Joe Rogan Experience #1932 - Merlin Tuttle

Merlin Tuttle has studied bats for over 60 years across 45 countries and built the world's largest collection of bat photographs. He recounts how he turned Austin from wanting to eradicate its bridge bats into celebrating them as a tourist and pest-control treasure, and explains why bats are vital seed dispersers and pollinators rather than the rabid menaces of myth. He shares the science of bat intelligence, echolocation, co-evolution with flowers, and the exaggeration of rabies fears. Throughout, he champions a conservation philosophy of winning friends instead of battles, illustrated by wild field stories from the Venezuelan jungle and South Pacific. Now 81 and living with Parkinson's, he is focused on preserving his legacy and raising an endowment for bat conservation.

• In early-1980s Austin, planted news stories and pest-control/health officials warned that bats under the Congress Avenue Bridge were mostly rabid and attacking citizens, fueling eradication petitions.
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• By convincing Austin not to eradicate its up-to-1.5-million bats, those bats now bring millions of tourist dollars each summer and eat tons of crop and yard pests nightly.
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• Tuttle's core conservation philosophy: win friends instead of battles by listening to opponents and helping both people and bats.
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• He led the creation of a national park in American Samoa by befriending the commercial bat hunters, who then self-imposed a five-year hunting moratorium.
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• Bats have social systems strikingly similar to primates, whales and elephants, recognizing each other and staying together across decades.
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• Tuttle was pushed out of Bat Conservation International, the org he founded and led for nearly 30 years, after directors decided he was too old to lead.
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• At 81 with Parkinson's, his next goal is raising an endowment to preserve his photo and information legacy for bat conservation.
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• Brazilian free-tailed bats can fly thousands of feet up and travel up to 100 miles an hour with a tailwind.
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• Bat wing skin has been rated 19 times tougher than a surgeon's glove, and swelling around a broken wing can act like a cast.
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• The largest bats, flying foxes, have wingspans approaching six feet, while the bumblebee bat of Thailand weighs about a third of a U.S. penny.
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• Brazil-nut-like seed pods evolve heavy armor plating to admit only bats, the best long-distance seed dispersers and pollinators in the world.
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• It took Tuttle 11,000 photographs to capture a single shot of a bat pollinating a Mucuna flower, an effort National Geographic backed with roughly $70,000.
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• Mucuna flowers have spring-loaded anthers that fire pollen onto a bat's rump, and different flower species deposit pollen on specific body parts to avoid hybridization.
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• Only one or two people a year die of bat-borne rabies in the U.S. and Canada combined, versus 40-50 deaths a year from dog attacks in the U.S. alone.
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• Bats can live 40+ years and are largely immune to arthritis and cancer, but slow reproduction (usually one pup per year) makes them highly vulnerable.
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• Tuttle personally investigated cases where people killed millions of bats in single incidents by burning kerosene-soaked tires in cave entrances.
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• The Yanomami snuff 'ebene', made from a tree containing DMT and 5-MeO-DMT, blowing it up the nose to chase out spirits.
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