What You Didn't Know About Bats: Merlin Tuttle (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of ecologist Merlin Tuttle’s talk titled “What You Didn’t Know About Bats” at TEDxUTAustin 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

MERLIN TUTTLE: Thank you. I’m delighted to have this opportunity to share some of what I’ve learned from defending traditionally misunderstood and intensely hated bats. As you’re about to see, they actually rank among our safest and most beneficial neighbors, and they come in a world of amazing surprises.

From the brilliantly colored painted bats of Southeast Asia to Snow White ghost bats of Latin America, even the spectacular spotted bats found right here in Texas, they can be just as cute as any panda, as strange as any dinosaur, or just plain funny. They range in size from giant flying foxes with nearly six foot wingspans, down to tiny bumblebee bats that weigh about the same as a US penny.

Early Interest in Bats

I first learned about bats while exploring a cave near my home in East Tennessee. At age 17, I identified the bats as gray bats, but these bats apparently hadn’t read the books. The books all said that they lived in one cave year round and didn’t migrate, but my bats only came in the spring and fall. That got me very curious.

I convinced my mom to drive me to the Smithsonian, where I could talk to bat experts. And they gave me bands and said, “Why don’t you try to see where they go?” In an amazing turn of good luck, I actually found my banded bats within a couple of months, 100 miles away in another cave. Not surprisingly, when I decided to get a PhD and entered graduate school nearly a decade later, I decided to come back and study the gray bat for my thesis research.

Dramatic Decline in Gray Bats

I was shocked to find that those ceilings were still stained, showing where tens of thousands of these bats had lived previously. Sometimes there would be none at all left. What happened to them? Did they just move to another site? Well, it’s hard to think that when you could look down at the floor and see it covered with skulls and skeletons.

In fact, they had declined so rapidly at that point that America’s leading experts were predicting that the species would soon become extinct. Why? Well, there were news headlines galore claiming that bats were nearly all rabid and would attack people, so no wonder everybody was frightened of having them around. The truth is, bats can occasionally contract rabies just like all other mammals can, but they’re unique in one respect. Even a sick bat almost never becomes aggressive. So for anybody who simply doesn’t try to handle bats, the odds of being harmed by one or contracting any disease are very close to zero.

Changing Attitudes about Bats

When I asked the owner of this cave for permission to study his bats, he gladly agreed. But just as I was going into the cave, he said, “And while you’re there, please kill all you can.” I didn’t argue with him. I simply went ahead and while in the cave, noticed that the floor was littered with colorful wings of potato beetles. I picked up a handful of them, and as I left, I showed him my potato beetle wings, and there was a moment of kind of stunned silence. “You mean those suckers eat my potato bugs?” In the snap of a finger, this man went from bat killer to bat protector. All he needed to know was that the bats were his friends helping him. He grew potatoes nearby.

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Power of Photography and Friendly Approaches

I didn’t always have a convenient show and tell like that to change people’s attitudes, but I did learn the power of photography as well as the power of friendly approaches, which I later would call “winning friends instead of battles.” I was the first to develop the ability to photograph bats in high speed action, showing how they benefited people. Through these photographs, I began to have global influence on millions of people, and it gave me courage to announce that I was going to resign my position at the Milwaukee Public Museum and devote full time to conserving bats.

Now, just about everybody looked at that as a sign of insanity at that time. Nearly everybody hated bats. Magazines from Family Circle to Good Housekeeping were running outrageous scare stories about bats. Virtually everybody hated them. So why would anybody in his right mind decide to devote full time to helping bats? Well, because in reality, we very much need bats. Our own survival can be threatened through their loss because not only are they actually today recognized as the most endangered warm-blooded animals of North America, but we don’t need just a few endangered survivors. We need large numbers because they’re vital to the health of entire ecosystems and economies upon which we ourselves depend.

Importance of Bats

Here in Texas, bats like this actually consume over a hundred tons of insects, mostly pests, each night, and their conservatively estimated value is $1.4 billion annually in protection of crops here in Texas. Backyard bat house bats have been well documented to consume 15 species of mosquitoes, nine of which can transmit West Nile virus.

Bats are also extremely important pollinators. These are pollinating the agave in Mexico, from which billions of dollars of mezcal and tequila are produced. Bats that consume fruit are equally important. They are by far the world’s most important re-seeders of cleared areas in need of reforestation. And as you know, this is a key element in slowing global climate change. We’re losing our forests and we need more foresters.

