeah. You have a little Batman logo on the front of it, too. So within a week it was put up, there was over a hundred bats in there. That's right. Now I wouldn't say that that's what you'd expect all the time. It often takes six months to a year, even sometimes a year and a half to two years to track bats. But if you put up the right kind of bat house in the right kind of place,

you'll probably track some bats and it can be a lot of fun and what is uh the right kind of bat house like do you have to put something in there to attract them no just uh roosting crevices are three quarters an inch to an inch wide usually the bats like those narrow crevices because they're used to snakes coming after them and like if a big rat snake comes into a bat house to try to catch a bat if the bat's roosting in a place only three quarters an inch wide the snake comes in he can't open his mouth wide enough to get around the bat's head he can but the bat opens his mouth and bites the snake's nose. So I suspect that's a large part of why bats like those narrow crevices is protection against one of their dominant predators. That makes sense. So you

would set one of these things up, leave it, and that would help control all sorts of mosquitoes and pests and things that are on your property. Yes. Putting up bat houses can be a big help in many ways. There's a recent study done in the Mediterranean that showed that when they put up bat houses strategically located around rice paddies, that they no longer had to use pesticides. Really? That's amazing. How many bats do you need to control pests? What kind of bugs are we talking about besides mosquitoes?

Those were moths that they were controlling. And bats have been found helping protect rice in Thailand where they're eating white-billed plant hoppers. They'll eat a wide variety of insects. One important point to make, you know, we hear a lot about the importance of biodiversity. And the bat houses in the Mediterranean that successfully eliminated the need for pesticides, they didn't mean that there were never any more pests or that there was no pest damage. What the bats have to do to eliminate the need for pesticides is just lower the damage to a level where the cost of the damage is less than it costs to put pesticides out. So the reason that worked was that there was a national park not very far away. And so, you know, if you just have miles of monoculture, what do the bats do in the off season when your

pests aren't there? They're going to starve to death. And so by having diverse habitat not far away in the off season, the bats had a place to go eat until they were needed over the rice paddies again. Okay. That makes sense. So when you first got here, you're dealing with these people that want to eradicate bats. You had to convince them that bats are very important. And how did you go about doing that? Like, what did you do to try to educate people? Well, this goes back a ways. When I, what started out, when I got my first job, it was a really great job. I was, got a full salary just to go have fun in the world as far as I looked at it, because I could go

anywhere in the world I wanted, stay as long as I wanted, as long as I did good research on some aspect of bat biology. And so when I announced that I was going to resign that to do full-time bat conservation work, even my closest friends thought I was stark raving crazy, because in those days days almost everybody especially in America thought that if not all at least most bats were rabid and they would much rather pay to have a bat killed than to have it saved and so it was very difficult at first. You know, we hear a lot from environmentalists, conservationists about the need to win battles. You know, send us X amount of money so we can beat up on such and such a company.

And people, there's a certain type of people that kind of love that. And but, you know, if you're starting out to save something that everybody hates and they'd really rather spend money to kill it than to save it, you got to get a whole lot more clever than just asking them for money to save the animal. So I had, I don't think it was because I was particularly smart or anything, but I had to learn early on to win friends instead of battles. And what I found was if I went about it right and I won enough friends, I didn't need to win the battles. And that's become kind of a dominant part of my approach to conservation is, first of all, you listen to people. And I don't care if they say, you know, I had fun burning a bat cave in which I killed thousands of bats, or whatever they say.

You know, we shouldn't be dwelling in the past. It's the future that counts. And we've all made crazy mistakes in the past, and we wouldn't want to be hated for the rest of our lives for what we did wrong before we knew what was right but i found that if i listened to people and took them seriously and understood that even the person with the wildest tail probably had some reason for believing it and the the more I listened and understood, the better I became at countering it. And also, I always had the attitude of, I'm not here to just help bats. I'm here to help people and bats. And if you've got a problem, I want to know what it is. I want to understand it. And then maybe I can help you solve it.

And so I learned to be good at listening to people. And I'm sure you've experienced a good share of winning is just listening. Most people will like you if you just take time to listen to them, even if you are at opposite poles as what you believe. And so by learning to listen well and then have an attitude that what can I do to help you, I was able to change a hell of a lot of people's minds about bats. So a lot of people, they have this idea about bats so a lot of people they have this idea about bats it's based on like horror movies vampire movies and whenever you see like halloween decorations there's always bats involved bats are thought of as like a creepy kind of scary animal

well that's all part of just not understanding in fact one of the big problems for bats is that, you know, out of the more than 1,400 species in the world, the vast majority of them, we hardly know a thing about them other than that they've got a name. And they fly erratically. They live in places that people often consider kind of spooky, the basement or the attic or the cave. often consider kind of spooky, the basement or the attic or the cave. And we don't know what they're going to do next because they fly so erratically and they're associated with the night. I mean, even people who work at night aren't trusted as much as people who work in the daytime.

That's true, right? That's true. Night shift people are kind of creepy. Yeah. Yeah. So these bats that we have in Austin, is there more than one species? At least 99% one species under the bridge. There's probably two species there. One's the cave myotis that usually lives in caves, and the other is the Brazilian free-tailed bat. And what's the most common? The free-tailed bats.

So that's the one when you see the big swarms, most of them are the Brazilian freetail bats. Right. So is that an invasive species? No, not by any means. So why is it called the Brazilian freetail bat? That's a good question. Species often get named by where they were first discovered. And the species was first described by specimens discovered in Brazil. Then it was discovered later that it was found all the way up into the United States and there were subspecies named. It was thought originally that there was a different subspecies in Mexico that came up into Texas and a third subspecies in Florida and the Gulf region.

And each of those subspecies, the first one was described in Brazil, so it was Tederida brasiliensis brasiliensis, and then Tederida brasiliensis mexicana from Mexico, and so on. But then a genetic study was done and found that they're so broadly mixed genetically that you couldn't separate out subspecies. And so they went back to the original name, and it's now called the Brazilian free-tailed bat, which is kind of a pain for all of us that knew it for many years as the Mexican free-tailed bat. But that's just the way of genetics. Sometimes I like the common names even better than the scientific because they don't seem to change as rapidly

these days. So, and what is the other bat that's very common here? It's not very common. Less common, but prevalent? Yeah, the cave myotis. It's a slower flying, more agile, maneuverable bat. The free tail bats can fly thousands of feet above ground and they can travel at, get this, with a tail wind, they can go 100 miles an hour. What? 100 miles an hour. And our bats from the bridge could easily be feeding clear down on the coast at some nights. I've watched on Doppler weather radar, we can watch them really well on radar. And I've watched where they come out of, let's say, Bracken Cave down near San Antonio, and we see the front band of moving bats crossing four to five counties in 12 minutes wow i had no idea i thought they

were you know like kind of like bird speed like a regular bird bats are by far the most maneuverable best flyers in the world uh they can do things that neither birds nor insects can do in flight and why is that uh they don't have fixed hard wings you know like insects the wings are made of chitin and they they don't bend that much except at the joints and birds feathers aren't nearly as flexible as the skin on a bat's wing Actually, the skin on a bat's wing is two layers, and that skin has been rated as 19 times tougher than a surgeon's glove. Wow, really? And what's really cool is even if they get damaged badly, it's amazing what their healing powers are. Sometimes the bat can even have a broken wing and the swelling around the break will act like a cast and will hold the bone in place where the bat still is able to fly and survive until it can recover. So these bats that we have, we have the

fast-moving bats that are the Brazilian bats, and then you have the other bats which are more maneuverable, but they don't go as fast? That's true. And these bats tend to feed in different types of places. And the fact that these Brazilian bats can make it all the way down to the coast, and then they come back to the bridge at night? Well, I'm not saying they make it all the way down to the coast, and then they come back to the bridge at night? Well, I'm not saying they make it all the way to the coast. The trouble is we haven't yet done good enough tracking to know. Can we put like a little GPS band on a bat, or is it too big?

Yeah, we can radio track bats. We'd love to radio track them when they migrate south and see where they're going, but it can be a real problem trying to track a bat at night across the U.S.-Mexican border without getting shot down by somebody. I was down looking for bats in the daytime one time with a friend who was an ex-aircraft Navy pilot, and we were in his private plane looking for bats down low along the New Mexico-Texas border. And first thing we knew, we got forced to land by drug agents that had overtaken us. And when we landed, we were surrounded by guys with guns, thinking they had really made the catch of the year, somebody dumb enough to fly in the daytime with these drugs.

