Going Microbatty

Possibly also Macrobatty

Y’all, I’m sick as a dog, with about 20 things to say and absolutely no ability to put them into any kind of order.

(It’s not COVID, or at least not according to the rapid tests I’ve been taking. I’m considering getting a PCR test but honestly it’s probably a bug that saw an opening — in between packing up the house and driving back and forth to Shenandoah (which I’ll talk about some other time) and so on, some wily little stomach bug figured I was looking pretty receptive to some attachment proteins and let me tell you it binded the hell out of the receptors on the surface of the host cell. I mean to tell you, it just absolutely clobbered the host cell and did not let go, they were besties at first sight, it is on there like white on rice. I don’t know what it’s going to take to break up the absolutely riotous love affair that is right now taking place between this virus and my host receptors, but let me tell you, they are absolutely doing it up in there. Busby Berkeley is in charge of the choreography. Hopefully, tea and sleep will slow them down a little.)

Photo by Trevor Gerzen on Unsplash

At any rate, bats. Bats are one of the things I wanted to mention to you, because my niece recently pointed out to me something I didn’t know about bats, which is that there are two categories of them: microbats and macrobats, and all bats fall into one of these two categories.

(This is one of my nieces on Michael’s side. And if she thinks, after 15 years of aunting her, I’m ever going to be anything but her aunt and she’s ever going to be anything but my niece — assuming she still wants to be — she has another think coming.)

At any rate, back to bats. The Tolga Bat Hospital gives this frankly batty explanation of the difference between the two bat categories:

There are two different classifications for bats. In the first, bats can be divided into two groups, based on morphology and behaviour. These groups are Microchiroptera (microbats) and Megachiroptera (megabats) and echolocation is the crucial difference between them. Some microbats are larger than some megabats so size is not always a reliable difference. All microbats rest with the wings folded along their forearms. Megabats do this too but often have their wings wrapped across their bodies. Megabats all eat fruit and/or nectar, but some also occasionally eat insects. Most microbats eat insects, but some also eat fruit and nectar. Some microbats of course are also carnivorous, or eat fish, spiders or blood. It is difficult to find any absolute difference between the two groups other than echolocation. Even then, there is a megabat, the Egyptian fruit bat Rousettus egyptiacus that uses a type of echolocation within its cave roosts. It does this by clicking its tongue, not the larynx echolocation method of microbats, where air passes over the vocal cords.

I mean, maybe it’s just the fact that I can’t sit up for any length of time or keep down my food, but this makes no sense. Scientists, do better.(1) There are two categories of bats, microbats and macrobats, and the difference between them is not size? You do realize you’re just fucking with us, right? Oh, and echolocation — which is the difference between them — isn’t always the difference between them. Come on now.

Despite all this, the bats themselves are fantastic. I mean their faces are just … even in a fevered state, I could never come up with such faces. MC Escher could not trace the line leading to infinity from the ridges on their faces.

Photo by Nils Bouillard on Unsplash

Which is why I’m glad that, after four decades of not seeing the Hills’ horseshoe bat, scientists led an expedition into Rwanda and saw two.

A few days into the expedition, at 4 a.m., the researchers drove the hour and a half from where they were staying, outside the park, to Uwinka, a watershed within Nyungwe where the original two Hills’ horseshoe bats had been found. At the harp trap, they started pulling bats from the bag, and, as Frick later whispered to me, “We found treasure.” The small, plump, furry bat that Webala pulled out looked sort of like other horseshoe bats, Frick said, but “the facial features were exaggerated to the point of comical.” The bat’s face was alien, an evolutionary screwball fit for the dark, featuring tiny button eyes, an inflated horseshoe-shaped snout, and, for a nose, a vulval sculpture of rippled and jutting skin flaps. Each pyramidal ear was striped, and larger than the bat’s face. “We were definitely really excited,” Frick said, “but also kind of doubtful. It almost seemed too easy.”

It’s slipped into the middle of the article, but this short section on the importance of indigenous knowledge for keeping track of rarer animals stood out to me:

Re:wild and the I.U.C.N.’s Species Survival Commission currently know of more than two thousand lost species, not scientifically documented in the wild for more than ten years, with no individuals under human care. Searches often begin with discussions with local and indigenous people. But the forces that are leading to biodiversity loss “also relate to the loss of indigenous and local knowledge about species,” Pamela McElwee, a human-ecology professor at Rutgers University, said. 

It’ll be a little while before I feel well enough to go back to the big dog park around here, Lincoln Park. I love going there at dusk, when people begin feeling the whisper of very fast wings around them and ask each other, “What kind of bird was that? Maybe a robin, coming back to roost?”

I’m no expert naturalist, but at that time of night, I’m almost certain it wasn’t a robin — it was a bat. There’s hundreds of them, maybe thousands in and around the park. It’s something, to sit in the sparse grass worn down by dog paws and strollers and sneakers, and play witness to little natural display that’s somehow a little secret, to see something that happens every day, if only we would look.

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(1) Unless, scientists, you are using the taxonomy of bats to tell us that we live in a chaotic world in which we can, and should, try to impose order but that, in the end, that effort is ultimately undone by the entropic nature of the universe and thus it is impossible to accurately categorize living beings. In that case, carry on.