The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1932 - Merlin Tuttle

00:00:12.000 Well, welcome to the show Merlin.

00:00:14.000 What a great name by the way.

00:00:16.000 Thank you.

00:00:16.000 Your parents named you Merlin.

00:00:19.000 Did they make you get into magic at all?

00:00:22.000 My mother actually named me Merlin DeVere, and her hope was that she would get a kick out of me being a medical doctor, M.D. Tuttle M.D. But it didn't work out that way.

00:00:36.000 Well, you're a bat scientist. 0.99

00:00:39.000 How does one specialize in bats?

00:00:41.000 How did that journey start?

00:00:43.000 Well, I was always interested in anything in nature.

00:00:47.000 I start out, too, collecting monarch caterpillars and watch them make cocoons and hatch into butterflies.

00:00:53.000 And then I went into a snake phase, in which my mother was not happy with that phase.

00:00:59.000 At five, I was dragging in sometimes snakes four or five feet long, and they'd get loose in the house.

00:01:04.000 Oh, no.

00:01:06.000 We moved into a new neighborhood one time, and a welcoming committee came over to welcome my mother to the neighborhood.

00:01:14.000 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.

00:01:21.000 And we couldn't find it in the house.

00:01:23.000 We thought it had gotten out of the house.

00:01:26.000 The group's 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.

00:01:35.000 And this snake had reared up behind the couch and was looking for all the world like a cobra looking around.

00:01:41.000 And only one of those women would ever even speak to my mother again. 0.99

00:01:45.000 That's hilarious. 1.00

00:01:47.000 Your crazy son with his snakes. 0.99

00:01:49.000 So you are a bat scientist. 1.00

00:01:53.000 Right.

00:01:53.000 And The Secret Lives of Bats is one of your books, and the other one is The Bat House Guide.

00:02:00.000 That's the most recent one.

00:02:02.000 There's a lot of bats in Austin, Texas.

00:02:05.000 That's right.

00:02:08.000 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.

00:02:16.000 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.

00:02:26.000 There were news headlines from coast to coast saying that hundreds of thousands of rabid bats were invading and attacking the citizens of Austin.

00:02:35.000 And was that nonsense?

00:02:37.000 Absolutely.

00:02:39.000 Why do you think people have this fear of bats?

00:02:43.000 Fear of the unknown.

00:02:45.000 I mean, you're probably not totally unaffected.

00:02:49.000 I mean, I know I am.

00:02:51.000 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.

00:03:01.000 Statistically speaking.

00:03:02.000 Right.

00:03:03.000 But we fear what we don't know, and very few people know much about bats, so they're easily misunderstood and scared.

00:03:12.000 And in those days, if a bat tried to catch a mosquito near somebody, the person would run like hell thinking that they were being attacked, and they'd never even look around to see the bat catch the mosquito and go on his way.

00:03:26.000 In fact, I had one guy that claimed he was actually...

00:03:31.000 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.

00:03:49.000 Yeah.

00:03:50.000 So, bats in Austin, what's interesting is this bridge near Lady Bird Lake, right?

00:03:59.000 And that bridge is famously home for millions of bats, right?

00:04:05.000 Up to 1.5 million.

00:04:07.000 It's a lot of bats.

00:04:08.000 Right.

00:04:09.000 It's a beautiful thing when you watch them fly out.

00:04:11.000 One of the first times I've ever come here, they could see Jamie has a photo of it happening.

00:04:16.000 One of the first times I ever came here, we went next to it, and you could hear the bats.

00:04:22.000 Right.

00:04:22.000 You could hear them squeaking.

00:04:24.000 Right.

00:04:24.000 And stuff in there.

00:04:25.000 Well, when I first came to Austin, I... We had to face people who were signing petitions to have them eradicated.

00:04:35.000 They were terrified of them.

00:04:37.000 The Health Department had warned that they were mostly rabid and would attack people.

00:04:41.000 Mostly rabid?

00:04:42.000 Oh, yeah.

00:04:43.000 And what were they basing this on?

00:04:44.000 In the early 1980s, there were all kinds of planted stories in the news media We're good to go.

00:05:13.000 And so people were really frightened, genuinely.

00:05:17.000 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.

00:05:28.000 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, she said, what next?

00:05:42.000 Somebody's going to be trying to conserve cockroaches.

00:05:45.000 But the first time I actually showed her a live bat in the hand, she was like, oh, isn't he cute?

00:05:53.000 You know, a whole different response.

00:05:56.000 And so bats, once people meet them, they're their own best ambassadors.

00:06:02.000 They're gentle animals that...

00:06:04.000 Almost never bite anything except an insect or fruit, except in self-defense.

00:06:10.000 And all I had to do was come to Austin and point out that this was a treasure not yet recognized.

00:06:20.000 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.

00:06:35.000 So that's what's important for people to understand, is they actually serve a very important purpose in the ecosystem, right?

00:06:41.000 Yes.

00:06:42.000 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.

00:06:53.000 It's a matter of like them or not, we need them.

00:06:57.000 And if we understand them, we'll probably like them too.

00:07:00.000 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?

00:07:14.000 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.

00:07:23.000 We could be practically buried in insect pests.

00:07:27.000 Bats are the primary controllers of Insects that fly at night, like mosquitoes.

00:07:33.000 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,

00:07:52.000 nine of which carried West Nile virus.

00:07:56.000 Do we get West Nile virus in Texas?

00:07:58.000 Is that common?

00:08:00.000 I don't think it's real common.

00:08:02.000 But it's possible?

00:08:03.000 Yeah.

00:08:04.000 So a bat house, and this is a photo of a bat house that you have on the cover of your book. 0.95

00:08:09.000 I didn't even know that these were a thing.

00:08:10.000 They're like bird houses, but it's a bat house. 1.00

00:08:13.000 Yeah, except that they're open at the bottom instead of a hole in the front with a floor.

00:08:17.000 And so people put these up and construct them purposely so bats can live in them.

00:08:22.000 Right.

00:08:23.000 And how do you get a bat to get in there?

00:08:26.000 Well, just like birds, they find them and decide they like them.

00:08:29.000 Oh, wow, look at that picture.

00:08:31.000 That's crazy.

00:08:32.000 That bat house was occupied by 105 bats within a week of the time it was put up.

00:08:38.000 Oh, yeah, you have a little Batman logo on the front of it, too.

00:08:42.000 So within a week it was put up, there was over 100 bats in there.

00:08:47.000 That's right.

00:08:47.000 Now, I wouldn't say that that's what you'd expect all the time.

00:08:50.000 It often takes six months to a year, even sometimes a year and a half to two years to attract bats.

00:08:56.000 But if you put up the right kind of bat house in the right kind of place, you'll probably attract some bats, and it can be a lot of fun. 1.00

00:09:05.000 And what is the right kind of bat house? 1.00

00:09:08.000 Do you have to put something in there to attract them?

00:09:10.000 No.

00:09:12.000 Just...

00:09:14.000 Roosting crevices are three-quarters of an inch to an inch wide, usually.

00:09:18.000 The bats like those narrow crevices because they're used to snakes coming after them.

00:09:23.000 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 of an inch wide, the snake comes in, he can't open his mouth wide enough to get around the bat's head. 0.83

00:09:37.000 He can...

00:09:38.000 But the bat opens his mouth and bites the snake's nose.

00:09:42.000 So I suspect that's a large part of why bats like those narrow crevices is protection against one of their dominant predators.

00:09:51.000 That makes sense.

00:09:52.000 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.

00:10:04.000 Yes.

00:10:04.000 Putting up bad houses can be a big help in many ways.

00:10:08.000 There's a recent study done in the Mediterranean that showed that when they put up bad houses strategically located around rice paddies, that they no longer had to use pesticides.

00:10:20.000 Really?

00:10:24.000 That's amazing.

00:10:25.000 How many bats do you need to control pests? 0.96

00:10:29.000 What kind of bugs are we talking about besides mosquitoes?

00:10:33.000 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.

00:10:44.000 Eat a wide variety of insects.

00:10:49.000 One important point to make, you know, we hear a lot about the importance of biodiversity.

00:10:55.000 And the bat houses in the Mediterranean that successfully eliminated the need for Pesticides. 0.99

00:11:03.000 They didn't mean that there were never any more pests or that there was no pest damage.

00:11:08.000 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.

00:11:21.000 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?

00:11:36.000 They're gonna starve to death.

00:11:38.000 And so by having diverse habitat not far away, in the off-season, the bats had a place to go eat until they were kneaded over the rice paddies again.

00:11:51.000 Okay, that makes sense.

00:11:53.000 So when you first got here, You're dealing with these people that want to eradicate bats.

00:12:00.000 You had to convince them that bats are very important.

00:12:03.000 And how did you go about doing that?

00:12:06.000 Like, what did you do to try to educate people?

00:12:10.000 Well, this goes back a ways.

00:12:12.000 When I got my first job, it was a really great job.

00:12:19.000 I 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.

00:12:32.000 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.

00:12:43.000 Because in those 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.

00:12:55.000 And so...

00:13:00.000 It was very difficult at first.

00:13:05.000 You know, we hear a lot from environmentalists, conservationists, about the need to win battles.

00:13:13.000 You know, send us X amount of money so we can beat up on such and such a company.

00:13:18.000 And people, there's a certain type of people that kind of love that.

00:13:24.000 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've got to get a whole lot more clever than just asking them for money to save the animal.

00:13:37.000 So 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.

00:13:46.000 And what I found was if I went about it right...

00:13:51.000 And I won enough friends, I didn't need to win the battles.

00:13:54.000 And that's become kind of a dominant part of my approach to conservation.

00:14:01.000 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.

00:14:14.000 You know, we shouldn't be dwelling in the past.

00:14:17.000 It's the future that counts.

00:14:19.000 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.

00:14:28.000 But I found that if I listened to people...

00:14:32.000 And took them seriously and understood that even the person with the wildest tail probably had some reason for believing it.

00:14:42.000 And the more I listened and understood, the better I became at countering it.

00:14:47.000 And also, I always had the attitude of, I'm not here to just help bats.

00:14:54.000 I'm here to help people and bats.

00:14:58.000 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.

00:15:06.000 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.

00:15:19.000 Most people will like you if you just take time to listen to them, even if you are at opposite polls of what you believe.

00:15:27.000 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.

00:15:43.000 So a lot of people, they have this idea about bats based on like horror movies, vampire movies, and whenever you see like Halloween decorations, there's always bats involved.

00:15:53.000 Bats are thought of as like a creepy kind of scary animal.

00:15:57.000 Well, that's all part of just not understanding.