And they were very disappointed to find out we were just bat people. So when it comes to bats around the world, how much variation is there? I know that there's some really large bats in Asia, right? There's some big variation. There's, yes, large bats in Southeast and in Asia, Africa. What's the biggest bat? The biggest bat has a wingspan of almost six feet. I have a colleague who swears that the biggest ones sometimes actually get to six feet.

What is that bat? Flying foxes. There are 200 kinds of flying foxes. Some of them are small and some are big. Look at the size of that sucker. These are really neat bats. And it's not just these great big bats, but one of the world's smallest mammals is a bat. The little bumblebee bat from Thailand weighs a third less than a U.S. penny. Look at the size of that thing. That's in the Philippines?

Is that what that is? Is that what it says, Jane? These flying foxes are in the Philippines, yes, but they're in a wide area of the Old World tropics. We're very concerned about them because, for one— Go back to that photo with the guy next to it so we could see it the perspective no the one yeah that one look at that that's crazy i think it's a little too close well that's forced perspective that's kind of like holding your fish out a bit right exaggerate as i say but it seems even if it's a forced perspective, that seems pretty large. You know, I've never gone there and personally seen it, but I'm told that there's a place on the island of Bali where there's a guy that has tamed wild flying foxes that have these nearly six-foot wingspans.

And visitors can actually come, and he'll call them down out of the trees, and they can hang on their arms sometimes for a photo. These are wild bats. So he tamed them with food, just got them accustomed to feeding? Well, one of the secrets of my—I don't know if you've seen my large photo collection. I have the largest collection of bat photos in the world. of bat photos in the world. And a lot of my photos, I get these incredible pictures because I can actually train bats to come and do their natural thing where I can photograph them. And how do you do that? Well, when I was a teenager, I learned falconry. And in falconry, you train the hawk to come back on call for a small reward in your hand and it's the same thing with bats you train them to get a reward from coming to your hand

and there's some of your photos there yeah whoa and what does that little fella got in his mouth he's got a fig now that that brings up a whole nother story bats like that account for up to 98 percent of the first seed dispersal into cleared areas in africa and as you may be aware desertification is one of the biggest threats in africa people cut down the forest they abandon the land after a few years when it's not any longer productive, and then you very much need something to reseed it. And these fruit-eating bats are often badly over-harvested for human food, and most recently because they've been wrongly blamed as a source of Ebola. And when that happens, people don't tolerate them anymore, and there goes the seed dispersal that people need if they're going to continue to have viable land.

Now, you said over-harvested for human food. So it's really common that people eat bats? I know that that was the wet market theory initially out of the Wuhan area that people were eating bats. of the Wuhan area that people were eating bats? Actually, although that was speculated early on, when they searched the market, they could find no evidence that bats had been sold there. Yeah. But bats, there's evidence that bats were eaten at one time by American Indians. There've been clay pots found with full of bat bones that look like people were cooking them up to eat. But in memorable history, there hasn't been bat eating in the New World. In memorable history? What do you mean? What I'm saying is there is evidence that American Indians occasionally ate bats because there have been jugs, pottery jugs with lots of bat bones in them that look like they were eaten probably by Indians.

But in the old world where bats are much larger, they are frequently eaten, and that's a major cause of their decline. Like where are bats – what part of the world are bats eaten the most? Pacific Islands and Indonesia, Southeast Asia, but also the places like Madagascar. And so how do they cook bats? Like what's a common way to serve up a bat? I got a picture of them boiled in coconut milk in Guam. Yeah?

Did you try it? No. Would you feel bad about eating a bat since you love them so much? a bat since you love them so much? Well, I think we, I don't see a reason to play favorites among animals. You know, some people think it's okay to rear cattle and poultry and things in horrible circumstances to eat, but it's totally bad if a hunter goes out and shoots something from the wild to eat. Actually, I know this isn't going to sit well with everybody, but I would rather in many cases see us harvesting wild animals, and it would be more compatible with

a healthy environment than cutting down all the trees in a rainforest so that we can run cattle listen i agree with you i'm on your side with that um but there's not a lot of wild animals for everybody well they're not but um there is something to be said for the hunting side. Hunters get abused a lot by conservationists that become too emotionally involved with their animals. People often ask me, you must really love bats. No, I don't really love bats. I'm a scientist who's very fascinated by them, and I'm impressed with how valuable they are, how much we need them. But when I go out to do conservation, I'm looking out for both bats and people. And I think that's the only way we can really be successful. When we get too

emotional about animals and we think they have rights that we need to look out for over human needs, then we start getting into trouble. I, for example, years ago, led the way in getting a national park created in American Samoa. And how it all started was there were commercial hunters that were devastating flying foxes. They were shooting them and selling them to Guam for a delicacy. And in a very short time, they had wiped out most of the flying foxes from the whole area. Harvard botanist graduate student who's finishing up his PhD, if I would come and do something to help save the bats. So I got together a couple donors and him and we went out to American Samoa. And the first thing I did the first day, my collaborators were all worn out from an overnight flight. So they slept in while they were sleeping in, I went out and made friends with the commercial hunters.

And I just came across as, you know, another guy that was perfectly happy with hunting. And, in fact, I am sure as a population ecologist that we need hunters. We've wiped out most of the dominant predators of the world, and if somebody doesn't act as the dominant predators, we're going to have trouble. But I went out and I made friends with the hunters, and they actually invited me to go out on a hunt with them that night. Well, I didn't shoot any of the bats, but they only shot two in the whole evening, and they were saying, oh, you should have been here last year. We could have shot 100 in an hour.

And I just asked innocent questions, you know, not too many of them at once. Well, what do you think caused all this? And they readily admitted that they shot too many. And so, you know, eventually I'd ask, well, what are you going to do? You know, your grandchildren are not going to be able to hunt bats anymore because you hunt them all out. And after just a few nights, now when my colleagues found out what I'd been doing, oh my God, if I'd been fireable, I would have been fired. They were very upset that I had consorted with the enemy. But in the end, these commercial hunters recognized they had a problem, and they actually, when I told them that in a few days I was going to be meeting with Governor

Lutale, they were thrilled when I offered to intercede with the governor on behalf of getting game laws to make sure there were flying foxes in the future. We joined forces that way, and as they learned more about the flying foxes and what they did, they not only got game laws passed in record time but they self-imposed on themselves well actually they completely outlawed commercial hunting the commercial hunters did and then they themselves declared a five-year moratorium on hunting flying foxes and the flying foxes had recovered. I think there is some hunting now, but the point is, if we had just gone barreling in there that we hated these guys because they did something that we didn't like and they had almost caused the extinction of a bat, we would have gotten nowhere. And if we had insisted that they quit all hunting immediately, we would have gotten nowhere.

But by being willing to compromise and see both sides early on, we gained a whole national park in addition to solving our original problem and showed the value of making friends instead of winning battles. The value of diplomacy. So what did they hunt instead of the flying foxes? What did they transition over to? They're commercial hunters. Oh, they quit commercial hunting. Oh, wow. So are you curious?

Have you had bat before? Have you eaten it? This is something that... Is it difficult to discuss? I guess I'm going to be honest with you. Please do. The reason I'm hesitant is that one time I was coming out of a news conference at National Geographic. They'd just published... I've done five articles with them and they'd just done a news conference about my article on flying foxes as i was coming out of their front door an associated press reporter

approached me and said well you said that there's a real problem with people eating too many flying foxes have you ever had one and being honest i said well you know in thailand one morning i'd been out with poachers learning about what they were doing to cause problems and uh you know they were doing something that i really wanted to stop but they were really nice people the guys the poachers were just trying to support their families, and we got to be friends. And they invited me for breakfast. And what did they serve me? A bat burger.

And they chopped up the bats. They did this with chickens and fish, too. They would chop them up, bones and all. And, my God, I used to kid some of them about how they survived without dying of punctured throats or stomachs from all those bones well they chopped up these patties and in thailand especially in those days if you refused to eat what somebody served you it was the ultimate insult you were implying that they were trying to poison you and you didn't trust them. So I ended up trying to eat part of one of those burgers. Well, I didn't get very far.

