Today, we meet some beleaguered animals that should
be our friends. The University of Houston's College
of Engineering presents this series about the
machines that make our civilization run, and the
people whose ingenuity created them.
Diane Ackerman writes books
and poetry about the sensate world around us --
titles like A Natural History of the
Senses. A sensate joy in the ambient world
draws her, relentlessly, to the problem of
preserving both her surroundings and the pleasure
she finds in them. Take her article, "In Praise of
Bats."
Saving a vanishing species, she points out, is a
lot easier when the species is winsome like the
panda. Pandas eat huge amounts of bamboo and
convert it to manure. They're strongly woven into
their ecology. Yet we're moved to save them, not
for the good of the ecosystem, but because they're
cute.
Then there are bats. Bats are mammals, not birds,
and they come in a vast variety of species -- all
the way from the bumblebee bat, the smallest known
mammal, to the so-called flying fox with a wingspan
that can reach six feet. Bat wings are actually
long webbed fingers on the bat's forelimbs. Bats,
who live 20 or 30 years, and breed only once a
year, use those articulate, prehensile wings to
cuddle their young.
Our mythology is hard on bats. And I don't just
mean Dracula stories. Take the myth of rabies --
that bats carry rabies without being affected by
it. That's simply false. Bats can catch rabies, but
when they do, they soon die. Anyway, North American
bats can hardly break our skin with their tiny
teeth --they don't attack humans. Stand in the path
of a flock and they'll pass by without touching
you.
Still, until recently, public health officials
egged on the extermination of bats. Communities,
like peasants in Frankenstein movies, have carried
torches into caves and burned out the bats. Many
species have been exterminated and the rest are
dwindling.
The irony lies in our huge debt to these harmless
creatures. They are voracious eaters of insects.
Kill off a local bat, who eats 600 mosquitoes a
night, and the mosquitoes flourish. Bats repopulate
certain forests by spreading seeds and pollinating
plants. Guam's rain forests are under assault
because Guamanians have hunted their fox bats for
food until they're nearly extinct.
So read the record. Read about the balance of
nature. Read about vampire bats who adopt orphaned
baby bats, mate for life, and help out their
friends. Read about cooperative coexistence.
A line pops out of Shakespeare's
Tempest: "On a bat's back I do fly."
Well, perhaps we really do, far more than we
thought. But that's hard to see when we're corroded
by nameless atavistic fears of these fragile
coinhabitants of our fragile Earth.
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Ackerman, D., The Moon By Whale Light.
New York: Random House, 1991, Chapter 1, In Praise of
Bats.
I am indebted to Margaret Culbertson, UH Art and
Architecture Library, for recommending the Ackerman
book and providing me with a copy. For more on
Ackerman's A Natural History of the
Senses, see Episode
955.
For a fine website on bats, see http://www.webb-it.com/bats/
Toward the end of The Tempest,
Ariel sings, while he helps to
dress Prospero,
Where the bee sucks,
there suck I:
There I couch
when owls do
cry,
On a bat's back
I do fly
After summer merrily.
Image from An Illustrated
Shakspere Birthday Book, 1883
From the 1832 Edinburgh
Encyclopaedia
Representation of a Vampire Bat
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard.
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