Winning Friends Instead of Battles

Now, I want to talk a little bit about my experience in using this kind of motto, “winning friends instead of battles.” “Winning friends instead of battles” has become my battle cry. And to illustrate how effective it’s been, the gray bat whose extinction was predicted not long ago, has now—we’ve recovered millions, based almost entirely on friendly education of cavers and cave owners.

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One of my favorite stories comes from American Samoa, where in the mid 80s, flying foxes were almost there, right at the edge of extinction from commercial hunting.

Friends and colleagues who love these bats and never want to see another one shot were horrified when they found out that I had actually gone to Samoa and made friends with the commercial hunters. I went out with them as an observer on hunts. I actually helped them develop game laws that would ensure that there were always some left to hunt in the future—bag limits, seasons, things like that.

How in the world could a bat conservationist do such things? Well, in the end, because of my approach to winning friends, these guys, as they learned more about the value of the bats actually on their own, declared an entire end to hunting flying foxes. And they then joined me in gaining a national park that now protects some of the world’s most important biodiversity.

Creativity in Bat Conservation

Norma Monfort in the Philippines contacted me urgently because the government had just informed her that her bat cave was about to be destroyed in an agricultural expansion project. This one picture won the day for her. I went out there and showed the mayor and local community leaders how these bats pollinated durian. Durian is the most prized fruit of the Philippines. I explained that her 2 million bats could easily pollinate 10 million or more durian in a single night. There was no question what was going to happen after that. Within the hour, I was seated with the mayor and community leaders, signed a successful petition to have the site declared critical protected wildlife habitat.

It’s not always that easy. It can require some real creativity. In northern Michigan, when we learned unexpectedly of the existence of one of America’s largest hibernating bat colonies in the old Mill Hill mine, community and mining company executives wouldn’t even return our phone calls when we became concerned about the fact these bats were about to be buried and killed in a safety closure.

So what should I do? Well, I could have declared the Endangered Species Act, sued them. I could have gone to the media and embarrassed them. But instead I went to tell their children about bats. I got the school principal at the local elementary school to give me some time to introduce the children to bats. Obviously they loved bats. I baited them with “if they would just get their parents to bring them down to the local library a couple nights later, I would show them every kind of cool bat under the sun.”

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We were all pretty amazed when close to 200 people showed up for my talk. I never once said, “You need to protect these bats.” I simply told them about bats and their values. After that talk ended, so many people volunteered labor, materials, expertise that at the dedication ceremony—and here we’re dedicating a structure that protects both bats and people—at that ceremony, the head of the Cleveland-Cliffs Mining Company public relations section got up and reported that they had saved 90% of their anticipated closure costs because of help from conservationists. Not only that, but they’d gotten the best PR in their history.

So they, on their own, voluntarily offered to organize and host a national symposium for mining companies on how to benefit from partnering with bat conservationists. Largely as a result of that symposium, we actually saved more than a thousand caves—rehabilitated, you know, stabilized for the protection of bats. In that effort, we actually saved millions of bats, provided habitat for their long-term future survival, something that could never have happened had we actually declared war on the company for not returning phone calls.

Congress Avenue Bridge Bats

My next big challenge came from Austin, Texas, where when hundreds of thousands of bats began to occupy the newly created crevices beneath the Congress Avenue Bridge, they made national media publicity about how thousands of rabid bats were invading and attacking the citizens of Austin. I decided to come down and have a look at what was going on. This poster pretty much illustrates the mood of Austin in those days.

Looking around, I decided that this was a golden opportunity to once and for all disprove these claims of bats being dangerous. This was a golden opportunity to show that bats could be safe and invaluable neighbors. So I relocated myself and my small organization, a staff of one, to Austin, and I started showing people bats close up and explaining what they’re really like. And today, as we all know, these bats are world famous. They attract more than 10 million tourist dollars every summer, consume tons of insect pests every night, and have never harmed anyone.

Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation

In 2014, I founded Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation. Our next big objective is to create a world education center here in Austin, where people can come and learn from the Austin experience—the power of winning friends instead of battles, the power of living in harmony with nature, and the value of accepting bats as invaluable helpers. Thank you very much.

What You Didn’t Know About Bats: Merlin Tuttle (Transcript)