 Okay, I think we can get started. So welcome everyone. My name's Dan Sarowitz. I'm a professor of science and society at Arizona State University and also the editor of issues in science and technology magazine issues to the partnership between ASU and the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. And during the COVID crisis, we have been publishing a series of provocative and interesting perspectives on what's going on, trying to illustrate angles on the crisis and our experience of it that are perhaps less familiar and common. And a few weeks ago, we published a wonderful piece by Merlin Tuttle, today's speaker. I think it was called a viral witch hunt with a question mark. And today's webinar is called our bats really to blame for the COVID-19 pandemic. Just a little bit of background here. Most generally issues in science and technology hosts a series of online and when we can personal events to really expand conversations about science, technology, society and public policy and try to build a community of engaged people who are interested in those issues and interested in engaging and learning from one another. So this is one in an ongoing series of those sorts of events, but also particular to our focus on COVID these days, our understandable focus on COVID these days. And these events focus not just on hearing from an expert with an interesting perspective, but also in getting your involvement in discussions. And so Merlin will talk for a half hour or a little less and then we're gonna open it up for question and answer. And so please either during or immediately after his presentation, if you have questions for Merlin, use the Q and A function, not the chat function, use the Q and A function to communicate those questions to us and hopefully we'll get to a fair number of them. There's a big audience today. We may not get to all of your questions, but we'll do our best. One other process point, we like to use Chatham House rules here. So what that means is this is open to, we don't consider this any sort of a closed meeting. It's open to the public, but we do ask that if anyone, if there's any media out there and you're going to quote from either Merlin or from me or any of the other participants then you please get permission before you do direct attribution. But other than that, we're totally open here. So let me just introduce you very briefly to Merlin Tuttle. I have to say, if one thinks about a perfect name for a baseball player, one might come up with Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays. And if one had to come up with a perfect name for a bat conservationist and ecologist, it might be Merlin Tuttle. And he's been in this game for a long time, a very heartfelt and scientifically driven commitment to protecting a crucial component of global ecosystems, which is bats. And he's written for issues in science and technology in the past. He's really devoted his lifetime to advocating on behalf of bats. And he's going to talk to us today about bats and COVID and shed some light where there's been perhaps a little more heat than is necessary. So let me turn it over to you, Merlin. Thank you very much, Dan. I really appreciate this wonderful opportunity to share my views and defensive bats with hundreds of other people. It's my first time speaking to so many without being able to see any. But before we get into the first question, are bats really to blame for COVID-19 pandemic? I'd like to introduce just a little bit of the background information that we're up against when we defend bats. Just imagine that you're a defense lawyer repairing to defend bats. And you find that you've got to face this kind of pre-trial publicity time. Bats are the number one carriers of disease. National public radio bats are arguably among the most dangerous animals in the world. Wall Street Journal. Where will the next pandemic come from? Likely from bats. I don't think many of you would want to defend any entity that just had that kind of publicity. Yet we need to ask where did these headlines come from? What is the scientific grounding for such assertions? So the basis for these claims, Anthony Adol in 2017 reported more viruses for species in bats than other animals. The implication was that they were far more dangerous than other animals. And this made media headlines worldwide. The study, however, compared just four of 26 orders of mammals and examined almost as many bats as all of their mammals combined. Now, less than 99% of viruses are yet to be discovered. So we can find new species of virus anywhere we look, even on our own bodies. Meaning that wherever we put the most effort looking, we'll find the most viruses. That would seem to me to prejudice the case against bats if they are far more examined looking for viruses than other animals are. More recently, Melinda and Striker reported viral risk to be equal when all words were included. Remember the first study just included just included four of 26 orders of mammals. The new study includes all orders of mammals as well as all orders of birds and finds that there are no, there is no single order that is more likely to transmit risky viruses than the others. This study is so far as I can tell is far more thorough and yet it has raised almost no media coverage. The sensational coverage was about bats being more dangerous than anybody else. In the case of