morning. we do everything we can to ensure the safety and well being of the animals and we have a basic set of samples we correct. oral swabs, fecal pellets, blood. and we take measurements. over the course of eight months, they sampled caves all over southern china and then took them back to the lab. it really took better part of eight years of consistent and persistent sampling, testing different horseshoe bat populations around, until we finally found the missing link we were looking for. that link was a bat virus genetically connected to sars. capable of jumping directly from bats to humans. that was the nail in the coffin for us in terms of this coming from bats. dr. xi told us bat-borne viruses will cause more
the smallest bat in the world, it is this tiny thing in thailand that weighs less than a penny. the biggest bat in the world has more than a six-foot wing span. there is a bat that lives in the cloud forests of ecuador that has the longest tongue of any mammal. this thing has a tongue that is 1 1/2 times the length of its body. if you stick your arm straight out in front of and you imagine your tongue could touch your fingers, it is three times that long so it can get into a flower to pollinate. so relative to its body size, if i stick my arm out, if my tongue could be to the end of my arm, this bat s tongue would go two more arms? that s right. there are a number of cute bats including one dubbed the panda bat. and another, cocobo rossi,
then they make a little divot with their front teeth, and they put their jaw up against that hole and they lick and drink and pee. it is completely creepy. who else does that? i ll tell you who else. a serial killer does that. however, vampire bats don t kill their victims. they just act like a mammal sized parasite. i ve heard you say that the weirdness of bats was scientifically interesting to you. the faces of bats is a perfect example of that. if you take a bat that has a weird flap on its nose, you think that s a strange looking adornment, it turns out a lot of bats have food in their mouth when they re trying to echo locate and it is hard to shout when you have food in your mouth so they hum. that weird flap actually points echo location sound where they want it to go. most bats navigate and hunt for food in the dark using echo location in which they emit sound from their nose and mouth and then listen for the echo
been plummeting all because of an outbreak they ve been fighting of a disease called white nose syndrome. it is a cold loving fungus that grows on the bat when the bats are hibernating in the wintertime. unfortunately this has affected in the order of of a dozen different species of north american bats. in some cases, populations have declined over 90%. that s huge. yes. it is a terrible let the to bats and ironically, it is a disease that we brought to bats. the fungus that causes this disease is identical to fungus that naturally occurs in europe. the thought is it was accidentally brought over by people. it was accidentally introduced into bat caves. so while fighting a virus that potentially came to us from bats, bats are fighting a disease that potentially came from us. in fact no north american bats are known to have covid-19. among bat researchers, there is a concern that humans will give
ancient medical experts developed a lot of odd ideas about how you would cure rabies. they used to believe that one way to stop rabies from killing you was to take a hair from the tail of the rabid dog and insert it into the bite wound, and this is the origin of the phrase hair of the dog which we talk about as hangover treatment. then along came louis pasteur, he had been working on a vaccine for years and eventually tried to try on it a young boy who had been bitten by a rabid dog. the vaccine worked. most of the cases in the united states do come from bats. but the risk is low. so unless you see a bat behaving very strangely, moving around during the day in a funny way, more than likely, the bat won t be a risk to an individual.