Is that your alarm that's telling you to take your pill? Yeah, that's my alarm going off. Remember where I was. You were talking about eating bats. I'm ready. Don't worry. where I was. You were talking about eating bats. I'm ready. Don't worry. Yeah, I've got Parkinson's and I have to take pills several times a day. But I mentioned that I do have Parkinson's because I'd like to encourage others that have it that, you know, oftentimes if you've got something you're

living for and you're working out and staying in health, you can still function perfectly fine taking a few pills and going on with your life. I still travel the whole world. I was in South Africa in Zambia just recently. There's water right there. So they take these bats and they just chop them up and turn them into patties and make burgers out of them that's what they were doing no they're doing it they so they do they take the skin off of it actually i'm told that in the south pacific it's considered bad etiquette if you don't eat the skin too. But to finish these guys' story, I surreptitiously spit most of it out

because I just wasn't about to swallow all those chopped up bones. But I admitted that I had had a couple mouthfuls of bat. This reporter went out and did a major story in which he claimed that Dr. Merlin Tuttle, this famous bat conservationist, traveled the world looking for new ways to eat bats. And I've never been so beside myself angry. I went to a judge friend and asked if there was anything I could do, and he said, no, no, you're too well known as a public figure.

You're exempted. You can't defend yourself that way. That's hilarious. So that's why I was a little hesitant when you asked me. Well, I mean, that's the media for you. It's not the media. It's people that use the media, and they're unscrupulous. It's very discouraging.

That sucks. But so what did it taste like? I, you know, everybody says when you got something unusual like that, well, it was like chicken, but I don't know what it tasted like. I was so busy trying to get the bones out of my mouth. And how do these people, did you ask them, like, how do you guys deal with the bones? They just swallow them just no problem yeah i guess i mean my thai assistant sir upon donkai he was a great guy but uh uh he never had any problem and i although i must say he didn't eat bats while he was with me, but I do have a funny story to tell on him.

At one of the caves that we ended up saving, we were going up to it early one morning before sunup, and we were having to go through jumbled boulders and brush. And I'm aware that snakes often congregate at cave entrances to try to catch and eat bats, especially in that area, cobras. So I'm saying, Serapone, are we okay? You know, how about cobras here? And he says, oh, no worry. You know, when I was in the military, they taught us cobras gentle no attack no problem

and then a few days later i saw a man we saw a man running real hard down the road and sir upon says man run run like chased by cobra and i said well i thought you said cobras don't attack people. He said, oh, only when they're guarding their eggs. I said, well, when do they have their eggs? I don't remember. So you were at the mouth of these caves where the cobras are. That's where they like to hang out? Yes. They like to hang out and wait for bats to come out how do they catch them just out of the air well snakes usually hey they'll like to hang from a vine or a bush or something where they can hang their head

down into the flight plan of the bats and they'll wait until a wing touches their nose, and then they can be incredibly fast about grabbing the bat. You got video of that? No, I have still pictures of bats being caught by snakes. Yeah? Can we see them? I didn't bring any. Is there any online? There are. I have at least one picture of a snake eating a bat, I remember. So mostly it's snakes that eat bats?

Is that what bats' number one predators are other than human beings? In the United States, a major predator of bats are two major predators, feral cats and raccoons. Feral cats kill everything. cocoons. Feral cats kill everything. And I could have brought a video that I... So here we go. You can't see it, catch it, but it's caught. Yeah, that's a python catching flying foxes.

That's a big, big bat too, boy. Yeah. It just crushes that poor little guy. There's another one here too. This one bat too, boy. Yeah. It just crushes that poor little guy. There's another one here too. This one's on the ground. Yeah. So I know that people make bat soup too, right? Isn't that a common thing in Asia?

I suppose you could say that. You know, I'm not a guy who's out to stop all bat eating. I think what we need to do is get balance in the world first. If we can get some balance and compromise while we're getting the balance, then maybe eventually we get further where we want to go. But I'm okay with eating bats as long as it's not done excessively. If I could use eating bats as a reason for saving a colony, I would be happy to advocate eating bats. I want to do whatever it takes to keep nature in balance.

We live in a world where all these living things are interdependent, and we can't afford to just love one and hate another. We need them all, and if we don't compromise some about what we want, the ones we love, we're probably going to lose them all. That's a very good point. Yeah, and that's a thing that's brought up oftentimes about hunters is the conservation aspect of it, is that in wanting to preserve these animals so that they can hunt them, they actually contribute more money towards conservation than anyone does. I know of cases like that. For example, in Mexico, they have desert bighorn sheep in a real i'm told that a good trophy

size bighorn ram you might pay a hundred thousand dollars to shoot one and i'm told that there are there's at least one and maybe several ranches now in Mexico where the owner has found that it's more profitable to reduce his cattle and promote bighorn sheep. And, you know, if he can make $100,000 for one sheep being shot, he has to run a lot of cattle and go to a lot of work to make that kind of money off his cattle. And so actually I like these situations where there's economic incentive for preserving a wild animal. I'm told that where that is happening, that natural vegetation is recurring, biodiversity is expanding. Cattle aren't adapted to live in those places. They do a lot of destruction.

But as long as the ultimate goal is that we're improving the health of the natural world and all creatures are benefiting, I'm happy with whatever it takes to get there. I am too. So what is this large coconut that you brought? What's the deal with that? Well, this isn't exactly a coconut. What is it? Now look here.

See how well this looks like it's all one piece. Right. It's a perfect fit. Now. What is it? Inside. That's not a coconut no inside you have in a if this is just picked off the tree this would be a fruit and in each fruit you'd have a seed this is exactly how brazil nuts grow and the reason for all this armor plating around is this there's a bat with a more than two foot wingspan and that disperses the

seeds of this tree and this tree doesn't are such—most people aren't aware of this, but bats are by far the best, the most effective long-distance seed dispersers and pollinators in the world. More than bees? Oh, much more. Really? Oh, yeah. And so here's what happens with this. This hangs down like this, 100 feet up in a big tree so that's like a tree pod like a pod right for seeds right and when it's ready to be seed

dispersed it opens just a crack enough to let the scent out and there's this big bath that knows exactly how to pry this loose the reason for all this armor-plating is that the plant does not want monkeys or other primates or or parrots or other birds it just wants bats because bats are the best seed dispersers and so it's going to all this energetic trouble to protect itself from everything but bats the bat pries this off so that just kind of falls open it opens up a little bit and then the bat pries it the rest of the way so it's almost like it's just a little built-in door yeah and then he carries this this would be a fruit this is dried with the seed inside he carries this away and drops the seed when he finishes eating. And in fact, this nut that's in this fruit would be commercially sold if we could figure

out how to beat the bats to it, but it's grown way up high on trees and we don't have a system for beating the bats to it. And this is Brazil nuts. Can I see that? This is... Is that Brazil nuts? This is very similar to Brazil nuts. Can I see that? This is... Is that Brazil nuts? This is very similar to Brazil nuts. What is it called?

Sapicaya. And these are edible? Yes. Like we can crack this sucker open and eat it? Yeah. What's it taste like? I don't know. I've never eaten one.

Really? But you have all these. You're not curious? If I was you, I'd be eating bats. I would eat them, but I've never been able to beat the bats to them. And these aren't good, the ones you have here in this thing? Are they dried up? Oh, they're dried up long since.

It's fascinating because it seems like it's been cut. It's crazy that this is just a natural feature in the seed pod. And the people that are not watching this, just listening to this, it seems just like a coconut. It's so thick and hard. You can hear it here. I'll knock on it. It's very hard and very big, like a bowling ball. The co-evolution between bats and plants is absolutely incredible.

We haven't talked at all about pollination. This is just about seed dispersal. There are flowers, a whole suite of different kinds of flowers that produce reflectors to guide bats to them on dark nights. Flowers that bloom in dense foliage where bats have a hard time finding them, they produce reflectors out of either their petals or a leaf turned up the wrong way. There's a vine in Cuba that the flowers hang down on a long stem, and then the last leaf above where the flowers are turns exactly upside down. Instead of going this way to catch sunlight to photosynthesize, it turns around this way and then acts as a reflector.

Let's see, that's one that does that, but it's not the one I'm talking about. But it's a similar effect. Oh, here, the red one. Now, that's a similar effect. National Geographic, and never once saw one of those hummingbirds touch the reproductive organs of the flower. It was thought for probably 100 years that this plant was pollinated by hummingbirds. But when later I photographed bats coming to it, the bats filled up that gap and got covered in pollen. Ah, wow. Interesting. and got covered in pollen.