00:16:01.000 In fact, one of the big problems for bats is that, you know, out of 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.

00:16:15.000 And they fly erratically.

00:16:17.000 They live in places that people often consider kind of spooky, the basement or the attic or the cave.

00:16:24.000 And we don't know what they're going to do next because they fly so erratically and they're associated with the night.

00:16:32.000 I mean even people who work at night aren't trusted as much as people who work in the daytime.

00:16:36.000 That's true, right?

00:16:38.000 That's true.

00:16:38.000 Night shift people are kind of creepy.

00:16:40.000 Yeah.

00:16:41.000 Yeah.

00:16:41.000 So these bats that we have in Austin, is there more than one species?

00:16:49.000 At least 99% one species under the bridge.

00:16:53.000 There's probably two species there.

00:16:55.000 One's the cave myotis that usually lives in caves, and the other is the Brazilian free-tailed bat.

00:17:01.000 And what's the most common?

00:17:02.000 The free-tailed bats.

00:17:04.000 So that's the one when you see the big swarms, most of them are the Brazilian free-tailed bats. 1.00

00:17:08.000 Right.

00:17:08.000 So is that an invasive species?

00:17:10.000 No, not by any means.

00:17:12.000 So why is it called the Brazilian free-tailed bat?

00:17:14.000 That's a good question.

00:17:16.000 Species often get named by where they were first discovered, and the species was first described by specimens discovered in Brazil.

00:17:25.000 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.

00:17:47.000 And each of those subspecies, the first one was described in Brazil, so it was Taderta brasiliensis, braziliensis, and then Taderta brasiliensis mexicana from Mexico and so on.

00:18:00.000 But then a genetic study was done and found that they're so...

00:18:05.000 Broadly mixed genetically that you couldn't separate out subspecies. 0.97

00:18:10.000 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.

00:18:22.000 But that's just the way of genetics.

00:18:25.000 Sometimes I like the common names even better than the scientific because they don't seem to change as rapidly these days.

00:18:32.000 And what is the other bat?

00:18:35.000 That's very common here?

00:18:37.000 It's not very common.

00:18:38.000 Less common, but prevalent?

00:18:40.000 Yeah, the cave myotis.

00:18:42.000 It's a slower-flying, more agile, maneuverable bat.

00:18:47.000 The free-tail bats can fly thousands of feet above ground, and they can travel at, get this, with a tailwind, they can go 100 miles an hour.

00:18:58.000 What?!

00:18:59.000 100 miles an hour.

00:19:00.000 Our bats from the bridge could easily be feeding clear down on the coast at some nights.

00:19:06.000 I've watched on Doppler weather radar.

00:19:09.000 We can watch them really well on radar.

00:19:11.000 And I've watched where they come out of, let's say, Bracken Cave down near San Antonio.

00:19:18.000 And we see the front band of moving bats crossing four to five counties in 12 minutes.

00:19:27.000 I had no idea.

00:19:28.000 I thought they were kind of like bird speed, like a regular bird.

00:19:33.000 Bats are by far the most maneuverable, best flyers in the world.

00:19:38.000 They can do things that neither birds nor insects can do in flight.

00:19:42.000 And why is that?

00:19:45.000 They don't have fixed, hard wings.

00:19:48.000 You know, like insects, the wings are made of chitin, and they don't bend that much, except at the joints.

00:19:54.000 And birds' feathers aren't nearly as flexible as the skin on a bat's wing.

00:19:59.000 Wow.

00:20:00.000 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.

00:20:13.000 Wow, really?

00:20:15.000 And what's really cool is even if they get damaged badly, it's amazing what their healing powers are.

00:20:21.000 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.

00:20:41.000 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?

00:20:52.000 That's true.

00:20:53.000 And these bats tend to feed in different types of places.

00:20:58.000 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?

00:21:03.000 Well, I'm not saying they make it all the way to the coast.

00:21:06.000 The trouble is we haven't yet done good enough tracking to know.

00:21:10.000 Can we put like a little GPS band on a bat, or is it too big?

00:21:14.000 Yeah, we can radio track bats.

00:21:16.000 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.

00:21:28.000 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.

00:21:46.000 First thing we knew, we got forced to land by drug agents that had overtaken us. 0.94

00:21:52.000 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 his drugs.

00:22:04.000 And they were very disappointed to find out we were just bat people. 0.84

00:22:08.000 Yeah.

00:22:10.000 So when it comes to bats around the world, how much variation is there?

00:22:15.000 I know that there's some really large bats in Asia, right?

00:22:19.000 There's some big variation.

00:22:23.000 There's, yes, large bats in Southeast and in Asia, Africa.

00:22:27.000 What's the biggest bat?

00:22:28.000 The biggest bat has a wingspan of almost six feet.

00:22:33.000 I have a colleague who swears that the biggest ones sometimes actually get to six feet.

00:22:39.000 What is that bat?

00:22:41.000 Flying foxes.

00:22:42.000 There are 200 kinds of flying foxes.

00:22:44.000 Some of them are small and some are big. 0.97

00:22:47.000 Look at the size of that sucker. 0.96

00:22:49.000 These are really neat bats. 0.91

00:22:51.000 And it's not just these great big bats, but one of the world's smallest mammals is a bat.

00:23:00.000 The little bumblebee bat from Thailand weighs a third less than a U.S. penny.

00:23:04.000 Look at the size of that thing.

00:23:06.000 That's in the Philippines?

00:23:07.000 Is that what that is?

00:23:08.000 Is that what it says, Jamie?

00:23:10.000 These flying foxes are in the Philippines, yes, but they're in a wide area of the Old World tropics.

00:23:18.000 We're very concerned about them because...

00:23:21.000 Go back to that photo with the guy next to it so we can see it, the perspective.

00:23:28.000 No, the one.

00:23:29.000 Yeah, that one.

00:23:30.000 Look at that.

00:23:30.000 That's crazy.

00:23:31.000 I think it's a little too close.

00:23:32.000 Well, that's kind of like holding your fish out a bit in front of you to exaggerate.

00:23:39.000 But it seems, even if it's a forced perspective, that's pretty large.

00:23:44.000 You know, I've never gone there and personally seen it, but I'm told that there's a place...

00:23:48.000 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.

00:24:05.000 These are wild bats.

00:24:07.000 So he tamed them with food?

00:24:08.000 Yeah.

00:24:08.000 Just got them accustomed to feeding?

00:24:10.000 Well, one of the secrets of my—I don't know if you've seen my— I have a large photo collection.

00:24:18.000 I have the largest collection of bat photos in the world.

00:24:22.000 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.

00:24:32.000 And how do you do that?

00:24:33.000 Well, when I was a teenager, I learned falconry.

00:24:37.000 And in falconry, you train the hawk to come back on call for a small reward in your hand.

00:24:44.000 And it's the same thing with bats.

00:24:46.000 You train them to get a reward from coming to your hand.

00:24:52.000 There's some of your photos there?

00:24:53.000 Yeah.

00:24:54.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:24:54.000 And what has that little fella got in his mouth? 0.71

00:24:56.000 He's got a fig.

00:24:57.000 Now that brings up a whole other story.

00:25:01.000 Bats like that account for up to 98% of the first seed dispersal into cleared areas in Africa.

00:25:10.000 And as you may be aware, desertification is one of the biggest threats in Africa.

00:25:16.000 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.

00:25:25.000 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.

00:25:37.000 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.

00:25:49.000 Now, you said over-harvested for human food.

00:25:53.000 So it's really common that people eat bats?

00:25:55.000 I know that that was the wet market theory initially out of the Wuhan area that people were eating bats.

00:26:04.000 Actually, although that was speculated early on, when they searched the market, they could find no evidence that bats had been sold there.

00:26:13.000 But bats...

00:26:17.000 There's evidence that bats were eaten at one time by American Indians.

00:26:21.000 There have been clay pots found full of bat buns that looked like people were cooking them up to eat. 1.00

00:26:29.000 But in memorable history, there hasn't been bat eating in the New World.

00:26:36.000 In memorable history?

00:26:37.000 What do you mean?

00:26:38.000 Well, 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 looked like they were eaten probably by Indians.

00:26:54.000 But in the old world, where bats are much larger, they are frequently eaten, and that's a major cause of their decline.

00:27:04.000 Where are bats, what part of the world are bats eaten the most?

00:27:10.000 Pacific Islands in Indonesia, Southeast Asia, but also the...

00:27:23.000 Places like Madagascar.

00:27:25.000 And so, how do they cook bats?

00:27:27.000 Like, what's a common way to serve up a bat?

00:27:31.000 Well, I got a picture of them boiled in coconut milk in Guam.

00:27:35.000 Yeah?

00:27:35.000 Did you try it?

00:27:37.000 No.

00:27:38.000 Would you feel bad about eating a bat, since you love them so much?

00:27:42.000 Well...

00:27:48.000 I think we...

00:27:49.000 I don't see a reason to play favorites among animals.

00:27:54.000 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.

00:28:14.000 Actually, I know this isn't going to sit well with everybody, but I would rather in many cases see us harvesting wild animals It would be more compatible with a healthy environment than cutting down all the trees in a rainforest so that we can run cattle.

00:28:33.000 Listen, I agree with you.

00:28:34.000 I'm on your side with that.

00:28:36.000 But there's not enough wild animals for everybody.

00:28:40.000 Well, they're not.

00:28:41.000 But there is something to be said for the hunting side.

00:28:47.000 Hunters get abused a lot by conservationists that become too emotionally involved with their animals.

00:28:54.000 People often ask me...

00:28:56.000 You must really love bats.

00:28:59.000 No, I don't really love bats.

00:29:01.000 I'm a scientist who's very fascinated by them, and I'm impressed with how valuable they are, how much we need them.

00:29:06.000 But when I go out to do conservation, I'm looking out for both bats and people.

00:29:12.000 And I think that's the only way we can really be successful.

00:29:15.000 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.

00:29:30.000 For example, years ago, led the way in getting a national park created in American Samoa.

00:29:39.000 And how it all started was there were commercial hunters that were devastating flying foxes.

00:29:46.000 They were shooting them and selling them to Guam for a delicacy. 1.00

00:29:50.000 And in a very short time, they had wiped out most of the flying foxes from the whole area.

00:29:57.000 And I was asked by a then-Harvard botanist graduate student who was finishing up his PhD if I would come and do something to help save the bats.

00:30:10.000 So I got together a couple donors and him, and we went out to American Samoa.

00:30:16.000 And the first thing I did the first day, my collaborators were all worn out from an overnight flight, so they slept in.

