amazon, would have 100 species of bat. the smallest bat in the world, it is this tiny thing that 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. it has a tongue that is one and a half 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, tube nosed bat,
deadly. one of the big problems in europe and the u.s. used to be wild rabid dogs. 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 rabbid dog and inset it into the bite wound which this was where the term hair of the dog came from. then along came louis pasture. 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,
virus probably came from, it means sars covid 2 probably came from bats and probably southern china. wuhan is 1,000 miles away from the southern sub tropical regions of w the province where they have the greatest risk of jumping from animals to humans. most of the viruses had been in southern china and wuhan is in central china. when she first found out there was a coronavirus outbreak in wuhan, she did initially wonder, is there some chance that it could have come from her lab? the wuhan institute of virology is just a few miles from where many of the first cases were reported. the doctor was facing this mounding pressure. that s very alarming, particularly for those who work within that lab. she and her colleagues immediately isolated the virus, sequentialed it, tested its behavior, and she was very relieved when she discovered
they lick the area to clean and it then they make a divot and they put their jaw in and they lick and drink and pee. it is completely creamy. 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 case of it. if you take a bat that has a weird animal on its nose. you think that s a strange looking adornment, it turns out a lot of bats have food in their mouth when s they re trying to echo locate and it is hard to shout when you have food in your mouth so they hum. that weird animal points the echo location sound where they want it to go. most bats navigate and hundred for food in the dark
in fact no north american bats are known to have covid-19. among bat researchers, there is a concern that humans will give covid-19 to bats. emerging infectious diseases can go both ways. we do know that some other animals can get covid-19. for instance, the tigers at the bronx zoo. for now, most research involving handling of bats across the u.s. has been put on hold because humans are potentially the bigger threat to bats. that s why td ameritrade designed a first-of-its-kind, personalized education center. their award-winning content is tailored to fit your investing goals and interests. and it learns with you, so as you become smarter, so do its recommendations. so it s like my streaming service. well except now, you re binge learning. for a limited time, get up to $800 when you open and fund an account. call 866-300-9417 or visit tdameritrade.com/learn.