Oh, wow. Interesting. Now, let's see. One of the flowers you first showed, you can see all these on my website. Merlin, Merlin, talk into the microphone. Okay. Yeah. You can see all these probably on my website. Let's see.

I'm trying to. Okay, watch this one, the one you've got up now. That's that bad as pollen named Makuna flowers. So all that stuff that's coming off of those flowers, that's all the pollen. That's pollen. And that's going to get on him, and then he's going to disperse that. Yeah, it took me 11,000

pictures to get that picture. That's an amazing picture. His tongue poking out. National Geographic must have invested close to $70,000 in getting that. Well, it's worth it. Look at that. I mean, it's really cool. But I got a whole series where he's coming, and see that turned up petal that's right in front of his tongue?

Yes. That's the reflector for that flower that guides the bat to find the flower. It acts like airport landing lights on a runway for a pilot at night. See, I've always, I mean, I don't know much about bat vision, but I always thought bats had very poor vision, and they used sound, and they used like a radar to find where they're going. They have quite good vision, most of them, but in addition, they can see everything with sound that we can except color.

And they can see a lot more that we can't. Like a bat would know from the reflection off my hand that it was a soft surface as opposed to this mic being a hard surface. Really? Because I had always heard that they used echolocation because their eyesight was poor. That's really interesting. Yeah. Let me finish that story about that Makuna flower. Sure.

The flower so wants to be pollinated, and I don't want to be anthropomorphic, but it's very advantageous to be visited by – oh, here's the other one. See how the bat fills up the gap and carries pollen? Yeah. and carries pollen yeah uh in the macuna flowers the uh the flower doesn't even open and become reproductively active until about 45 minutes after dark so that it's totally avoiding any late coming hummingbirds or bees or anything like that it's on a long stem that hangs down so possums or anything like that can't get to it and it opens late and then it has just a little slit that's a millimeter or two wide and the tongue of the bat has to go

into that just like a lock a key in a door in a lock and when wow that is fascinating that's a different kind of flower look at the tongue on that guy. Look over at the next one over in the picture there, that one. Okay, this bat, he's saying his echolocation sounds out through his nose, and that leaf on his nose is aiming into the reflector. And so that's guiding him in. And then just below that is the slit I was telling you about that's just a millimeter or two wide.

And the bat has to perfectly get his tongue in that slit in order to get nectar or pollinate the flower. Go to that other picture again, Jamie, the one you just did. Right here on the corner, you got the tongue going into the slit. Go over one to the right. No, the one you just had, go back Go back, go back There's the far right There you go, that one

Okay, there he's got his tongue in the slit Wow So it's almost like it's designed For a bat's tongue The reason it took me 11,000 pictures to get this is that this all happens in tiny fractions of a second. And what's going to happen next is his tongue goes in there. The flower actually has spring-loaded anthers and fires the pollen onto his rump. That's why you see pollen flying around as he's just been shot.

way you see it pollen flying around as he's just been shot and by putting it on the bat's rump then that flower doesn't mix pollen with other species which might cause hybridization that would result in inferior plant production wow so at that location i found some flowers, they're all blooming at the same time, but one species was the bat, it put pollen on the bat's rump, another one put it on his throat, another one put it on his snout, another one put it on the back of his head, and one put it between his shoulders, and another one put it on his wings. So they have very specific areas where they disperse their pollen specifically. Right. Wow. You can see it. Go back to that photo with the one with the tongue deep into the leaf. You can see all.

Look at that. That is crazy. Now, this one has a really cool tongue that acts like a soda straw, and he can stick it down there, and by, I think you'd call it peristaltic action, And he can stick it down there, and by, I think you'd call it peristaltic action, he can bring the, he's got a groove down each side of the tongue. And those grooves then form cavities like straws, and he can bring the nectar up just like he had a long straw in the flower. It's so fascinating that these flowers, it seems like they've evolved symbiotically with the bats. Oh, yes. That's so fascinating. How does that happen? It's incredible. I mean, I'm so... Whoa, look at him covered in pollen. Yeah. That looks like a bear that got into a

bag of cereal. Well, now this illustrates what I'm saying when I talk about bats being by far the most efficient carriers of large amounts of pollen long distances. Some bats fly over 100 miles in a night pollinating flowers. And look at how much more pollen a bat can carry on its fur than you'll see on a hummingbird or an insect. Oh, yeah. I mean, for folks that are just listening, he's covered like a bag of pollen just blew off in his face. Yeah. I mean, so, but it is absolutely fascinating that these bats and these flowers, they seem to have symbiotically evolved.

Right. Like, what is the explanation for that? Like, is there any theory as to how this takes place? Just natural selection, brand mutation? Talk to Darwin. It's amazing, right? Yeah. I find it mind-boggling.

Not just I can kind of understand the bats adapting, but the plants. It's like the plants are almost thinking, there's so-and-so over there that's doing this, so I got to do that. Yeah, like they have a partnership. It's truly amazing. And not just a partnership with the bats, but an understanding that other plants are going to pollinate on different parts of the bat. And you don't want to mix your pollen with that pollen, so we're going to pollinate on an area when the bat is feeding, we know we can get to his head. And this one's like, we'll get to his wings. And this one's like, we'll get to his rump. Well, I wouldn't go so far as to claim bats think, but you know,

the more we discover about the natural world, the more we find that there's just a whole lot of thinking and behavior that we never even suspected. For example, the bats. It's been found in recent years that they have social systems strikingly similar to those of primates, whales, and elephants. Really? Yeah. Like they have an alpha bat and they have a bat leader? Really? They know each other.

In my own banding studies years ago, I banded 40-some thousand bats in one study. And I showed that over periods of a decade, sometimes you'd find the same bats, like you caught four or five bats together in a place at one time 10 years before. And then you might catch them five years later, two miles away, Ten years later, 20 miles away. All still together. Wow. And bats not only know each other and have what we, you know, we used to criticize people soundly for what we call anthropomorphizing,

but that's almost getting to be an out-of-date word as we find more about what animals really do and think. Bats help each other in need. They'll adopt orphans. They form apparently long-term friendships. There are all kinds of cool things that are going on in the world of bats. So our previous thoughts about bats, it's really just based on a lack of examination. Lack of understanding, for sure. One thing I would like to point out to your listeners, all these things that we're talking about in these pictures you're seeing, I have thousands of those pictures available on my website at merlintuttle.org. And you can go there and see all these things that you're seeing glimpses of now.

Now, are there some bats that are more complex than other bats, that are more intelligent than other bats? Well, let me tell you an interesting story. bats that are more intelligent than other bats? Well, let me tell you an interesting story. After I learned to train frog-eating bats for my research, I thought, well, these carnivores are just, they're smarter than other bats, and it never dawned on me that other bats might be trainable too, especially really small bats. And then one time i went out to west texas and i caught a fairly large pallid bat and i wanted to take a picture for national geographic of it catching centipedes six eight inches long they they're immune to the stings and they eat

centipedes and scorpions and so i was trained this bat to come to my hand on call because I was going to put in a natural-looking set a centipede and call it to come down and catch the centipede to get the picture. And after the bat finally got too full to want to come again, I had this little western pipistrelle that weighs less than a nickel tiny little bat body about that big so you're holding up the tip of your pinky yeah and and that bat had been in my portable studio watching me train the bigger bat and when the bigger bat decided not to come on call the little bat came and got the reward and i couldn't believe it here was this little guy that I was sure didn't have enough intelligence to be trained, and it trained by just watching me train another bat. Wow. Do you think it's watching and observing, or do you think there's

some other information that might be being distributed, whether it's through sound or whether it's through some sort of, maybe some sort of like some unknown connection that they have to each other, pheromonal connection, psychic connection? Well, pheromones certainly play a role, but mostly everything that I've seen, I would ascribe to intelligence and thinking. An observation. Let me tell you a story that really still boggles my mind. My wife and I had gone to Borneo and set up my portable photo studio. We were going to photograph little woolly bats that weigh less than a nickel.

