Stumped by Nature

Professionally, really I am just a wildlife cinematographer, who happens to love bats.  While I have always loved all animals, and have always especially taken a shine to the under-appreciated critters and creepy crawlies, I can't say that I was always obsessed with bats the way I am today. 

Being from Austin, as my early career took off working on documentaries for National Geographic and traveling the world, the only times I ever got asked to stay at home and film something here, it was always either the bats here in Austin at the Congress Avenue Bridge (This was for a BBC David Attenborough series about Mammals - 3mins) or Bracken Cave, the world's largest bat colony, which is just north of San Antonio (there's a 14min scene in Deep in the Heart)

That was my gateway to professional obsession. We've all seen hundreds of films about Lions of the Serengeti, but there are over 1,500 hundred species of bats worldwide!  Our ecosystems would collapse without them, and yet, we rarely see bat stories in wildlife documentaries.  So I saw filming bats as both a professional opportunity and a fun challenge.  

The reason bats don't get the love they deserve and the reason they are so hard to film go hand-in-hand. They are fast, secretive, nocturnal flying creatures. Us humans have a tendency to fear what we don't understand, and what could be more mysterious than these little creatures who are everywhere, but rarely seen by people.   

I'm obsessed with the staggering diversity of bats out there.  Leaf-nosed bats (Phyllostomidae), who are only found in the new world, are one of evolution's fastest experiments in reinvention.  In just the last 25 to 30 million years, from a single ancestor, this family now includes fruit bats, fishing bats, vampire bats, insect hunters, nectar sippers, and even bats specialized in hunting frogs. Few animal groups on Earth pack so much dietary / ecological range into so short an evolutionary span.

And bats are really important to modern medicine!  A lot of misinformation and fear surrounds bats and disease because they have got such incredible immune systems.  Rather than fearing them or blaming them for spreading diseases, which in cases like Covid was disproven, bats need to be studied and celebrated because they could unlock the future of human health!  

Flying is intense behavior, so bats don't suffer inflammation like most other mammals have, which may have led to their ability to harbor viruses and rarely get sick. That probably explains also why some species, like our Mexican free-tails at the bridge and other big Texas bat caves, can live stacked right on top of each other with millions of their neighbors. 

Beyond their immune systems, nectar bats live on a diet of nearly entirely sugar, but they never get diabetes. Vampire bats anti-coagulant saliva has already been used to create drugs that help stroke patients.  Bats rarely get cancer, and live staggeringly long lives for such small animals.  Some bats banded by scientists have been recaptured in the wild 30-40 years later!  Most similarly small mammals like a mouse live 2-3 years. Not only is that a staggeringly long life, but we’re not talking about some toothless, old former matriarch lioness limping around at the ripe old age of 11 or 12 years old.  We're talking 40-year-old bats are out there still flying around all night hunting insects.  It'd be like 90 year old humans running marathons daily.