bats, we seem to find a situation where they're guilty until proven innocent. So are bats really to blame for COVID-19? The closest relative to the virus that causes COVID-19 is Ratge 13 found in horseshoe bats. 96% of SARS-CoV-2, the source of COVID-19, they're 96% similar to the Ratge one from horseshoe bats. And that's what's gained media attention headlines is this similarity and for most people that cinched the case. This virus that's in bats is 96% similar to the one that's causing COVID-19. However, maybe we should stop just a moment and consider that we're 98% genomically similar to chimpanzees and yet I don't know anyone who has trouble distinguishing a human from a chimpanzee. But most of the media have left out in talking about the results of this paper, they have failed to note that their key elements of the spike protein required to invade human cells that are not found in the bat relative virus. That means that it's highly unlikely to jump from bats to humans. And that's according to Zanging Homes 2020. So how did SARS-CoV-2 become viral? Well, there are several ways that it could have happened but the two most commonly credited hypotheses among virologists are these. Could have involved in intermediate host species such as a pangolin or any of many other animals. We've hardly scratched the surface when it comes to examining wild creatures for viruses. Right now pangolins seem to have the closest match to a virus that can invade human cells and is similar to the bat one. But it may be found that there are other animals that are far more likely to transmit the virus to humans. But I don't know of hardly anyone who believes that the virus went directly from bats to people. After the other hypothesis is that it may have entered humans up to 50 or more years ago and evolved in humans from a non-threatening virus to a highly threatening one without aid of an intermediate host. Now, you may be wondering who am I to be speaking about virology? I'm not a virologist. I have no training virology. I'm a bat researcher. But I have spent more than 60 years studying bats worldwide, hundreds of species on every continent where they're found often surrounded by millions of them at a time. I crawled into the craziest places looking for them, trained them for research and photography. And never once have I contracted one of these so-called emerging diseases that were so fearful of these days. Yes, like veterinarians and other bat biologists, I have been vaccinated against rabies because we all handle animals with which we're unfamiliar and are occasionally bitten. But for a person who simply doesn't handle bats, the odds of being contracting a disease from one are so remotest to be virtually incalculable. This picture was taken on a recent trip leading a group of volunteer scientists in Thailand. We're in a Buddhist shrine area in a cave. We are obviously not taking this very seriously as far as being afraid of getting a deadly disease from bats. It makes us smile a bit when we see our virologist colleagues dressed up like this every time they enter a bat cave. In my whole career of leading probably more than a thousand people into bat caves in workshops and other activities, not one of these people, not one bat researcher in the history of bat research is contracted one of these supposedly deadly, well, they are deadly, but one of these so-called emerging diseases that have been widely attributed to bats. Now let's take a look at the real world of bats. All four of these bats could be found at a single location in Latin America. There are more than 1400 species of bats worldwide and they're incredibly sophisticated. Even the smallest bats have social systems strikingly similar to those of higher primates. They form long-term relationships, they share information, they help others in need and they even adopt orphans. And there's a great deal that we can learn from bats. Instead of spending so much money trying to figure out ways to fear, reasons to fear bats, perhaps this time we pay a little more attention to how it is that bats almost never contract things like arthritis or cancer, how they're so resistant to other diseases. There's so much we could learn from them if only we'd quit fearing them so much. Now let's take a look at their values. Oaxaca, Mexico, July, 2017. These bats are pollinating the agave from which all tequila and most, all, I've forgotten the other, all tequila and most miscolors made. Without bats like this to pollinate these flowers, we could lose these industries. They're worth billions of dollars a year in Mexico. And if we go to Southeast Asia, a recent report showed that durian sell for $18 million a year and they can't be produced even in an orchard without bats to pollinate the flowers. And yet this dawn bat shown here is one of the species that's first killed when people fear bats and go destroying them in caves out of fear. This epaulet bat is one of several small fruit bats of Africa that are now being targeted for eradication out of needless fear of Ebola. These little guys can account for up to 95% of the first seeds that drop on cleared land that needs restoration when it's abandoned by farmers. They're absolutely crucial to restoration of forests. And free-tail bats are key controllers of pests worldwide. Just one of these little guys here in Texas can, in a single night, fly thousands of feet above