Again, tiny, tiny little guys. And they live out in swamps where there's no way we could go out in the swamp to photograph. And they live in pitcher plants. And get this, the pitcher plant puts up a reflector over the top to guide the bat to get to the pitcher plant and then has a special ridge inside where he can sleep almost like providing a bunk bed and we had gone out there to photograph these bats but we couldn't do it out in the swamp because it rained every little bit and you're wading waist deep and there are poisonous snakes hanging from the vines and just wasn't a good place to take pictures so we caught this bat brought it back to my studio, and the first evening I hand-fed it mealworms,

holding it one hand and handing it mealworms to the other. And then the next morning when my wife and I came back to the studio, this bat was hanging up in one corner of the studio, and it immediately recognized me. It didn't try to go to her. She didn't feed it before. It came to me and started bumping me in the nose. In fact, I believe you may have a video of that that you can share. He started bumping me in the nose, and I don't know how I so quickly figured it out, but I figured

out that he wanted to be fed. He wasn't really attacking me and uh so my wife saw this and said uh get your shirt on it was really hot and i didn't have a shirt on and get your shirt on and she grabbed the camera watch his bat he's coming up pestering me to give him a mealworm he's only one time in his whole life eaten a mealworm, only one time gotten it from me. And how did he figure out that my face was the place to get my attention? Wow. So I went and got my shirt on, and it was still doing this. Watch, when I held up my hand, it knew to come and get the mealworm. And this bat had never had a mealworm in his life before,

may never have eaten a non-flying insect before, certainly never seen a human until the night before. Absolutely mind-boggling. Wow. That's wild. So it just learned. It learned and it remembered you. Yeah.

So have you tried other kind of experiments to see? You know how like they've done experiments with crows where they find out how intelligent crows are because they can get them to use tools. And there's a little cough button if you want to use that. I'm okay. Thank you. But there's, you know, they've done all these experiments with crows and found out that crows are incredibly intelligent and much more intelligent than we ever suspected. Absolutely. Do you think that would be the case with bats as well, that you could get them to do things?

Oh, yeah. I don't know what you could get them to do. It would have to be something in line with what they – I can't comment. I can't comment. What I can tell you is that one of the smartest colleagues that I ever had, a guy named Jack Bradbury, he was a top-notch bat researcher. He ended up going off studying, I think it was grouse or something. But back when he was studying bats many years ago, he announced that he was going to try to test Vampyram Spectrum. This is a big carnivorous bat with a nearly three-foot wingspan.

It's the biggest New World bat. It lives in the tropical America. He was going to test them to see how smart they were. And this is a cool bat. Before I tell you about his test, the parents take turns babysitting. They go out and they hunt and bring food back for the one that stayed and watched the pup. They appear to mate for life. And their carnivores eat everything from insects and frogs to rats and parrots. And this is a vampire bat?

It's not a vampire bat. It's named Vampyram Spectrum because somebody mistook its big teeth and thought that it was a vampire when they named it. And what is it? Want to tell more about this bat? Is that what this is? Is that this kind of bat? No, that is a vampire bat. I just switched this.

That is a vampire bat. That bat is crazy. Play that. It's on a horse, I think. Oh, what a little creep. Well, hang on a minute. Let's stick with one story and tell it again. Stick with your first story.

The Vampyram Spectrum. You know, there's a whole bunch of bats named Vampyram, with vampire-type names scientifically. Not a single one of them is a true vampire. They're all mistakenly named vampires. So the one I was originally telling you about is not a vampire, it's a carnivore. But this colleague of mine that I so highly respected announced that he was going to do some tests to test the intelligence of this species of bat.

I saw him a year later and said, well, how did your research go? He laughed, shook his head, later and said well how did your research go he laughed shook his head and said i gave it up the bat was smarter than i was what was wrong with the the test like why he would design that was smarter than him he would design a test that he thought the bat couldn't you know would have to do it a certain way and then the bat would find an alternative. Wow. So there's carnivorous bats, there's bats that eat fruit, and then why do we call bats vampire bats? Did we initially think at one point in time they were sucking blood? There are some vampire bats. They're found only in Latin America now. Oh, so they're real? Yeah. We were just looking at a vampire bat a moment ago. Okay.

So these guys with the teeth. That's a real vampire bat. And so they actually bite animals and suck their blood? Lap their blood. What is this that we're looking at? That's the kind of special tongue that a vampire bat has. Oh, whoa. Now, before you get too put off by vampire bats.

I'm not put off. I'm excited. Let me point out that these are really sophisticated animals that in every way, they're the ones that were first found to have altruistic relationships with friends and help them and even feed them in times of need. They adopt orphans. These are animals that they're always – now, you didn't get this from my website. No, no, no. This is YouTube. If you went to my website, one of the cutest pictures on my website,

one that I get a big kick out of showing people because when I show it to them, their reaction is, oh, my God, isn't he cute? And it's a vampire. It depends on how you show these bats. They're right there at the bottom. That's a vampire. Oh, no, it's this one. That one. That's a vampire.

He's very cute. And just how you show these animals. Well, you're very defensive because I don't have a problem with them being vampires. Well, I don't have a problem with – now, the first one you're looking at that was lapping blood. Yes. That was Desmodus rotundus. It's fascinating. I mean, I don't have a problem with it.

I think it's really interesting. It's the kind of vampire that causes most of the trouble. It gets vampires in trouble in Latin America. They're a problem because we came in and cut down the rainforest and brought in cattle and they overpopulated because they had an easy food supply. Okay. So that's what they're causing trouble down in Latin America because there's so many of them? They're overpopulated because we screwed up the habitat and brought in easy food. Well, not you and I. Someone else did it.

Well, we kind of do it because we buy the beef from Latin America. It's a roundabout chain. So these bats that prey on the cattle, do they carry diseases? Are they a problem in some way? Not commonly. You can get rabies from a vampire bat. You can get rabies from any mammal. But rabies has been vastly exaggerated in bats.

For example, here in the United States, there was a time when people thought that all bats or most of them were rabid. But in fact, put this in perspective, only one or two people in a year in all of the U.S. and Canada combined die of rabies from a bat. And those people die because they picked up a sick one, got bit in self-defense and didn't use good sense and go get checked out. And there's a vaccination you can take that would be 100% effective. I read a story about a guy who was outside of a cave and bats flew by and scratched him. And then he wound up getting rabies from that. Sounds like a bit of an exaggeration and maybe taken a bit out of context. Oh, yeah? I already died.

Well, if you get rabies, you're going to die, but most of the time you will. But take me, for example. I've been studying bats for over 60 years worldwide. I've studied bats in 45 countries, photographed hundreds of species, handled them, spent countless hours with millions in caves, and I have never, ever been attacked by a bat. I have only been bitten when I was handling one, and he bit in self-defense. Did you ever see a rabid bat? Yes. How would you be able to discern whether a bat is rabid in the wild? Yes.

How would you be able to discern whether a bat is rabid in the wild? I probably couldn't. It would be a good guess, but I'm sure that I have seen a rabid bat. They're not a whole lot with rabies. When you sample wild populations, actually, one of the things that bats get a bad name for is it's much easier to catch a sick bat than a healthy bat. get a bad name for is it's much easier to catch a sick bat than a healthy bat. So when they go out and catch bats and they say, well, up to a half of 1% are rabid, what that's like is if you go to the waiting room of a cancer specialist doctor and you examine the people there, you're going to get a bit higher frequency of cancer than you would from the

base population. We don't really know how many have rabies, but what we can tell you is it's very few. And you can forget disease from bats just about entirely if you just don't go around picking up, you know, if you find a bat where you can handle it in the daytime, it's probably a sick bat. Don't handle it. You leave it alone. You got no problem. They don't attack people. Well, you probably shouldn't be out there handling bats anyway, unless you're a bat scientist, right? Well, you shouldn't handle unfamiliar animals. Let me point out that while we make a big deal out of the one or two people in a year that die of rabies from a bat bite in

the U.S. and Canada combined, in the U.S. alone, we lose between 40 and 50 people a year from dog attacks. But before we go on a rampage to rid dogs from our neighborhoods, we might consider how hypocritical that would be in a country where our spouses kill us off by the thousands. So the moral of the story is if you're brave enough to own a dog and get married, you certainly ought to be brave enough to handle having a few bats in your neighborhood. That's a good point. It's all about numbers, right? Yeah.