00:30:24.000 And while they were sleeping in, I went out and made friends with the commercial hunters.

00:30:28.000 And I just came across as another guy that was perfectly happy with hunting.

00:30:37.000 And in fact, I'm sure as a population ecologist that we need hunters.

00:30:45.000 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.

00:30:53.000 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.

00:31:00.000 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.

00:31:08.000 We could have shot 100 in an hour.

00:31:11.000 And I just asked innocent questions, you know, not too many of them at once.

00:31:17.000 What do you think caused all this?

00:31:19.000 And they readily admitted that they shot too many.

00:31:22.000 And so, you know, eventually I'd ask, well, what are you going to do?

00:31:27.000 You know, your grandchildren are not going to be able to hunt bats anymore because you hunt them all out?

00:31:34.000 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.

00:31:45.000 They were very upset that I had consorted with the enemy.

00:31:49.000 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 they were flying foxes in the future.

00:32:14.000 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.

00:32:28.000 Actually, they completely outlawed commercial hunting.

00:32:32.000 The commercial hunters did.

00:32:34.000 And then they themselves declared a five-year moratorium on all flying fox hunting so that they could recover.

00:32:40.000 And when I asked about it of a Samoan biologist 25 years later, he said they still weren't hunting flying foxes, and the flying foxes had recovered.

00:32:53.000 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.

00:33:10.000 And if we had insisted that they quit all hunting immediately, we would have gotten nowhere.

00:33:14.000 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.

00:33:28.000 The value of diplomacy.

00:33:30.000 So what did they hunt instead of the flying foxes?

00:33:33.000 What did they transition over to?

00:33:35.000 They're commercial hunters.

00:33:37.000 Oh, they quit commercial hunting.

00:33:39.000 Oh, wow.

00:33:41.000 So, are you curious?

00:33:43.000 Have you had bat before?

00:33:46.000 Have you eaten it?

00:33:48.000 This is something that...

00:33:50.000 Is it difficult to discuss?

00:33:51.000 I guess I'm going to be honest with you.

00:33:53.000 Please do.

00:33:54.000 The reason I'm hesitant is that one time I was coming out of a news conference at National Geographic.

00:33:59.000 They'd just published...

00:34:00.000 I've done five articles with them, and they'd just done a news conference about my article on flying foxes.

00:34:08.000 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.

00:34:19.000 Have you ever had one?

00:34:21.000 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.

00:34:30.000 And, you know, they were doing something that I really didn't.

00:34:36.000 I wanted to stop, but they were really nice people.

00:34:40.000 The guys, the poachers, were just trying to support their families, and we got to be friends.

00:34:46.000 And they invited me for breakfast, and what did they serve me?

00:34:50.000 Bat's burger.

00:34:53.000 And they chopped up the bat's They did this with chickens and fish, too. 1.00

00:34:59.000 They would chop them up, bones and all.

00:35:00.000 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.

00:35:10.000 Well, they chopped up these patties.

00:35:12.000 And in Thailand, especially in those days, if you refused to eat what somebody served you, it was the ultimate insult.

00:35:19.000 You were implying that they were trying to poison you, and you didn't trust them.

00:35:23.000 So I... Ended up trying to eat part of one of those burgers.

00:35:32.000 Well, I didn't get very far.

00:35:34.000 Is that your alarm that's telling you to take your pill?

00:35:36.000 Yeah, that's my alarm going off.

00:35:39.000 Remember where I was and...

00:35:41.000 You were talking about eating bats.

00:35:43.000 I'm ready.

00:35:43.000 Don't worry.

00:35:45.000 Yeah, I've got Parkinson's and I have to take pills several times a day, but...

00:35:52.000 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.

00:36:10.000 I still travel the whole world.

00:36:12.000 I was in South Africa and Zambia just recently.

00:36:16.000 There's water right there.

00:36:24.000 So they take these bats and they just chop them up and turn them into patties and make burgers out of them?

00:36:30.000 That's what they were doing.

00:36:32.000 So do they take the skin off of it? 0.73

00:36:35.000 Actually, I'm told that in the South Pacific, it's considered bad etiquette if you don't eat the skin, too.

00:36:42.000 But to finish these guys' story, I... 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.

00:36:59.000 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.

00:37:14.000 And I've never been so beside myself angry.

00:37:17.000 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.

00:37:26.000 You're exempted.

00:37:27.000 You can't defend yourself that way.

00:37:29.000 That's hilarious.

00:37:32.000 So that's why I was a little hesitant when you asked me.

00:37:35.000 Well, I mean, that's the media for you.

00:37:38.000 It's not the media, it's people that use the media, and they're unscrupulous.

00:37:43.000 It's very discouraging. 0.99

00:37:46.000 That sucks. 0.56

00:37:47.000 But, so, what did it taste like? 0.96

00:37:52.000 You know, everybody says that when you got something unusual like that, well, it was like chicken, but I don't know what it tasted like.

00:37:58.000 I was so busy trying to get the bones out of my mouth.

00:38:01.000 And how do these people, did you ask them, like, how do you guys deal with the bones?

00:38:07.000 They just swallow them, no problem?

00:38:09.000 Yeah, I guess.

00:38:11.000 I mean, my Thai assistant, Sirupon Dwanke, he was a great guy, but he never had any problem, and 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.

00:38:28.000 One of the caves that we ended up saving, we were going up to it early one morning before sun-up, 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,

00:38:46.000 especially in that area, cobras.

00:38:48.000 So I'm saying, Serapone, are we okay?

00:38:54.000 You know, how about cobras here?

00:38:57.000 And...

00:38:58.000 He says, oh, no worry.

00:39:02.000 You know, when I was in the military, they taught us, cobra is gentle, no attack, no problem.

00:39:09.000 And then a few days later, I saw a man, we saw a man running real hard down the road.

00:39:14.000 And Serpon says, man, run like chased by cobra.

00:39:20.000 And I said, well, I thought you said cobras don't attack people.

00:39:26.000 He said, oh, only when they're guarding their eggs.

00:39:29.000 I said, well, when do they have their eggs?

00:39:32.000 I don't remember.

00:39:38.000 So you were at the mouth of these caves where the cobras are.

00:39:45.000 That's where they like to hang out?

00:39:47.000 Yes.

00:39:47.000 They like to hang out and wait for bats to come out?

00:39:49.000 How do they catch them?

00:39:51.000 Just snatch them out of the air?

00:39:52.000 Well, snakes usually, 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.

00:40:08.000 You got video of that?

00:40:11.000 No, I have still pictures of bats being caught by snakes.

00:40:15.000 Yeah?

00:40:16.000 Can we see them?

00:40:18.000 I didn't bring any.

00:40:20.000 Is there any online?

00:40:22.000 There are.

00:40:24.000 I have at least one picture of a snake eating a bat I remember.

00:40:28.000 So mostly it's snakes that eat bats?

00:40:30.000 Is that what bats' number one predators are other than human beings?

00:40:34.000 In the United States, a major predator of bats are two major predators, feral cats and raccoons.

00:40:42.000 Feral cats kill everything.

00:40:45.000 And I could have brought a video that I... So here we go.

00:40:50.000 You can't see it catch it, but it's caught.

00:40:55.000 Yeah, that's a python catching flying foxes.

00:40:59.000 That's a big, big bat too, boy.

00:41:02.000 Yeah.

00:41:03.000 It just crushes that poor little guy.

00:41:04.000 There's another one here too.

00:41:06.000 That's what's on the ground.

00:41:07.000 Yeah.

00:41:09.000 So...

00:41:10.000 I know that people make bat soup too, right? 0.99

00:41:13.000 Isn't that a common thing in Asia?

00:41:16.000 I suppose you could say that.

00:41:21.000 You know, I'm not a guy who's out to stop all bat eating. 1.00

00:41:26.000 I think what we need to do is get balance in the world first.

00:41:30.000 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.

00:41:37.000 But I'm okay with...

00:41:43.000 Eating bats as long as it's not done excessively.

00:41:47.000 If I could use eating bats as a reason for saving a colony, I would be happy to advocate eating bats.

00:41:56.000 I want to do whatever it takes to keep nature in balance.

00:41:59.000 We live in a world where all these living things are interdependent, and we can't afford to just love one and hate another.

00:42:09.000 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.

00:42:20.000 That's a very good point.

00:42:21.000 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 I know of cases like that.

00:42:40.000 For example, in Mexico they have desert bighorn sheep.

00:42:46.000 I'm told that a good trophy sized bighorn ram, you might pay $100,000 to shoot one.

00:42:56.000 And I'm told that 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.

00:43:13.000 And, you know, if he can make $100,000 for one sheep being shot...

00:43:20.000 He has to run a lot of cattle and go to a lot of work to make that kind of money off his cattle.

00:43:25.000 And so, actually I like these situations where there's economic incentive for preserving a wild animal.

00:43:36.000 I'm told that where that is happening, that natural vegetation is recurring, biodiversity is expanding.

00:43:44.000 Cattle aren't adapted to live in those places. 0.93

00:43:47.000 They do a lot of destruction.

00:43:49.000 But as long as the ultimate goal is that we're improving the health of The natural world and all creatures are benefiting.

00:44:03.000 I'm happy with whatever it takes to get there.

00:44:06.000 I am too.

00:44:06.000 So what is this large coconut that you brought?

00:44:10.000 What's the deal with that?

00:44:11.000 Well, this isn't exactly a coconut.

00:44:14.000 What is it?

00:44:15.000 Now look here.

00:44:16.000 See how well this looks like it's all one piece.

00:44:20.000 Right.

00:44:22.000 It's a perfect fit.

00:44:24.000 Now...

00:44:24.000 What is it?

00:44:27.000 Inside...

00:44:27.000 That's not a coconut?

00:44:28.000 No.

00:44:30.000 Inside, you have...

00:44:33.000 If this had just picked off the tree, this would be a fruit.

00:44:37.000 And in each fruit, you'd have a seed.

00:44:39.000 This is exactly how Brazil nuts grow.

00:44:44.000 And the reason for all this armor plating around is this.

00:44:51.000 There's a bat with a more than two-foot wingspan that disperses the seeds of this tree.

00:45:02.000 Bats are such...

00:45:04.000 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.

00:45:14.000 More than bees?

00:45:15.000 Oh, much more.

00:45:16.000 Really?

00:45:17.000 Oh, yeah.

00:45:18.000 And so here's what happens with this.

00:45:21.000 This hangs down like this, 100 feet up in a big tree.

00:45:25.000 So that's like a tree pod, like a pod for seeds.

00:45:29.000 Right.

00:45:30.000 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 bat that knows exactly how to pry this loose.