ground to intercept migrating, foreign air and armyworm moths and can eat enough of them to prevent them from laying 20,000 or more eggs enough to force a farmer to spray multiple acres of pesticides at a cost of $74 an acre. If people only had any idea of what these bats are doing for us, they'd be lined up to protect them. But unfortunately, most of what they hear is that the bats might give them some terrible disease. Now I wanna share with you my first experience of getting such bats protected and what it meant for people. This is Kaohsiung Prawn in Thailand. These bats weren't always here. 40 years ago, while visiting Thailand, I convinced the monks that owned this cave that if they'd just protect it, that their once great bat colony could be restored and at great economic benefit. They protected the cave. And today, guano production sells for fertilizer at more than $200,000 a year and not just the adults to collect it. It's amazing. Whole families go in and scoop up this guano. If bats are so deadly dangerous, I'd like to know why they're not dying in droves. But suffice it to say that these bats are really valuable, not just for fertilizer production, but as they became spectacular, they started attracting the attention of scientists and entomologists conservatively estimated that this one colony is saving Thai rice growers $300,000 US annually. And of course, such a spectacle also attracted tourists. And the locals have been very quick to take advantage of the tourists selling them various goods. Instead of warning people that these bats could someday prove dangerous, perhaps it's time to spend more money and attention on documenting how valuable it can be in terms of helping people to protect bats like this. These bats don't just generate a lot of revenue, they also are supporting the whole nearby school. These students gain tremendously from proceeds from bat guano mining. And as an acknowledgement of that, the school principal, teachers and the children themselves one day a week wear bat t-shirts to school. And now I wanna close with my, one of my all time favorite stories that happened right here in my hometown in Austin, Texas. In the early 1980s, when large numbers of bats begin to take up residence in newly created crevices in our downtown Congress Avenue Bridge, public health officials warned that they were mostly rabid and dangerous. People panic, this poster pretty well illustrates the mood at the time. They started signing petitions to have the bats eradicated, but to make a long story short, I came and convinced them that the bats might just turn out to be safe and invaluable. And so decades later, here's what we found. This one colony of bats has become one of the most internationally famous tourist destinations in the whole state of Texas. Millions of people have stood on this bridge and watched these bats close up, never one of them contracting a disease from a bat. Not only that, but the bats are eating up to 10 tons of insect pests each night and bringing in millions of tourist dollars each summer. Austin is now proudly the world's center for educating people about the benefits of living in harmony with bats. They do indeed make safe and invaluable neighbors. Thank you. Thank you. Ready for questions. Thanks, Marlon. So while you're all thinking of and submitting questions, we've already gotten quite a few. Let me start with one, if I may, take the moderator's prerogative here. And that is so it's easy. And some of our questions seem to focus on this as well, to look to the media to blame for blame on why these attitudes about bats keep getting propagated. But I guess I'm wondering the media presumably gets its stories from scientific articles and science and scientists. Are scientists just not stepping up to correct these stories or do scientists, are they not simply involved in the media reporting? In other words, why aren't there science journalists talking more to scientists to share your perspective? Where's the scientific community in this story? There are scientists speaking up for bats, but unfortunately they're not as popular with media headline generators as those who's come up with very scary hypotheses. Scary speculation sells big time in media headlines and readership and also sells bigger grants. Talking about the benefits of bats just doesn't hold a candle to the popularity of scaring people about bats. It grabs attention. So let me maybe put this a little overly provocatively. Do you feel like some in the scientific community are not acting responsibly in their interest in getting media attention here? Or is it mostly a problem of the journalists not doing their research? It's not solely a problem of the journalists. Certainly they love scary headlines, but the scientists oftentimes knowingly play right into that. There have been recent nationally televised interviews with so-called virus hunters, who have warned that unseen flying overhead at night, bats can defecate on us, bring us deadly diseases. There's not a single instance worldwide in all history in which we can document that a bat ever defecate on somebody to give them a terrible disease. In fact, if that were possible, I should have been dead a million times over. Well, we know about Merlin, right? All right, so let me begin to look at some of the questions and field some of the questions from our audience. A number of these, as