So these vampire bats, do any of them prey on humans? Do any of them try to bite humans and drink the blood of humans? The common vampire Desmodus rotundus will bite humans, but the humans have to be doing something foolish. I mean— It's not like if you're camping and you just, like, take a nap in a hammock and a vampire bat comes and bites you? Well, I would certainly—I've taken plenty—I've slept plenty of night in a hammock in the rainforest, but never without a mosquito net over me. There are a whole lot of things that can bite you besides vampire bats, and it's just foolish to be sleeping out in the open in a South American rainforest.

And that's where most of the vampire bats are? They're all limited to Latin America. Really? So this idea of vampire bats being in Romania, like where Dracula lived? The original vampire stories came from tales about horrible behavior in humans. Like Vlad the Impaler? Yeah. Yeah.

But bats, how did they get connected to bats? Do you know the story of the origins of the lore? the bats do you know the story of the origins of the lore there apparently vampire bats weren't discovered until i think it was columbus when we first came to america and they heard about bats biting people but long before that the empire stories and myths had evolved based on human behavior and so that's just something that just got spread and turned into this lore, and they don't even exist in the place where they were supposedly turned into vampires. Yeah, even in Latin America, vampires are a small proportion of the species present. Interesting.

So what's the most common bat in the world? That's a hard one to say. The largest colonies we know are free-tailed bats, particularly the species that lives under our Congress Avenue Bridge. We have colonies of those that get up to 10, 20 million in one cave. Cave. And that opens the discussion for why bats are among the most endangered animals on our planet. But if we have 1.5 million of them living under Congress, how do we say that they're endangered? Well, they're extremely vulnerable. First of all, they're among the least known, most feared, most often needlessly persecuted animals. Secondly, they have very slow reproductive rates.

They are programmed to live up to 40 years or more. And that brings up another interesting aspect. Instead of trying to find ways to fear bats, we ought to be finding ways to understand better why they can do the really neat things that they can do. They can survive up to 40 years in the wild, and that's the equivalent of a human living to be 100 and still able to run sprints through obstacle courses. They're also largely immune to things like arthritis and cancer. But they're very vulnerable because they're dependent on long lifespans and slow reproduction. Most bats produce only one pup per year. They aggregate in these huge concentrations.

You can get millions in a single cave. And here in the New World, I have personally investigated cases where somebody just put old car tires in a cave entrance, poured kerosene on it, are the most easily seen and also misunderstood, and have slow reproduction. They're prime targets for bad things to happen in terms of survival. What is the common reason why people are killing bats? Like, why someone would go out of their way to do something like that, like light tires on fire to kill them? Fear.

Fear. Misconceptions. Right. Yeah. Nobody who fully understood bats would be out there killing them. And when they're lighting these fires, it's just the smoke that's killing the bats? Yeah. Toxic smoke a lot.

Hmm. What is this tube that you brought? You said there's something crazy in there. Yeah. Yeah. I bet you've never seen anything like this on your show before. I bet you're right. What is it? Well, I don't want to sidetrack the whole conversation here, but I've had a lot of really wild adventure experiences while looking for bats. This is a Yanomamo Indians

arrowhead container. Notice the top of it is made out of ocelot for the fur's still on the hide on the inside. And if we look in here, this is an arrowhead. Now, that is coated in curare oh that's not still lethal because it's very old i've had it for decades but when i first got it it would if somebody had poked you with it you'd be dead in a couple minutes really and that is made specifically to kill humans. Notice the notches. Every few inches, you see the three notches?

Yeah. Well, where your thumb, your base thumb is, that's where it fits into the arrow, the shaft. And then when that hits you, it can't just go through and not poison you. It's very clever. It, like shrapnel into you so once that arrow hits you no matter where it hits you you're going to die because you got all that like shrapnel that's soaked in curare in you wow so in my travels studying bats i have had every kind of experience you can imagine from living with aboriginal Indians to being captured by terrorist insurgents to... You got captured?

Yeah, having my camp attacked by bandits, being hunted by aborigines that didn't want, that had bad experience with other outsiders and wanted to kill me, being charged by angry elephants, stalked by lions, you name it, and I've had it. Tell me about being captured. What happened there? Well, that's a really good story to illustrate the value of being able to make friends whether you agree with somebody or not. Back in my first big job out of college, I was co-director of the

Smithsonian's Venezuelan Project, a big $400,000 field project collecting small mammals. And one of the first places we stayed was high up on a mountaintop in a resort setting where the previous dictator of the country had built this and when when he was thrown out of power nobody wanted to acknowledge that that was worth anything so it was just sitting up there with a caretaker well the we were allowed to go up there and use it for collecting. It was beautiful habitat surrounding it. And I quickly found out, figured out, that the head caretaker there was actually one of the local communist leaders. And we got to be good friends.

leaders. And we got to be good friends. And he would laughingly call me his amigo Yankee, and I'd call him me amigo Commie. And it wasn't very hard to find common ground that neither one of us agreed with everything our governments did. And I got to be such good friends with him that when my boss, Dr. Handley, came down, he was the director of the mammal division at the Smithsonian. When he came down to visit and see how things were going, I borrowed the local communist leader, borrowed his jeep because ours hadn't arrived yet and i took dr handley with me looking for bats up in the mountains and we had the misfortune of running into a secret meeting of of communist insurgents there ensued a wild chase we were on a muddy slick road very narrow one lane sometimes dropping off 200 feet on one side. It was crazy. They finally caught us, and when they caught us, the only thing that saved us was we were in the Communist Party

boss's Jeep, and they radioed him for instructions what to do with us. Wow. So if you were just in an unmarked car. Right. We'd have been in big trouble. At that time, the insurgents were killing an average of 65 police a year on the streets of Caracas. And what did they think you guys were up to? Well, they knew that we were friends of their leader. Right. And their leader knew we were studying bats. But why were they chasing you? Because they didn't know who we were. Right. But why were they chasing you? Because they didn't know who we were.

Right, but what did they think you were doing? Some kind of Yankee spies trying to figure out where they were and how to attack them, probably. Wow. Was that the most danger you've ever been in on an exhibition? Expedition, rather? Probably not. No? No?

expedition rather uh probably not no uh one one night on the uh upper mavaca river we were named bats in an area where we didn't think there were any aborigines that would bother us because we had camped with a group of yanam, and the idea was you couldn't put a camp between village of Yanomamo because then they would all think they could prey on you. But if you became friends of one village, at least they wouldn't bother you, and they would view you as useful. with, the guys informed me that now way up the river, 30 miles or so, there was an area that I would love to have collected in, but I couldn't because it was controlled by a group of Yanomamo that had shot at everybody who'd ever gotten near there and, you know, shot arrows. And so I was afraid to go up there to do any collecting. But then our group of Yanomamo informed me that these guys had gone off on a raid to attack another group and probably wouldn't be back for a couple of months. So I got brave and went up into their area where I didn't think they were going to be

with a young man, Venezuelan, who worked for me. with a young man, Venezuelan, who worked for me. And we had just parked our dugout canoe on the bank and had gone out into the woods to set nets for bats when we hear a hundred or so, maybe not a hundred, but a goodly number of Yanomamo men coming down the trail. Yanomamo men coming down the trail, and we immediately thought, oh my god, we're going to be absolutely dead ducks if they find us. But I did know that they don't usually go after their quarry, they usually wait and ambush. So we hid out in the jungle until about two o'clock in the morning, and then tried turning our lights really dim and sneaking along without making any noise to get back to our canoe and hoping they were asleep.

And we'll never know whether they were asleep or not because we did get shoved off and got away. But the very next night, we were stupid enough to think we had gone far enough away that they wouldn't find us and we went back and tried to net again and then we heard jaguar noises and i had a yanamamo and a makititari indian working for me and they immediately started warning me, that's not El Tigre. That's the Indians that we're trying to avoid. Just making jaguar noises. Right, to communicate among themselves. Oh, wow. But I insisted. I thought that these guys were just trying to get out of work because I'd been working them pretty hard and that they wanted to go to bed early that night.

So I didn't really take them very seriously. And I went off with my shotgun. Back then, we were collecting everything from jaguars to mice. And so in those days, it was a big macho thing to shoot a jaguar. So I go off with my shotgun to hunt the jaguar, and it kept moving too fast without noise in between. And it finally dawned on me that, hey, this is more like Indians than jaguars to me even. I went back, and my guys were just ready to actually abandon me and leave me.