00:45:42.000 The reason for all this armor plating is that the plant does not want monkeys or other primates or parrots or other birds.

00:45:51.000 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.

00:46:01.000 The bat pries this off So that just kind of falls open?

00:46:07.000 It opens up a little bit, and then the bat pries it the rest of the way?

00:46:11.000 So it's almost like it's just a little built-in door.

00:46:13.000 Yeah.

00:46:14.000 And then he carries this.

00:46:15.000 This would be a fruit.

00:46:16.000 This is dried with the seed inside.

00:46:19.000 He carries this away and drops the seed when he finishes eating.

00:46:24.000 And, in fact, this...

00:46:28.000 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.

00:46:40.000 And this is Brazil nuts.

00:46:41.000 Can I see that?

00:46:42.000 This is...

00:46:43.000 Is that Brazil nuts?

00:46:45.000 This is very similar to Brazil nuts.

00:46:48.000 What is it called?

00:46:51.000 Sapicaya.

00:46:52.000 And these are edible?

00:46:53.000 Yes. 0.98

00:46:54.000 Like we can crack this sucker open and eat it? 1.00

00:46:56.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:46:56.000 What's it taste like? 0.99

00:46:58.000 I don't know.

00:46:58.000 I've never eaten one.

00:46:59.000 Really?

00:47:00.000 But you have all these.

00:47:01.000 You're not curious?

00:47:02.000 I would eat them, but I've never been able to beat the bats to them.

00:47:08.000 And these aren't good, the ones you have here in this thing?

00:47:11.000 Are they dried up?

00:47:12.000 Oh, they're dried up long since.

00:47:14.000 It's fascinating because it seems like it's been cut.

00:47:17.000 It's crazy that this is just a natural feature in the seed pod.

00:47:21.000 And the people that are not watching this, just listening to this, it seems just like a coconut.

00:47:28.000 It's so thick and hard.

00:47:29.000 You can hear it here.

00:47:30.000 I'll knock on it.

00:47:32.000 It's very hard and very big, like a bowling ball.

00:47:35.000 The co-evolution between bats and plants is absolutely incredible.

00:47:40.000 We haven't talked at all about pollination.

00:47:43.000 This is just about seed dispersal.

00:47:47.000 There are flowers, a whole suite of different kinds of flowers that produce reflectors to guide bats to them on dark nights.

00:47:59.000 Flowers that bloom in dense foliage where bats have a hard time finding them.

00:48:06.000 They produce reflectors.

00:48:09.000 Out of either their petals or a leaf turned up the wrong way.

00:48:14.000 There's a vine in Cuba that the flowers hang down on a long stem.

00:48:24.000 And then the last leaf above where the flowers are turns exactly upside down.

00:48:29.000 Instead of going this way to catch sunlight to photosynthesize, it turns around this way.

00:48:35.000 And then acts as a reflector.

00:48:37.000 Let's see, that's one that does that, but it's not the one I'm talking about.

00:48:40.000 But it's a similar effect.

00:48:41.000 Oh, here, the red one.

00:48:42.000 Now, that's a hummingbird there, but look, I want to show you something while we're on that.

00:48:47.000 See how the reproductive organs, the anthers and stigma, are up there above the bird's head?

00:48:53.000 Yeah.

00:48:54.000 That bird is too small to fill the gap, and I took over 400 pictures of that for National Geographic, and never once...

00:49:03.000 I saw one of those hummingbirds touch the reproductive organs of the flower.

00:49:07.000 It was thought for probably a hundred years that this plant was pollinated by hummingbirds.

00:49:13.000 But when later I photographed bats coming to it, the bats filled up that gap and got covered in pollen.

00:49:22.000 Ah, wow.

00:49:23.000 Interesting.

00:49:25.000 Now, let's see, one of the flowers you first showed, you can see all these on my website.

00:49:31.000 Talking to the microphone, Merlin?

00:49:32.000 Merlin, talking to the microphone.

00:49:33.000 Okay.

00:49:34.000 You can see all these probably on my website.

00:49:39.000 Let's see, I'm trying to...

00:49:41.000 Okay, watch this one.

00:49:44.000 The one you've got up now.

00:49:46.000 That bad is pollinating macuna flowers.

00:49:48.000 So all that stuff that's coming off of those flowers, that's all the pollen.

00:49:52.000 That's pollen. 0.95

00:49:53.000 And that's going to get on him, and then he's going to disperse that.

00:49:56.000 Yeah, it took me 11,000 pictures to get that picture.

00:50:00.000 That's an amazing picture.

00:50:01.000 His tongue poking out.

00:50:03.000 National Geographic must have invested close to $70,000 in getting that.

00:50:07.000 Well, it's worth it.

00:50:09.000 Look at that.

00:50:09.000 I mean, it's really cool.

00:50:10.000 But I got a whole series where he's coming, and see that turned-up petal that's right in front of his tongue?

00:50:16.000 Yes.

00:50:17.000 That's the reflector for that flower that guides the bat.

00:50:22.000 To find the flower.

00:50:23.000 It acts like airport landing lights on a runway for a pilot at night.

00:50:27.000 See, I've always...

00:50:28.000 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.

00:50:37.000 They have quite good vision, most of them, but in addition, they can see everything with sound that we can, except color.

00:50:44.000 Oh.

00:50:45.000 And I can see a lot more that we can't.

00:50:47.000 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.

00:50:56.000 Really?

00:50:57.000 Because I had always heard that they used echolocation because their eyesight was poor.

00:51:02.000 That's really interesting.

00:51:04.000 Yeah.

00:51:04.000 Let me finish that story about that macuna flower.

00:51:07.000 Sure.

00:51:14.000 Wow.

00:51:18.000 Wow.

00:51:19.000 Wow.

00:51:28.000 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.

00:51:39.000 It's on a long stem that hangs down so that possums or anything like that can't get to it.

00:51:44.000 And it opens late and then it has just a little slit that's a millimeter or two wide.

00:51:52.000 And the tongue of the bat has to go into that just like a lock, a key in a door, in a lock.

00:52:00.000 Wow, that is fascinating.

00:52:03.000 That's a different kind of flower.

00:52:04.000 Look at the tongue on that guy. 0.99

00:52:06.000 Look over at the next one over in the picture there, that one.

00:52:11.000 Okay, this bat, he's saying his echolocation sounds out through his nose. 0.99

00:52:17.000 And that leaf on his nose is aiming into the reflector.

00:52:21.000 And so that's guiding him in.

00:52:23.000 And then just below that is the slit I was telling you about that's just a millimeter or two wide.

00:52:28.000 And the bat has to perfectly get his tongue in that slit in order to get nectar or pollinate the flower.

00:52:35.000 Go to that other picture again, Jamie.

00:52:36.000 Right here on the corner, you got the tongue going into the slit.

00:52:41.000 Go over one to the right.

00:52:48.000 No, the one you just had.

00:52:49.000 Go back.

00:52:50.000 Go back.

00:52:51.000 Go back.

00:52:52.000 There's the far right.

00:52:54.000 There you go.

00:52:54.000 That one.

00:52:55.000 That one.

00:52:56.000 Okay, there he's got his tongue in the slit. 1.00

00:52:58.000 Wow.

00:52:59.000 So it's almost like it's designed for a bat's tongue. 0.95

00:53:03.000 The reason it took me 11,000 pictures to get this is that this all happens in tiny fractions of a second.

00:53:09.000 And what's going to happen next is his tongue goes in there...

00:53:13.000 The flower actually has spring-loaded anthers and fires the pollen onto his rump. 0.95

00:53:19.000 That's why you see pollen flying around as he's just been shot.

00:53:24.000 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.

00:53:37.000 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,

00:53:53.000 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.

00:53:59.000 So they have very specific areas where they disperse their pollen specifically.

00:54:04.000 Right.

00:54:05.000 Go back to that photo with the one with the tongue deep into the leaf.

00:54:10.000 Look at that.

00:54:12.000 That is crazy.

00:54:14.000 Now, this one has a really cool tongue that acts like a soda straw, and he can stick it down in there, and by, I think you'd call it peristaltic action, he's got a groove down each side of the tongue.

00:54:31.000 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.

00:54:40.000 It's so fascinating that these flowers, it seems like they've evolved symbiotically with the bats.

00:54:49.000 Oh, yes.

00:54:50.000 That's so fascinating.

00:54:51.000 How does that happen?

00:54:53.000 It's incredible.

00:54:54.000 I mean, I'm so— Whoa, look at him, covered in pollen.

00:54:57.000 Yeah.

00:54:58.000 That looks like a bear that got into a bag of cereal.

00:55:01.000 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.

00:55:10.000 Some bats fly over 100 miles in a night pollinating flowers.

00:55:16.000 And look at how much more pollen a bat can carry on its fur than you'll see on a hummingbird or an insect.

00:55:22.000 Oh, yeah.

00:55:22.000 I mean, for folks that are just listening, he's covered like a bag of pollen just blew off in his face.

00:55:29.000 Yeah.

00:55:30.000 I mean, so...

00:55:32.000 But it is absolutely fascinating that these bats and these flowers, they seem to have symbiotically evolved.

00:55:41.000 Right.

00:55:41.000 Like, what is the explanation for that?

00:55:43.000 Like, is there any theory as to how this takes place?

00:55:47.000 Just natural selection, brand mutation?

00:55:50.000 It's amazing, right?

00:55:52.000 Yeah.

00:55:53.000 I find it mind-boggling, not just...

00:55:57.000 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.

00:56:06.000 Yeah, like they have a partnership.

00:56:09.000 It's truly amazing.

00:56:11.000 And not just a partnership with the bats, but an understanding that other plants are going to pollinate on different parts of the bat.

00:56:18.000 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.

00:56:27.000 And this one's like, we'll get to his wings.

00:56:28.000 And this one's like, we'll get to his rump.

00:56:30.000 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.

00:56:42.000 For example, the bats.

00:56:44.000 It's been found in recent years that they have social systems strikingly similar to those of primates, whales, and elephants.

00:56:53.000 Really?

00:56:54.000 Yeah.

00:56:54.000 Like they have an alpha bat and they have a bat leader?

00:56:57.000 They know each other.

00:56:59.000 In my own banding studies years ago, I banded 40-some thousand bats in one study.

00:57:05.000 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.

00:57:17.000 Ten years before.

00:57:18.000 And then you might catch them five years later, two miles away.

00:57:23.000 Ten years later, twenty miles away.

00:57:26.000 All still together.

00:57:28.000 Wow.

00:57:29.000 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 a An out-of-date word as we find more about what animals really do and think.

