S3E2: Flying Foxes

In this episode Amanda Bunten-Walberg tells Claudia all about bats, animals who have historically been persecuted as threats to biosecurity. Hoping to challenge this reductive way of understanding bats, Amanda talks about flying foxes, large fruit bats, noting how incredibly social and relatable they are. This content was originally aired in Season 5 of The Animal Turn Podcast.

 Featured: 

• Bioethics with Jeff Sebo on The Animal Turn.
• Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril by Deborah Bird Rose 
• Bat by Tessa Laird.

Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, producer and host 
• Amanda Bunten-Walberg, co-host
• Christiaan Mentz, sound editor and producer 
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Learn more about the team here. 

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• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
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Sponsor:

Thank you to the sponsors of the fifth season of The Animal Turn podcast, “Animals and Biosecurity,” where this animal highlight was originally aired 16 August 2022. They are: 

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Biosecurities Research Collective
The Biosecurities and Urban Governance Research brings together scholars interested in biosecurity.

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The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:45 Bats
• 4:36 Australian Flying Foxes
• 11:38 Credits

Transcript

00:00 - Introduction 

• Welcome to Season 3 of The Animal Highlight, extracted from Season 5 of The Animal Turn Podcast (focused on Animals and Biosecurity). 
• We are focused on the animals that are caught up in biosecurity dramas. 
• My co-host this season is Amanda Bunten-Walberg who at the time of the recording was a PhD candidate at Queen’s University interested in questions related more-than-human ethics especially in contagion contexts, using bats and COVID19 as her focus.  
• Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) and the Biosecurities and Urban Governance Research Collective sponsored the season of The Animal Turn where this content was extracted from. 
• This season had several technical and sound issues.
• This episode considers bats, more specifically flying foxes

02:45 - Bats

• Their lives are deeply implicated in bioethics.
• Bats have been widely blamed for COVID-19 and are facing escalating persecution
• Many bat species have also been pushed to the brink of extinction due to the anthropogenic spread of White-nose syndrome, deadly climate change induced heat waves, and large-scale habitat destruction.
• In making this highlight drew heavily from the posthumously authored book Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril by Deborah Bird Rose and Bat by Tessa Laird. 
• They are part of the second-most diverse order of mammalia on the planet—Chiroptera—and they can range in size from human-length wingspans to roughly the size of bumblebees (Laird 2018, 7).  
• Microbats are primarily small insect-eaters who use echolocation to navigate and who can be found on every continent, except for Antarctica (Laird 2018, 10).  
• Megabats, or flying foxes, are large fruit-eaters who don’t echolocate, with a few exceptions, and who can be found in Africa, Asia, and Indo-Australia (Laird 2018, 10).  

04:36 - Australian Flying Foxes

• They are intensely social.
• The close bond between mother and baby is perhaps most evident in the fact that mothers carry their young everywhere for the first several weeks of their life, even while flying out at night for food.
• Adult males take out groups of adolescent flying foxes, showing them how to fly, forage, and navigate.  
• Rose quotes the bat researchers and conservationists Hall and Richards as they describe these excursions in relatable detail:
• “They do not have the purpose or direction of adults, and are reminiscent of a group of school kids going home from school and exploring the environment.  Progress is slow as they carry out aerial bombs on each other, explore vegetation and duck from imaginary predators” (26-27).
• Play and learning are do intertwined. 
• Flying fox adults prefer to live in large camps.  At camp, these bats will literally hang out together all day before they fly out to forage for food at night.  
• Flying foxes love eating from trees and shrubs in the Myrtacea Family (30).  Many of these plants produce pollen and nectar at night, and are most receptive to pollination at night, when flying foxes feed
• Rose offers up the following passage that captures some of the magic of this mutualistic and deeply-attuned relationship:
• “In Australia, Eucalypt blossoming takes place sequentially; flying-foxes are readily able to know when trees start to bloom hundreds of kilometers from where they are camping, and so they fly to find the nectar; scientists do not know how they do this.  Parry-Jones reported on a camp of about 80, 000 individuals in New South Wales where on one night in June 1989 almost the whole mob left the camp, flying away to destinations unknown. Where did they go? We don’t know.  Why or how did they all decide to leave on the one night?  We don’t know.” 
• Flying foxes call forth water, rely on it for survival, and also delight in it.  Tim Pearson describes watching flying-foxes belly dip at a lagoon in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden one late afternoon:
• “They skim over the water, get the water on their belly, then fly up to a tree and lick the water off and have a wash in it.  Occasionally you’ll see some belly dipping over the other side in the salt water.  We think it’s because they need a bit of salt…You can tell the ones that are the older bats that really know what they’re doing.  They approach beautifully, flap in and just glide with enough speed, do it perfectly, and fly off.  Some of them have a few goes at it, they don’t quite have the courage to commit.  We’ve occasionally seen very young ones miscalculate and just totally face-plant…One very hot day we saw one juvenile come in and misjudge, and woomph!  His little head popped up and he swam ashore and climbed ashore very wet and obviously a lot cooler.” (27-28).
• I love how this quote captures these astonishing but also relatably clumsy beings as they interact with the water, engaging with it for both practical reasons and for pleasure!
• We often have these conversations at species levels and we need to think more about individual experiences. 
• When it comes to trying to secure the safety of a farm, they make contagion and biosecurity decisions based on an entire flock. 

11:38 - Credits

• Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring the podcast and the Biosecurities and Urban Governance Research Collective for sponsoring the season of The Animal Turn where this content was extracted from. 
• A big thank you to Amanda Bunten-Walberg for co-hosting this season of The Animal Highlight
• This episode was produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and edited by Christiaan Mentz. 
• The logo and episode artwork were created by Rebecca Shen. 
• Show notes compiled by Claudia Hirtenfelder
• Please rate and review wherever you listen.