They were so scared. Oh, no. We didn't even take the nets down. We got out of there as fast as we could, went back to camp, and the next day when we came back to get our nets, all the main strands of the nets had been stolen, proving that these were Indians that were after us, and we probably just got out in time.

Woo! So that's the most danger you've ever been in. I don't know. I mean, there was the time I was crawling into a cave and on my belly in a narrow passage and all of a sudden found that there was a big cobra coming out and I had to lay perfectly still so that the cobra didn't get upset while he was going by. So you had to lay perfectly still while the cobra didn't get upset while he was going by. So you had to lay perfectly still while the cobra slithered by you? Yeah.

Whoa. And there was a time the river bandits came after us. River bandits? Where was that? That was in Venezuela on the Costa Caria Canal. we're getting into stories that probably ought to be told at another time when we're not distracting from bats. No, they're fun. We can go back to bats. To put a long story shorter,

the Kosikari Canal is the world's longest natural canal. And out in the middle of it, there are just no humans around. And we were camped out there collecting for the Smithsonian. But I carried a lot of small cash to do business when I did come to where there were villages. The small cash was hidden in false bottoms of trunks. The way I got the cash, we were funded through a military grant. And anybody that knows anything about the military knows they've got every restriction under the sun on their money and accounting for it. I had known that their rules weren't going to work very well for collecting. their rules weren't going to work very well for collecting. And so I had gotten bids from plane charter companies to fly us out to this remote savannah. And they were going to charge

a lot of money because it was risky to the planes. And so I got the military to send the money to the Bank of America in Caracas. And then this was time when you had machine guns at the door of every bank. And, I mean, it was a dangerous time in Venezuela, period. Well, we pretended to change Christmas gifts, and that's how we got our money in a small change and took it back to our hotel. Then we put it in false bottoms of trunks. Then we go out to the frontier, and after a while, the word kind of gets around that these guys can always pay for something. They must have some secret supply of money. money so one day we're out at this remote camp and my venezuelan helpers indians uh came running up saying oh you know in spanish kidado the the vandal not vandals but uh

the robbers are coming and uh they were coming up the river in a little motorized dugout and so that's how my guys heard them in time to know that they were coming and then they saw them and realized who they were. And so I had just a couple minutes. It's kind of interesting because I was reared to be a conscientious objector and didn't believe in fighting in war. And so here we are with the bandits coming armed with shots. It was kind of interesting. They had old muzzleloader guns that they actually used rocks and black powder still to shoot.

But here they're coming, and I'm responsible for eight or ten people, their lives. And am I going to be a conscientious objector, or what am I going to do? And so I broke out all the guns we had, gave everybody one of the, you know, everything from an M1 rifle to a couple double-barreled shotguns, pistols, and got everybody positioned behind rocks and logs.

And then as the bandits approached, I yelled down to them in Spanish that we understood who they were, and if they touched that rock, we were going to kill them. And they kept coming. And so I finally had everybody show themselves and their guns and yelled one more time. And the last time I yelled, they were within a meter of hitting the bank. And at that point, we'd have had to kill them.

But they finally, at the last minute when they saw they were outgunned and we had the upper hand, they backed up and went off. That ought to be hair-raising. It was. backed up and went off. That ought to be hair raising. It was. But I learned a lot about my conscientious objector. You're ready to abandon it. Well, I mean, what are you going to do? You're going to let good people die just because you don't believe in firing a gun at a human? Yeah, that's a good point, right? Yeah. Very important lesson to learn, right? Yeah, it was an important one for me. Boy, you've had some pretty amazing experiences just studying bats around the world. It's been a wild life, I bet, huh?

Well, I've never chosen to get myself into big adventures, but— The adventures chose you. One of my all-time favorite things to do is to go places where almost nobody's ever been. Like when I went out to see the Shamatari Indians, I had to hike 46 miles across country from the last Yanamama village to get out there and see them. And I just went out there. I mean, I knew it was dangerous. How dangerous, I didn't know. But I just was driven by curiosity.

Here's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a group of people that have only seen two other outsiders in their whole existence. outsiders in their whole existence and it was just so much fun going out there and seeing experiencing that kind of thing but i certainly got into the high adventure while i was out there yeah that sounds amazing so you had a hike how long did it take you to hike 46 miles to get to them well we did it in a day and a half i had a 40 some pound pack um we went extra fast because i did not know when we start on the trip that the reason them see these two shamitari came out to uh visit our our yanamamo group because they were looking for allies in a battle they're expecting to be raided by another tribe whoa and i didn't know this is why they were there but when i asked through my interpreters and and let me point this out too when you watch a movie

and they're speaking pidgin english you know there's no such thing as a place where people are really Aboriginal you're speaking pidgin English to them everything I said on that whole trip out there had to be translated by me from English to Spanish and then from Spanish to micro Atari from micro Atari to yonamama and from y Yanomama to Shamitari. Oh, my God. You can imagine there are a few miscommunications. Oh, my God. What year was this?

This was happening. This was 1967. Okay. So clearly there's no cell phones, no other ways of communicating. Right. Wow. So we did not know that these guys were expecting an attack until we had already left with them to go out to their village. Oh, boy.

And what we eventually found was that the reason they welcomed us so strongly was that they thought we'd bring our bang sticks with us, meaning guns, and be good in the battle. Oh, boy. bang sticks with us needing guns and be good in the battle oh boy and so by the time we got there well we found out that we had to camp out along the trail the first night and we we found out that they were expecting attack my two guys i had to have a yanomami and a Maikiditari for the translations to go. And incidentally, they knew enough that they wouldn't go. I had a terrible time getting them to go. When I finally convinced them I had to pay them a month's wages for every day they went out there with me.

So that first night, we set up camp by a beautiful stream in the jungle. And then my guys got really suspicious when our two Shamitari hosts went off by themselves quite a ways away in a hidden place in the jungle to put up little shelters for their night. And so they got suspicious, went and checked, and found that they were worried about being attacked, and they were leaving us out on the trail to be the bait. And so but the next day we arrived out there, and my Maikaditari guide had experienced, he had been in a Yanamama village during an attack once.

And so he, since we knew they were thinking of being attacked any time, he instructed me what to do if we were attacked. And he said, you know, right off, you know, play dead. And we were thinking that the attack might come at night and sure enough the very first night we're there i mean talk about scary experiences long before we thought we were being attacked there were people that had malaria and there were guys getting really high on drugs to chase the hakura the devils out and uh they were going around the devils out right they mean they believe that everything was attributable to spirits even malaria yeah uh there were good good spirits and bad spirits they hadn't evolved to think of god one god and one devil there are

just a lot of spirits with good ones and bad ones and they were trying to chase the bad ones out of the village by getting high on dope and then shooting those curare tipped arrows at the hallucinated images so what what drugs are they getting high on ebon it's a powder that they i'm trying to think what they make it from a vine i believe and what is the psychedelic substance and they blow it up their noses oh okay if you go to my if you go to my website there's a place on the website where you can i'm trying to remember we can tell you later exactly how to get to it but i've got a place on my website where you can actually see that trip me out there with i had a movie camera with me you can see him blowing the dope up their

nose and we i've got it on film right up until the guy tried to attack and kill me and then i had to quit taking pictures he tried to attack and kill you because you were taking pictures right napoleon the uh famous anthropologist had warned me never to get around him when they were taking dope, but I couldn't resist. So is this stuff like an amphetamine? Like what is this stuff they're blowing up their nose? I don't know. I never tried any of it. I'm sure that if Napoleon was still alive, he could tell you what it was.

Did you get tempted to try it? No. No? They're out there tripping in the woods and you're not like what are you doing so anyway that first night i've gone to bed and these guys are getting high and they're running around the village shooting those seven foot curare tipped arrows into hallucinated images and i'm hearing those things go thunk into the side of the you know we're sleeping under lean-to's is how the village has made a big circle of lean-to's and uh i would hear an arrow go thunk poison arrows poison in your the area where you're

sleeping because these people are seeing things right and i. And I'm scared shitless. Oh, boy. And so I'm laying there in the middle of that when all of a sudden. Is that them? Yeah. So this is them blowing the snuff up their nose. You can see all this actually in videos on my website. I was trying to find it. I just couldn't find it. Where is it at on your website?