00:57:52.000 Bats help each other in need.

00:57:56.000 They'll adopt orphans.

00:57:58.000 They form apparently long-term friendships.

00:58:02.000 There are all kinds of cool things that are going on in the world of bats.

00:58:06.000 So our previous thoughts about bats, it's really just based on a lack of examination.

00:58:14.000 Lack of understanding, for sure.

00:58:18.000 One thing I would like to point out to your listeners, all these things that we're talking about and 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.

00:58:35.000 Now, are there some bats that are more complex than other bats?

00:58:40.000 That are more intelligent than other bats?

00:58:42.000 Well, let me tell you an interesting story.

00:58:46.000 After I learned to train frog-eating bats for my research, I thought, well, these carnivores are just, they're smarter than other bats.

00:58:55.000 It never dawned on me that other bats might be trainable, too.

00:59:01.000 Especially really small bats.

00:59:03.000 And then one time I went out to West Texas and I caught a fairly large pallet bat and I wanted to take a picture for National Geographic of it catching centipedes six, eight inches long.

00:59:16.000 They're immune to the stings and they eat centipedes and scorpions. 0.96

00:59:19.000 And so I was training 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.

00:59:33.000 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.

00:59:47.000 So you're holding up the tip of your pinky.

00:59:49.000 Yeah, and that bat had been in my...

00:59:54.000 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.

01:00:02.000 And I couldn't believe it.

01:00:03.000 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.

01:00:13.000 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...

01:00:28.000 Maybe some sort of like some unknown connection that they have to each other, pheromonal connection, psychic connection?

01:00:35.000 Well, pheromones certainly play a role, but mostly everything that I've seen I would ascribe to intelligence and thinking.

01:00:47.000 An observation.

01:00:49.000 Let me tell you a story that really still boggles my mind.

01:00:53.000 My wife and I had gone to Barneo and set up my portable photo studio.

01:00:59.000 We were going to photograph little woolly bats that weigh less than a nickel.

01:01:04.000 Again, tiny, tiny little guys.

01:01:07.000 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.

01:01:13.000 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.

01:01:27.000 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 it just wasn't a good place to take pictures.

01:01:39.000 So we caught this bat, brought it back to my studio, and the first evening I hand-fed it mealworms.

01:01:46.000 Holding it one hand and handing it mealworms with the other.

01:01:50.000 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.

01:02:00.000 It didn't try to go to her.

01:02:02.000 She didn't feed it before.

01:02:04.000 He came to me and started bumping me in the nose. 0.99

01:02:08.000 In fact, I believe you may have a video of that that you can share.

01:02:13.000 He started bumping me in the nose.

01:02:17.000 And I don't know how I so quickly figured it out, but I figured out that he wanted to be fed.

01:02:23.000 He wasn't really attacking me.

01:02:25.000 And so my wife saw this and said, Get your shirt on. 1.00

01:02:32.000 It was really hot, and I didn't have a shirt on.

01:02:35.000 And get your shirt on, and she grabbed the camera. 1.00

01:02:38.000 Watch this bat.

01:02:40.000 He's coming up pestering me to give him a mealworm.

01:02:44.000 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?

01:02:55.000 Wow.

01:02:56.000 So I went and got my shirt on, and it was still doing this.

01:02:59.000 Watch, when I held up my hand, it knew to come and get the mealworm.

01:03:03.000 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.

01:03:13.000 Absolutely mind-boggling.

01:03:15.000 Wow.

01:03:16.000 That's wild.

01:03:17.000 So it just learned.

01:03:19.000 It learned and it remembered you.

01:03:21.000 Yeah.

01:03:23.000 So have you tried other kind of experiments?

01:03:27.000 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.

01:03:36.000 I'm okay, thank you.

01:03:38.000 But there's, you know, they've done all these experiments with crows and found out that crows are incredibly intelligent.

01:03:48.000 Absolutely.

01:03:49.000 Do you think that would be the case with bats as well, that you could get them to do things?

01:03:52.000 Oh, yeah.

01:03:54.000 I don't know what you could get them to do.

01:03:56.000 It would have to be something in line with what they...

01:03:58.000 I can't comment.

01:04:01.000 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.

01:04:10.000 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.

01:04:23.000 This is a big carnivorous bat with a Nearly three-foot wingspan.

01:04:28.000 It's the biggest New World bat.

01:04:29.000 Lives in the tropical America.

01:04:31.000 He was going to test them to see how smart they were.

01:04:36.000 And this is a cool bat.

01:04:38.000 Before I tell you about his test, the parents take turns babysitting.

01:04:43.000 They go out and they hunt and bring food back for the one that stayed and watched the pup.

01:04:48.000 They appear to mate for life.

01:04:50.000 And their carnivores eat everything from...

01:04:54.000 From insects and frogs to rats and parrots.

01:04:58.000 And this is a vampire bat?

01:05:00.000 It's not a vampire bat.

01:05:01.000 It's named Vampire Spectrum because somebody mistook its big teeth and thought that it was a vampire when they named it.

01:05:07.000 And what is it?

01:05:08.000 Want to tell more about this bat?

01:05:10.000 Is that what this is?

01:05:11.000 Is that this kind of bat?

01:05:12.000 No, that is a vampire bat.

01:05:14.000 That is a vampire bat. 0.94

01:05:16.000 That bat is crazy.

01:05:18.000 Play that.

01:05:20.000 It's on a horse, I think.

01:05:22.000 Oh, what a little creep.

01:05:24.000 Well, hang on a minute.

01:05:26.000 Let's stick with one story until we finish.

01:05:29.000 The vampirum spectrum, you know, there's a whole bunch of bats named vampirum with vampire-type names scientifically.

01:05:38.000 Not a single one of them is a true vampire.

01:05:40.000 They're all mistakenly named vampires.

01:05:44.000 So the one I was originally telling you about is not a vampire.

01:05:47.000 It's a carnivore.

01:05:49.000 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.

01:05:58.000 I saw him a year later and said, well, how did your research go?

01:06:03.000 He laughed, shook his head, and said, I gave it up.

01:06:06.000 The bat was smarter than I was. 0.73

01:06:10.000 What was wrong with the test?

01:06:13.000 Why did he say the bat was smarter than him?

01:06:15.000 He would design a test that he thought the bat would have to do it a certain way, and then the bat would find an alternative.

01:06:24.000 Wow.

01:06:25.000 So there's carnivorous bats, there's bats that eat fruit, and then why do we call bats vampire bats?

01:06:33.000 Did we initially think at one point in time they were sucking blood?

01:06:36.000 There are some vampire bats.

01:06:38.000 They're found only in Latin America now.

01:06:40.000 Oh, so they're real?

01:06:41.000 Yeah.

01:06:42.000 We were just looking at a vampire bat a moment ago.

01:06:45.000 Okay, so these guys with the teeth.

01:06:47.000 That's a real vampire bat.

01:06:49.000 And so they actually bite animals and suck their blood? 0.76

01:06:53.000 Lap their blood.

01:06:55.000 What is this that we're looking at?

01:06:57.000 That's the kind of special tongue that a vampire bat has.

01:07:00.000 Oh, whoa.

01:07:02.000 Now, before you get too put off by vampire bats...

01:07:04.000 I'm not put off.

01:07:05.000 I'm excited.

01:07:06.000 Let me point out that these are really sophisticated animals in every way.

01:07:12.000 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.

01:07:23.000 They adopt orphans.

01:07:25.000 These are animals that...

01:07:27.000 Oh.

01:07:28.000 They're always...

01:07:31.000 Now, you didn't get this from my website.

01:07:34.000 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?

01:07:47.000 And it's a vampire.

01:07:48.000 It depends on how you show these bats.

01:07:51.000 They're right there at the bottom.

01:07:52.000 That's a vampire.

01:07:55.000 That one.

01:07:58.000 That's a vampire.

01:08:00.000 He's very cute.

01:08:01.000 And just how you show these animals...

01:08:04.000 Well, you're very defensive, because I don't have a problem with them being vampires.

01:08:07.000 Well, I don't have a problem with...

01:08:10.000 Now, the first one you're looking at that was Lapping Blood.

01:08:15.000 Yes.

01:08:15.000 That was Desmodus rotundus.

01:08:17.000 It's fascinating.

01:08:18.000 I mean, I don't have a problem with it.

01:08:20.000 I think it's really interesting.

01:08:21.000 It's the kind of vampire that causes most of the trouble that gets vampires in trouble in Latin America.

01:08:26.000 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.

01:08:35.000 Okay, so that's what they're causing trouble down in Latin America because there's so many of them? 1.00

01:08:41.000 They're overpopulated because we screwed up the habitat and brought in easy food.

01:08:46.000 Why not?

01:08:46.000 You and I. Someone else did it.

01:08:48.000 Well, we kind of do it because we buy the beef from Latin America.

01:08:53.000 It's a roundabout chain.

01:08:55.000 So these bats that prey on the cattle, do they carry diseases?

01:09:01.000 Are they a problem in some way?

01:09:05.000 Not commonly.

01:09:07.000 You can get rabies from a vampire bat.

01:09:11.000 You can get rabies from any mammal.

01:09:14.000 But rabies has been vastly exaggerated in bats.

01:09:19.000 For example, here in the United States there was a time when people thought that all bats, or most of them, were rabid.

01:09:25.000 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.

01:09:37.000 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.

01:09:45.000 And there's a vaccination you can take that would be 100% effective.

01:09:50.000 Right.

01:09:50.000 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.

01:10:01.000 Sounds like a bit of an exaggeration and maybe taken a bit out of context.

01:10:06.000 Oh, yeah?

01:10:06.000 I heard he died.

01:10:09.000 Well, if you get rabies, you're going to die, but most of the time you will.

01:10:14.000 But take me, for example.

01:10:16.000 I've been studying bats for over 60 years worldwide.

01:10:20.000 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.

01:10:33.000 I have only been bitten when I was handling one, and he bit in self-defense.

01:10:37.000 Did you ever see a rabid bat?

01:10:40.000 Yes.

01:10:40.000 How would you be able to discern whether a bat is rabbit in the wild?

01:10:45.000 I probably couldn't.

01:10:46.000 It would be a good guess, but I'm sure that I have seen a rabid bat.

01:10:52.000 They're not a whole lot with rabies.

01:10:55.000 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.

01:11:04.000 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.

01:11:23.000 We don't really know how many have rabies, but what we can tell you is it's very few.

01:11:29.000 And you can forget disease from bats just about entirely if you just don't go around picking up...

01:11:35.000 You know, if you find a bat where you can handle it in the daytime, it's probably a sick bat.