It's a video gallery. I was trying to't find it. Where is it at on your website? It's a video gallery. I was trying to get through it. Look under. Do you have a search area? Bat Research Venezuela. Or if you look under Venezuela, I'm almost sure you'll find it. You were on TV with David Letterman in 1984 talking about bats? Right.

Wow. That's pretty crazy. Let's go to that. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the second half hour of our telecast tonight. Tomorrow on this program you're going to meet Gary Burton. Do you know Gary Burton, Paul? Not personally, but I'm looking forward to meeting him

and playing with him. He's a wonderful jazz vibraphonist. He will be playing with the band. There's a funny story about that. I shared the green room that night with Zsa Zsa Jabbour and John Cleese. Oh, wow. Tour of China. Who asked for it?

Stupid Petricks. The list goes on. Now, this is an okay show. I don't like this random whining. I'll come up there and teach you people a lesson. All right. Well, we got to... Oh, and the night's still young.

John Cleves will be out here a little bit later, and my next guest, I'll introduce him right now. He is the curator of mammals at the Milwaukee Public Museum and also the founder of an organization called Bat Conservation International. He has spent 20 years studying bats and feels that they don't get the respect they rightfully deserve. Please welcome Dr. Merlin Tuttle. Look at you.

Hi, Doctor. How are you? Hi, David. Nice to see you, sir. Have a seat. All young and handsome. You're from Milwaukee? Right. Everything all right in Wisconsin? Just fine.

Good. You're a brave man having me and Bats on right after Ava Gabor. Well, how so? Well, you know, this is only the middle of your show. You know what would happen if one of these guys got out? No. Would it be crazy in here? We asked the audience. I don't know how many would stay. Yeah. Now, that's true.

I'm scared silly of bats, and probably most people who know nothing about them are also frightened of bats. Now, is there any real reason to be worried about bats? Actually, not at all. It's very simple. No, it's okay. We get it. That's you. Yeah. Is it weird? Well... Looking at you from a long time ago. time ago. I had an interesting experience with Gabor and John Cleese. He tried to get her interested in bats. He asked her and she came in and she liked animals and she said, oh, I love

animals. And he said, oh, let me show you. Dr. Tuttle here's got bats. And oh my God, she just liked they had a fit. And so he thought, well, she just doesn't know what they're like. And he tried to show her a picture that I had of a cute bat. And then she threatened to sue him because she was going to have nightmares for a month. And if she did, she was going to sue his pants off. She was going to sue him if she had nightmares? Right. I did notice it said that I had just i i had just founded back conservation international i

did found back conservation international i'm proud of what we have managed to accomplish there in the nearly 30 years that i led the organization but i'm no longer there as often happens with founders of non-profits or even corporations over time the directors sometimes diverge in their priorities from what the founder wants to have. And eventually it just got to be untenable where we weren't accomplishing what we needed to accomplish because we were disagreeing over what we should be doing. What did they want to do? what we should be doing.

What did they want to do? Well, it started, I think, with you're too old to lead anymore. You're 60 years old. We need to find the next leader. And obviously I wasn't too old. I've done a pretty damn good job of founding Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation, and we're doing very well. They were just trying to take over. Assume the reins.

Right. Yeah. And so I just wanted to be clear that that's not where I'm at. If somebody wants to find me or learn more about what I do, I'm at merlintuttle.org is the organization. Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation, is where I am supported and where I do all my work these days. So what do you do these days? Like, what are you up to now? Like, how much more bat work is there to be done? An enormous amount. The thing is, despite, you

know, I can tell you stories endlessly of the great things we've accomplished we didn't just protect the bats at the congress avenue bridge i've gotten millions of bats protected in many other places got a national park in samoa but um uh right now bats are in big big trouble despite all that progress we've made protecting individual groups of bats and species of bats, bats are among the most rapidly declining animals, most endangered animals on the planet. I've already pointed out how susceptible they are because of their slow reproduction and congregating in large numbers where they're easy to pick on. Right now, one of my biggest concerns is to form an entity that, well, we've already formed Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation, but what I need to do next is to

ensure that my legacy of information, photographs, and other things remains available to help others long after I'm dead. I know I'm not going to live forever. I'm 81. I've got Parkinson's, but I'm still going great. And I'm hoping to go great until I'm 90. I love what I do. And I love helping both people and bats. And that's what makes me successful. I'm not just animals have rights, step aside. I'm trying to solve problems for people, help people live in a better world with healthier surroundings and in doing that i'm helping bats but uh the next big challenge is we need to raise an endowment for my organization and that would seem to be a bit much for an organization that's saving traditionally unpopular animals. But I was thinking over breakfast this morning,

all that would have to happen is people listening right now give even a couple dollars apiece, and we'd have the endowment that it would take to make a huge difference for bats, for people, and make an old man damned happy. Well, maybe we could do that. So what is the website that they should go to? Is it your website? Yes. Marylandtuttle.org?

That's right. And is it – there's a very clear donate link up there? There it is. Donate. Far right side. Yes. Inspiring bat conservation worldwide. And Merlin, do you have social media that people can go to as well?

Yes, we do. What is it? I'm sorry I'm not our social media person, and at my age I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to social media. It's Merlin Tuttle Bats, and it's on Instagram. And as of right now, it has 25,000 followers. So hopefully we'll get you a lot more than that, get people to pay attention. Well, I really, really appreciate, Joe, you're having me on and getting this exposure for bats. Well, I'm a curious person, and you're a fascinating guy.

And your work has been really amazing. And so it's very cool to check it out. Oh, here's the video. Yeah, that's from my website. This is you from 1966 to 1967, Adventures of a Real Batman. And so this is you with the Yanomami? Yeah, this guy is just blowing dope up his nose. Now, he's higher than a kite here, and he's...

He's yelling so loud I don't want to do it because I'd hurt my throat. But he's trying to scare the... The demons. Demons out of the village. And he's naked. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the way he goes. And you notice he's got a string around his waist

that's tying his foreskin up. If that ever breaks, they act as though you would if you were in town and you lost all your clothes. Somehow that's leaving them naked if that string breaks. So it's just the foreskin pressed up against his body? Is that what it is? Tied. And there you see blowing the dope up the nose how they do it and boy so what is this stuff like what's in there? I don't know I wasn't what is it called again what is it called again? Eben yeah E-B-E-N-E is how I'm finding it spelled and what is in there what's in that stuff? Doesn't say yeah let's let's google that stuff? It doesn't say. Yeah, let's Google that. I tried. Hallucinogenic plant form is all I was really getting. Interesting.

I'll try again. So that was the recreation. Well, it wasn't really recreation, I don't think. The guys would get high as a part of when they got high, they would see these, quotes Hakura, the spirits that they thought they saw in their hallucinations, and then they'd go try to chase them out of the village. And in 1967, no internet, so there's really no way to know about these people other than to be there, right? That's right.

And if anything happened to me out there, it would just be, remember years ago when the Rockefeller person just disappeared and nobody knew what happened to him. So here it is. What does it say? It says also known as Yopa, Jopa, Cohoba, Parica, or Calcium tree. It's a perennial tree of the genus Anandenanthera, native to the Caribbean and South America. What's in it? The seeds. This is the genic stuff is all I got to still in here.

Oh, dimethyltryptamine. 5-MeO. 5-MeO, dimethyltryptamine. Bufetine. Oh, wow. There's a lot of good stuff in there. A lot of DMT. Okay, that makes sense. So they were reallyetine. Oh, wow. There's a lot of good stuff in there. A lot of DMT. Okay, that makes sense.

So they were really hallucinating. Oh, yeah. So they were taking an orally or a snuff version, rather, of DMT. Right. Very interesting. All right. Merlin, thank you very much for being here, man. I really appreciate it.

And people can get a hold of your books. They're available, The Secret Lives of Bats and The Bat House Guide. And put a bat house in your backyard, people. Kill some mosquitoes. And The Secret Lives of Bats isn't just about The Secret Lives of Bats. It's about my adventure studying the secret world of bats. All right. Well, we'll check that out.

Thank you, Merlin. Really appreciate it. Well, thank you so that out. Thank you, Merlin. Really appreciate it. Well, thank you so much, Joe, for having me on. I've thoroughly enjoyed your good questionnaire, and I very much enjoy people who are prepared for what they're doing. Well, I enjoy talking to you as well, and I wish you all the best. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. Bye, everybody.