01:11:40.000 Don't handle it.

01:11:41.000 You leave it alone.

01:11:42.000 You got no problem.

01:11:44.000 They don't attack people.

01:11:45.000 Well, you probably shouldn't be out there handling bats anyway unless you're a bat scientist, right?

01:11:48.000 Well, you shouldn't handle unfamiliar animals.

01:11:51.000 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 US and Canada combined, in the US alone, we lose between 40 and 50 people a year from dog attacks.

01:12:08.000 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. 0.98

01:12:21.000 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.

01:12:29.000 That's a good point.

01:12:30.000 It's all about numbers, right?

01:12:32.000 Yeah.

01:12:32.000 So these vampire bats, do any of them prey on humans?

01:12:40.000 Do any of them try to bite humans and drink the blood of humans?

01:12:44.000 The common vampire, Desmodus rotundus, will bite humans. 0.99

01:12:47.000 But the humans have to be doing something foolish.

01:12:51.000 It's not like if you're camping and you just take a nap in a hammock and a vampire bat comes and bites you? 0.92

01:12:56.000 Well, I've slept plenty of night in a hammock in the rainforest, but never without a mosquito net over me.

01:13:05.000 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.

01:13:16.000 And that's where most of the vampire bats are?

01:13:19.000 They're all limited to Latin America.

01:13:22.000 Really?

01:13:22.000 So this idea of vampire bats being in Romania, like where Dracula lived?

01:13:28.000 The original vampire stories came from tales about horrible behavior in humans.

01:13:34.000 Like Vlad the Impaler?

01:13:36.000 Yeah.

01:13:37.000 But bats, how did they get connected to bats?

01:13:40.000 Do you know the story of the origins of the lore?

01:13:43.000 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.

01:13:52.000 But long before that, the vampire stories and myths had evolved, based on human behavior.

01:14:00.000 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, like, turned into vampires.

01:14:11.000 Yeah, even in Latin America, vampires are a small proportion of the species present.

01:14:17.000 Interesting.

01:14:18.000 So what's the most common bat in the world?

01:14:24.000 That's a hard one to say.

01:14:25.000 The largest colonies we know are free-tailed bats, particularly the species that lives under our Congress Avenue Bridge.

01:14:34.000 Hmm.

01:14:35.000 We have colonies of those that get up to 10, 20 million in one cave.

01:14:41.000 And that opens the discussion for why bats are among the most endangered animals on our planet.

01:14:51.000 But if we have 1.5 million of them living under Congress, how do we say that they're endangered?

01:14:57.000 Well, they're extremely vulnerable.

01:15:00.000 First of all, they're among the least known, most feared, most often needlessly persecuted animals.

01:15:06.000 Secondly, they have very slow reproductive rates.

01:15:10.000 They are programmed to live up to 40 years or more.

01:15:15.000 And that brings up another interesting aspect.

01:15:17.000 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.

01:15:27.000 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.

01:15:39.000 They're also largely immune to things like arthritis and cancer.

01:15:46.000 But they're very vulnerable because they're dependent on long lifespans and slow reproduction.

01:15:52.000 Most bats produce only one pup per year.

01:15:55.000 They aggregate in these huge concentrations.

01:15:58.000 You can get millions in a single cave.

01:16:00.000 And here in the New World...

01:16:03.000 I have personally investigated cases where somebody just put old car tires in a cave entrance, poured kerosene on it, lit it on fire, and killed millions in single incidents.

01:16:19.000 Because bats form the largest, most conspicuous colonies, 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.

01:16:35.000 What is the common reason why people are killing bats?

01:16:37.000 Why someone would go out of their way to do something like that, like light tires on fire to kill them?

01:16:41.000 Fear.

01:16:42.000 Fear.

01:16:43.000 Misconceptions.

01:16:43.000 Right.

01:16:44.000 Yeah.

01:16:45.000 Nobody who fully understood bats would be out there killing them.

01:16:49.000 And when they're lighting these fires, it's just the smoke that's killing the bats?

01:16:53.000 Yeah, toxic smoke a lot.

01:16:57.000 What is this tube that you brought?

01:16:59.000 You said there's something crazy in there.

01:17:02.000 Yeah.

01:17:02.000 I bet you've never seen anything like this on your show before.

01:17:05.000 I bet you're right.

01:17:06.000 What is it?

01:17:08.000 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.

01:17:19.000 This is a Yanomamo Indians arrowhead container.

01:17:25.000 Notice the top of it is made out of ocelot fur, the fur still on the hide on the inside.

01:17:32.000 And if we look in here, this is an arrowhead.

01:17:41.000 Now, that is coated in curare.

01:17:48.000 That's not still lethal because it's very old.

01:17:51.000 I've had it for decades.

01:17:53.000 But when I first got it, if somebody had poked you with it, you'd be dead in a couple minutes. 0.99

01:18:00.000 And that is made specifically to kill humans. 0.99

01:18:03.000 Notice the notches. 0.99

01:18:05.000 Every few inches, you see the three notches?

01:18:08.000 Well, where your thumb, your base thumb is, that's where it fits into the arrow, the shaft.

01:18:15.000 And then when that hits you, It can't just go through and not poison you.

01:18:21.000 It's very clever, like shrapnel into you.

01:18:27.000 So once that arrow hits you, no matter where it hits you, you're going to die because you've got all that shrapnel that's soaked in curare in you.

01:18:35.000 Wow.

01:18:36.000 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?

01:18:57.000 Yeah.

01:18:57.000 Yeah, having my camp attacked by bandits, being hunted by Aborigines that had bad experience with other outsiders and wanted to kill me, being charged by angry elephants,

01:19:12.000 stalked by lions, you name it and I've had it.

01:19:16.000 Tell me about being captured.

01:19:17.000 What happened there?

01:19:19.000 Well, that's a really good story to illustrate the value of being able to make friends, whether you agree with somebody or not.

01:19:29.000 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.

01:19:41.000 And one of the first places we stayed It was high up on a mountaintop in a resort setting where the previous dictator of the country had built this, and when he was thrown out of power, nobody wanted to acknowledge that that was worth anything,

01:19:58.000 so it was just sitting up there with a caretaker.

01:20:00.000 Well, we were allowed to go up there and use it for collecting.

01:20:06.000 It was a beautiful habitat surrounding it.

01:20:12.000 I quickly found out, figured out, that the head caretaker there was actually one of the local communist leaders.

01:20:21.000 And we got to be good friends.

01:20:25.000 And he would laughingly call me his amigo, Yonke, and I'd call him mi amigo, Commie.

01:20:36.000 And, you know, it wasn't very hard to find common ground that neither one of us agreed with everything our governments did.

01:20:45.000 And I got to be such good friends with him that when my boss, Dr. Hanley, 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, 0.58

01:21:03.000 because ours hadn't arrived yet, and I took Dr. Hanley with me looking for bats up in the mountains, and we had the misfortune of running into a secret meeting of communist insurgents.

01:21:15.000 There ensued a wild chase.

01:21:18.000 We were on a muddy, slick road, very narrow one lane, sometimes dropping off 200 feet on one side.

01:21:24.000 It was crazy.

01:21:26.000 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.

01:21:38.000 Wow.

01:21:39.000 So if you were just in an unmarked car.

01:21:42.000 Right.

01:21:42.000 We'd have been in big trouble.

01:21:43.000 At that time, the insurgents were killing an average of 65 police a year on the streets of Caracas.

01:21:52.000 And what did they think you guys were up to?

01:21:56.000 Well, they knew that we were friends of their leader, and their leader knew we were studying bats.

01:22:03.000 But why were they chasing you?

01:22:05.000 Because they didn't know who we were.

01:22:07.000 Right, but what did they think you were doing?

01:22:09.000 Some kind of Yankee spies trying to figure out where they were and how to attack them, probably. 0.78

01:22:15.000 Wow.

01:22:16.000 Is that the most danger you've ever been in on an expedition?

01:22:20.000 Expedition, rather?

01:22:22.000 Probably not.

01:22:23.000 No?

01:22:26.000 One night on the 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 Yanomamo, 1.00

01:22:44.000 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.

01:22:51.000 But if you became friends of one village, at least they wouldn't bother you, and they would view you as useful.

01:22:57.000 So the village that we were staying 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.

01:23:10.000 But I couldn't because it was controlled by a group of Yanomamo that had shot at everybody who had ever gotten near there and shot arrows. 0.98

01:23:20.000 And so I was afraid to go up there to do any collecting.

01:23:24.000 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.

01:23:33.000 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.

01:23:44.000 And we had just parked our dugout canoe on the bank and had gone out into the woods to set nets for bats.

01:23:53.000 When we hear a hundred or so, maybe not a hundred, but a goodly number of Yonamamo men coming down the trail, and we immediately thought,

01:24:09.000 oh my god, we're going to be absolutely dead ducks if they find us.

01:24:13.000 But I did know that they don't usually go after their quarry, they usually wait and ambush.

01:24:20.000 So we hid out in the jungle until about 2 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.

01:24:32.000 And we'll never know whether they were asleep or not because We did get shoved off and got away.

01:24:40.000 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.

01:24:54.000 And I had a Yanomamo and a Maiketitari 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. 1.00

01:25:11.000 Just making jaguar noises.

01:25:13.000 Right, to communicate among themselves.

01:25:16.000 Oh, wow.

01:25:19.000 But I insisted.

01:25:20.000 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.

01:25:28.000 So I didn't really take them very seriously.

01:25:31.000 And I went off with my shotgun.

01:25:33.000 Back then, we were collecting everything from jaguars to mice.

01:25:38.000 And in those days, it was a big macho thing to shoot a jaguar.

01:25:44.000 So I go off with my shotgun to hunt the jaguar.

01:25:48.000 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.

01:25:59.000 I went back and my guys were just ready to actually abandon me and leave me.

01:26:03.000 They were so scared.

01:26:05.000 We didn't even take the nets down.

01:26:07.000 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. 1.00

01:26:19.000 And we probably just got out in time.

01:26:21.000 Woo! 0.99

01:26:23.000 So that's the most danger you've ever been in.

01:26:27.000 I... I don't know.

01:26:29.000 I mean, there was the time I was crawling into a cave 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.

01:26:43.000 So you had to lay perfectly still while the cobra slithered by you?

01:26:47.000 Yeah.

01:26:50.000 And there was a time the river bandits came after us.

01:26:54.000 River bandits?

01:26:55.000 Where was that?

01:26:56.000 That was in Venezuela on the Costa Chiari Canal.

01:27:07.000 We're getting into stories that probably ought to be told at another time when we're not distracting from bats.

01:27:13.000 No, they're fun.

01:27:14.000 We can go back to bats.

01:27:15.000 To put a long story shorter, the Cossicari Canal is the world's longest natural canal.

01:27:23.000 Out in the middle of it, there are just no humans around.

01:27:27.000 And we were camped out there collecting for the Smithsonian.

01:27:31.000 But I carried a lot of small cash to do business when I did come to where there were villages.

01:27:39.000 The small cash was hidden in false bottoms of trunks.

01:27:44.000 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.

01:27:57.000 I had I had known that 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 savanna, and they were going to charge a lot of money because it was risky to the planes.

01:28:25.000 The military to send the money to the Bank of America and Caracas, and then this was a time when you had machine guns at the door of every bank, and I mean it was a dangerous time in the Venezuela period.

01:28:40.000 Well, we pretended to change Christmas gifts, And that's how we got our money into small change and took it back to our hotel.

01:28:53.000 Then we put it in false bottoms of trunks.

01:28:55.000 Then we go out to the frontier.

01:28:57.000 And after a while, the word kind of gets around that these guys can always pay for something.

01:29:03.000 They must have some secret supply of money.

01:29:05.000 So one day we're out at this remote camp, and my Venezuelan helpers, Indians, came running up saying, oh, you know, in Spanish, quedado, the vandal,

01:29:24.000 not vandals, but the robbers are coming.

01:29:30.000 And...

01:29:32.000 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.

01:29:44.000 And so I had just a couple minutes.

01:29:48.000 It's kind of interesting because I was reared to be a conscientious objector.

01:29:54.000 And, you know, didn't believe in fighting and war.

01:29:59.000 And so here we are with the bandits coming armed with – it was kind of interesting.

01:30:08.000 They had old muzzleloader guns that they actually used rocks in – rocks and black powder still to shoot.

01:30:16.000 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?

01:30:28.000 And so I broke out all the guns we had, gave everybody everything from an M1 rifle to a couple double-barreled shotguns, pistols, and got everybody positioned behind rocks and logs. 0.87

01:30:46.000 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. 0.79

01:30:57.000 And they kept coming.

01:30:59.000 And so I finally had everybody show themselves and their guns.

01:31:04.000 And yelled one more time, and the last time I yelled, they were within a meter of hitting the bank. 0.99

01:31:10.000 And at that point, we'd have had to kill them.

01:31:13.000 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. 0.97

01:31:22.000 That ought to be hair-raising.

01:31:23.000 It was!

01:31:27.000 But I learned a lot about my conscientious objector ideas.

01:31:30.000 You were ready to abandon it.

01:31:32.000 Well, I mean, what are you going to do?

01:31:34.000 Are you going to let good people die just because you don't believe in firing a gun at a human?

01:31:39.000 Yeah, that's a good point, right?

01:31:41.000 Yeah.

01:31:42.000 A very important lesson to learn, right?

01:31:44.000 Yeah, it was an important one for me.

01:31:47.000 Boy, you've had some pretty amazing experiences just studying bats around the world.

01:31:52.000 It's been a wild life, I bet, huh?

01:31:55.000 Well, I've never chosen to get myself into big adventures, but...

01:32:00.000 The adventures chose you.

01:32:02.000 One of my all-time favorite things to do is to go places where almost nobody's ever been.

01:32:07.000 Like when I went out to see the Shamitari Indians...

01:32:13.000 I had to hike 46 miles across country from the last Yanamama village to get out there and see them.

01:32:24.000 I just went out there.

01:32:25.000 I mean, I knew it was dangerous.

01:32:27.000 How dangerous, I didn't know.

01:32:29.000 But I just was driven by curiosity.

01:32:33.000 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.

01:32:43.000 And it was just so much fun going out there and experiencing that kind of thing.

01:32:51.000 But I certainly got into the high adventure while I was out there.

01:32:56.000 Yeah, that sounds amazing.

01:32:57.000 How long did it take you to hike 46 miles to get to them?

01:33:01.000 Well, we did it in a day and a half.

01:33:03.000 I had a 40-some pound pack.

01:33:08.000 We went extra fast because...

01:33:11.000 I did not know when we started on the trip that the reason – see, these two shamatari came out to visit our Yanomamo group because they were looking for allies in a battle.

01:33:26.000 They were expecting to be raided by another tribe.

01:33:29.000 And I didn't know this was why they were there.

01:33:33.000 But when I asked through my interpreters, And let me point this out, too.

01:33:39.000 When you watch a movie and they're speaking Pigeon English, you know, there's no such thing as a place where people are really Aboriginal and you're speaking Pigeon English to them. 1.00

01:33:51.000 Everything I said on that whole trip out there had to be translated by me from English to Spanish, and then from Spanish to Maikatari, from Maikatari to Yanamama, and from Yanamama to Shamitari.

01:34:03.000 Oh, my God.

01:34:04.000 Yeah.

01:34:05.000 You can imagine there are a few miscommunications.

01:34:07.000 Oh my God.

01:34:10.000 What year was this that this was happening?

01:34:12.000 This was 1967. Okay, so clearly there's no cell phones, no other ways of communicating.

01:34:19.000 Right.

01:34:20.000 Wow.

01:34:22.000 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.

01:34:31.000 Oh, boy.

01:34:33.000 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, needing guns, and be good in the battle.

01:34:43.000 Oh, boy.

01:34:44.000 And so by the time we got there...

01:34:48.000 Well, we had to camp out along the trail the first night, and we found out that they were expecting an attack.

01:34:59.000 My two guys, I had to have a Yanomamu and a Maiketitari for the translations to go.

01:35:06.000 And incidentally, they knew enough that they wouldn't go.

01:35:11.000 I had a terrible time getting them to go.

01:35:14.000 When I finally convinced them, I had to pay them a month's wages for every day they went out there with me.

01:35:21.000 So that first night, we set up camp by a beautiful stream in the jungle.

01:35:27.000 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.

01:35:42.000 And so they got suspicious, went and checked, and found that they were worried about being attacked.

01:35:50.000 And they were leaving us out on the trail to be the bait.

01:35:54.000 But the next day, we arrived out there.

01:35:59.000 And my Maiketitari guide had experienced, he had been in a Yanomamo village during an attack once.

01:36:07.000 And so he, since we knew they were thinking of being attacked any time, he instructed me what to do if we were attacked.

01:36:15.000 And he said, you know, right off, you know, play dead.

01:36:22.000 And we were thinking that the attack might come at night.

01:36:26.000 And sure enough, the very first night we're there, I mean, talk about scary experiences.

01:36:32.000 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 hikura, the devils, out. 1.00

01:36:45.000 And they were going around the— Chase the devils out?

01:36:47.000 Right.

01:36:48.000 What do you mean?

01:36:48.000 They believed that everything was attributable to spirits.

01:36:51.000 Even malaria?

01:36:53.000 Yeah.

01:36:54.000 There were good spirits and bad spirits.

01:36:57.000 They hadn't evolved to think of one god and one devil.

01:37:01.000 There were just a lot of spirits with good ones and bad ones.

01:37:05.000 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.

01:37:16.000 So what drugs were they getting high on?

01:37:19.000 Ebon.

01:37:20.000 It's a powder that they – I'm trying to think what they – they make it from a vine, I believe.

01:37:26.000 And what is the psychedelic substance in this drug?

01:37:28.000 They blow it up their noses.

01:37:30.000 Oh, okay.

01:37:30.000 If you go to my website, there's a place on the website where you can – I'm trying to remember.

01:37:39.000 We can tell you later exactly how to get to it.

01:37:42.000 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.

01:37:48.000 You can see them blowing the dope up their nose, and 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.

01:37:59.000 He tried to attack and kill you because you were taking pictures?

01:38:01.000 Right.

01:38:02.000 Napoleon, the famous anthropologist, had warned me never to get around them when they were taking dope, but I couldn't resist.

01:38:10.000 So is this stuff like an amphetamine?

01:38:12.000 Like, what is this stuff they're blowing up their nose?

01:38:14.000 I don't know.

01:38:15.000 I never tried any of it.

01:38:17.000 I'm sure that if Napoleon was still alive, he could tell you what it was.

01:38:20.000 Did you get tempted to try it?

01:38:22.000 No.

01:38:22.000 No?

01:38:25.000 They're out there tripping in the woods, and you're not like, what are you doing?

01:38:28.000 So anyway, that first night...

01:38:32.000 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.

01:38:43.000 And I'm hearing those things go thunk into the side of the, you know, we're sleeping under lean-tos, is how the village has made a big circle of lean-tos.

01:38:53.000 I would hear an arrow go thunk.

01:38:56.000 Poison arrows.

01:38:57.000 Poison arrows.

01:38:57.000 In the area where you're sleeping, because these people are seeing things out there.

01:39:01.000 And I'm scared shitless.

01:39:03.000 Oh, boy.

01:39:04.000 And so I'm laying there in the middle of that, when all of a sudden...

01:39:09.000 Is that them?

01:39:10.000 Yeah.

01:39:12.000 So this is them blowing the snuff up their nose.

01:39:15.000 You can see all this actually in videos on my website.

01:39:19.000 I was trying to find it.

01:39:20.000 I just couldn't find it.

01:39:22.000 Where is it at on your website?

01:39:25.000 It's a video gallery.

01:39:26.000 I was trying to get through it.

01:39:28.000 Look under...

01:39:29.000 Do you have a search area?

01:39:32.000 Bat Research, Venezuela.

01:39:35.000 Or, if you look under Venezuela, I'm almost sure you'll find it.

01:39:39.000 You were on TV with David Letterman in 1984 talking about bats?

01:39:43.000 Right.

01:39:43.000 Wow.

01:39:44.000 That's pretty crazy.

01:39:46.000 Let's go to that.

01:39:50.000 Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the second half hour of our telecast tonight.

01:39:55.000 Tomorrow on this program, you're going to meet Gary Burton.

01:39:57.000 Do you know Gary Burton, Paul?

01:39:59.000 Not personally, but I'm looking forward to meeting him and playing with him.

01:40:03.000 He's a wonderful jazz vibraphonist.

01:40:06.000 He will be playing with the band.

01:40:07.000 There's a funny story about that.

01:40:09.000 I shared the green room that night with Zsa Zsa Gabor and John Cleese.

01:40:14.000 Ah, wow.

01:40:15.000 ...tour of China.

01:40:17.000 Who asked for it? 1.00

01:40:18.000 Stupid Petricks. 1.00

01:40:19.000 The list goes on... 1.00

01:40:20.000 Now, this is an okay show.

01:40:24.000 I don't like this random whining.

01:40:32.000 I'll come up there and teach you people a lesson.

01:40:38.000 All right.

01:40:39.000 Well, we got to...

01:40:40.000 Oh, and the night's still young.

01:40:42.000 We, uh...

01:40:43.000 John Cleaves will be out here a little bit later and my next guest, I'll introduce him right now.

01:40:47.000 He is the curator of mammals at the Milwaukee Public Museum and also the founder of an organization called Bat Conservation International.

01:40:56.000 He has spent 20 years studying bats and feels that they don't get the respect they rightfully deserve.

01:41:03.000 Please welcome Dr. Merlin Tuttle.

01:41:08.000 Look at you!

01:41:09.000 Hi, Doctor.

01:41:10.000 How are you?

01:41:11.000 Nice to see you, sir.

01:41:12.000 Have a seat.

01:41:14.000 All young and handsome?

01:41:16.000 You're from Milwaukee?

01:41:16.000 Right.

01:41:17.000 Everything all right in Wisconsin?

01:41:18.000 Just fine.

01:41:19.000 You're a brave man having me and bats on right after Ava Gabor.

01:41:24.000 Well, how so?

01:41:27.000 Well, you know, this is only the middle of your show.

01:41:32.000 You know what would happen if one of these guys got out?

01:41:34.000 No.

01:41:35.000 Would it be crazy in here?

01:41:36.000 We asked the audience.

01:41:37.000 I don't know how many would stay.

01:41:38.000 Yeah.

01:41:39.000 Now, that's true.

01:41:41.000 I'm scared silly of bats, and probably most people who know nothing about them are also frightened of bats.

01:41:46.000 Now, is there any real reason to be worried about bats?

01:41:49.000 Actually, not at all.

01:41:51.000 It's very simple.

01:41:52.000 No, it's okay.

01:41:53.000 We get it.

01:41:54.000 That's you.

01:41:55.000 Yeah.

01:41:56.000 Is it weird?

01:41:58.000 Looking at you from a long time ago?

01:42:01.000 I had an interesting experience with Gabor and John Cleese.

01:42:07.000 He tried to get her interested in bats.

01:42:11.000 He asked her and she came in if she liked animals and she said, oh, I love animals.

01:42:16.000 And he said, oh, let me show you.

01:42:17.000 Dr. Tuttle here's got bats.

01:42:20.000 And, oh, my God, she just liked they had a fit. 1.00

01:42:23.000 And so he thought, well, she just doesn't know what they're like.

01:42:26.000 And he tried to show her a picture that I had of a cute bat.

01:42:29.000 And then she threatened to sue him because she was going to have nightmares for a month.

01:42:33.000 And if she did, she was going to sue his pants off.

01:42:36.000 She was going to sue him if she had nightmares?

01:42:38.000 Right.

01:42:41.000 I did notice it said that...

01:42:44.000 That I had just founded Bat Conservation International.

01:42:47.000 I did found Bat Conservation International, and 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 nonprofits or even corporations.

01:43:02.000 Over time, the directors sometimes diverge in their priorities from what the founder wants to have, and You get pushed out.

01:43:12.000 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.

01:43:21.000 What did they want to do?

01:43:23.000 Well, it started, I think, with you're too old to lead anymore.

01:43:30.000 You're 60 years old.

01:43:31.000 We need to find the next leader.

01:43:35.000 And obviously I wasn't too old.

01:43:37.000 I've done a pretty damn good job of founding Merlin Tuttle's bat conservation.

01:43:42.000 And we're doing very well.

01:43:44.000 They were just trying to take over.

01:43:48.000 Assume the rains.

01:43:49.000 Right.

01:43:50.000 Yeah.

01:43:51.000 And so I just wanted to be clear that that's not where I'm at.

01:43:55.000 If somebody wants to find me or learn more about what I do, I'm at MerlinTuttle.org is the organization.

01:44:04.000 Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation is where I am supported and where I do all my work these days.

01:44:10.000 So what do you do these days?

01:44:12.000 Like, what are you up to now?

01:44:13.000 Like, how much more bat work is there to be done? 0.97

01:44:17.000 An enormous amount.

01:44:19.000 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.

01:44:28.000 I've gotten millions of bats protected in many other places, got a national park in Samoa.

01:44:34.000 But right now, bats are in big, big trouble.

01:44:43.000 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.

01:44:57.000 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.

01:45:09.000 Right now, one of my biggest concerns is to 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,

01:45:30.000 photographs, and other things remains available to help others long after I'm dead.

01:45:38.000 I know I'm not going to live forever.

01:45:41.000 I'm 81. I've got Parkinson's, but I'm still going great.

01:45:46.000 And I'm hoping to go great until I'm 90. I love what I do.

01:45:51.000 And I love helping both people and bats, and that's what makes me successful.

01:45:56.000 I'm not just animals have rights, step aside.

01:46:00.000 I'm trying to solve problems for people, help people live in a better world with healthier...

01:46:06.000 Surroundings, and in doing that I'm helping bats.

01:46:10.000 But 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.

01:46:29.000 But I was thinking over breakfast this morning, all would have to happen is People listening right now give even a couple dollars a piece, and we'd have the endowment that it would take to make a huge difference for bats, 0.73

01:46:47.000 for people, and make an old man damned happy. 0.69

01:46:50.000 Well, maybe we could do that.

01:46:52.000 So what is the website that they should go to?

01:46:54.000 Is it your website?

01:46:56.000 Yes.

01:46:56.000 MerlinTuttle.org?

01:46:58.000 That's right.

01:46:59.000 And there's a very clear donate link up there?

01:47:03.000 There it is.

01:47:05.000 Donate.

01:47:05.000 Far right side.

01:47:07.000 Inspiring bat conservation worldwide.

01:47:09.000 And Merlin, do you have social media that people can go to as well?

01:47:13.000 Yes, we do.

01:47:15.000 I'm sorry I'm not our social media person, and at my age, I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to social media.

01:47:22.000 It's MerlinTuttleBats, and it's on Instagram.

01:47:25.000 And as of right now, it has 25,000 followers.

01:47:28.000 So hopefully we'll get you a lot more than that, get people to pay attention.

01:47:32.000 Well, I really, really appreciate, Joe, your having me on and getting this exposure for bats.

01:47:39.000 Well, I'm a curious person, and you're a fascinating guy, and your work has been really amazing.

01:47:43.000 It's very cool to check it out.

01:47:46.000 Oh, here's the video.

01:47:47.000 Yeah, that's from my website.

01:47:49.000 This is you from 1966 to 1967, Adventures of a Real Batman.

01:47:53.000 And so this is you with the—this is the Yanomami?

01:47:57.000 Yeah, this guy is, he's just blown dope up his nose.

01:48:02.000 Now, he's higher than the kite here and he's he's yelling so loud I don't want to do it because it hurt my throat.

01:48:12.000 But he's trying to scare the demons out of the village.

01:48:19.000 And he's naked.

01:48:20.000 Yeah.

01:48:21.000 Well, I mean, that's the way it goes.

01:48:22.000 And you notice he's got a string around his waist that's tying his foreskin up.

01:48:26.000 If that ever breaks, they act as though you would if you were in town and you lost all your clothes.

01:48:34.000 Somehow that's leaving them naked if that string breaks.

01:48:37.000 So it's just the foreskin pressed up against his body? 0.89

01:48:41.000 Tied.

01:48:42.000 And there you see, blowing the dope up the nose, how they do it.

01:48:46.000 And, boy, so what is this stuff?

01:48:50.000 Like, what's in there?

01:48:51.000 I don't know.

01:48:52.000 I wasn't about to try it.

01:48:54.000 What is it called again?

01:48:54.000 E-B-E-N-E. Yeah, E-B-E-N-E is how I'm finding it spelled.

01:48:57.000 And what is in there?

01:48:59.000 What's in that stuff?

01:49:01.000 Doesn't say.

01:49:02.000 Yeah, let's Google that.

01:49:03.000 I tried.

01:49:05.000 Hallucinogenic plant form is always really good.

01:49:07.000 Interesting.

01:49:07.000 I'll try again, but...

01:49:12.000 Well, it wasn't really recreation, I don't think.

01:49:15.000 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.

01:49:31.000 And in 1967, no internet, so there's really no way to know about these people other than to be there, right?

01:49:38.000 That's right.

01:49:38.000 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?

01:49:48.000 So here it is.

01:49:49.000 What does it say?

01:49:51.000 It says, also known as Yopa, Jopa, Cohoba, Parica, or Calcium Tree.

01:49:58.000 It's a perennial tree of the genus Anandanthera, native to the Caribbean and South America.

01:50:08.000 Da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

01:50:10.000 What's in it?

01:50:10.000 The seeds.

01:50:12.000 Hallucinogenic stuff is all I got to still in here.

01:50:15.000 Oh, dimethyltryptamine.

01:50:17.000 5-MeO.

01:50:18.000 5-MeO, dimethyltryptamine.

01:50:21.000 Bufatine.

01:50:21.000 Oh, wow.

01:50:22.000 There's a lot of good stuff in there.

01:50:23.000 A lot of DMT. Okay, that makes sense.

01:50:26.000 So they were really hallucinating.

01:50:29.000 Oh, yeah.

01:50:29.000 So they were taking an orally or a snuff version, rather, of DMT. Right.

01:50:36.000 Very interesting.

01:50:37.000 All right.

01:50:39.000 Merlin, thank you very much for being here, man.

01:50:41.000 I really appreciate it.

01:50:41.000 And people can get a hold of your books.

01:50:45.000 They're available.

01:50:46.000 The Secret Lives of Bats and the Bat House Guide.

01:50:50.000 And put a bat house in your backyard, people. 1.00

01:50:52.000 Kill some mosquitoes. 0.96

01:50:54.000 Save some bats.

01:50:54.000 And the Secret Lives of Bats isn't just about the Secret Lives of Bats.

01:50:57.000 It's about my adventure studying the secret world of bats.

01:51:01.000 All right.

01:51:02.000 Well, we'll check that out.

01:51:04.000 Thank you, Merlin.

01:51:05.000 Really appreciate it.

01:51:05.000 Well, thank you so much, Joe, for having me on.

01:51:08.000 I've thoroughly enjoyed your good questioner, and I very much enjoy people who are prepared for what they're doing.

01:51:18.000 Well, I enjoy talking to you as well, and I wish you all the best.

01:51:21.000 Thank you.

01:51:22.000 Thank you.

01:51:22.000 All right.

01:51:23.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - January 27, 2023

Joe Rogan Experience #1932 - Merlin Tuttle

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