I said, are about media, but I wanna start with the one about intermediate hosts. So you showed the picture of the Pangolin and suggested there might be other intermediate hosts, but to what extent is the kind of bat intermediate host human chain of causation subject to the same kinds of distortions as the bat to human chain of causation? And is the problem of intermediate host, is that a genuine problem that we need to think about how to manage? This is a big problem. Throughout this whole COVID discussion, I see countless times reference to bats as the source for SARS, MERS, Ebola, all kinds of deadly diseases. And yet none of the ones I just mentioned has ever been isolated from a bat. In fact, there's no proof that a bat has ever transmitted one of these diseases directly to a human. What we know is that SARS went through an intermediate host, the Civic Cat. MERS went through camels. In fact, camels are such good reservoirs from MERS that they never needed bats in the first place. And there's no evidence that COVID came directly from bats either. But in talking about them, those that want us to fear bats just don't seem to want to own up to the fact that the diseases are coming through intermediate hosts. And it's those intermediate hosts that we need to be concerned about. In fact, in a recent paper by homes that all in nature, they concluded, and I quote directly, critically the surveillance of animal coronaviruses should include animals other than bats as the role of intermediate host is likely of major importance. So what good does it do to scare us about bats when it's actually camels or civets or pangolins or some other animal that is giving us the disease? It might be as simple as somebody not eating an endangered pangolin to have prevented COVID. So are there wildlife management? This is a question from Amanda Savage. Are there wildlife management approaches that might be effective in reducing the bat to intermediate host transmission? Well, I pretty much agree with homes at all that this virus hunting is kind of a misdirected waste of funding. What we ought to be doing is looking for trying to detect as quickly as possible when new viruses pop up and be ready to isolate them. But wasting money on trying to identify and catalog all the world's countless viruses, they point out that if we were to succeed, even if we were able to catalog all the world's viruses and try to ascribe danger levels to them, our data would be completely out of date by the time we got our list made because of the rapid rate of RNA virus at evolution. And so it makes no sense to spend billions of dollars chasing down viruses. The marriage between bats and viruses is the perfect storm when it comes to promoting big grants. People fear bats kind of naturally. It's like when we go to the airport, we fear flying, but we don't fear driving to the airport. But far more people are killed driving to the airport than they are in airplanes. But since we don't know much about bats and we don't know much about viruses, you know, I should point out in defense of viruses that most viruses are undoubtedly either benign or beneficial. Some of them may be essential to our very survival. Yet we only hear about the few that kill us. But if we marry bats and viruses and say these are really deadly, dangerous things, nobody knows any better or not very many do. And so we get rapt attention. If I were to go out today and try to sell you insurance against your house being destroyed by a falling meteorite, you'd laugh me out of town. You'd know better. But if I tell you you got to do something to protect yourself against bats, bats have been portrayed recently as though they were on a par with flying cobras as far as being dangerous. I mean, even a cobra can't enter your house flying. Can I just ask one more question about the intermediate transmission question? So do you think it is possible that bats were the origins of some of these diseases or is even that, and then they made it to humans via intermediate hosts and mutation or is even that causal chain not well demonstrated? Bats are already fairly modern 50 million years ago. We don't even have a real good notion of how they really are because they don't fossilize that well, but they've been around for a very long time. And it stands to reason that a group of mammals that's been around for a very long time is going to have microorganisms relaying, microorganisms in them that are related to those in other animals. This whole notion that bats are more dangerous than other animals is just not substantiated in real life. I contend that bats have one of the finest track records on our planet of living safely with people. So your story basically is that this whole thing is an incredible instance of looking where the street light is shining and finding whatever is there and calling that the keys to the problem. You got it exactly. Okay. So let me let me dig in here with a couple. Here's a bat biology question. It's about bat immune systems from Liz Farrell. Is there evidence that habitat degradation negatively affects bats immune systems and ability to cope with viruses? It may, but I have seen no evidence in my lifetime that bats are becoming more dangerous as sources of disease. When I was last at Couch on Fron K for example, virus hunting virologists had just been there and had discovered a new species of coronavirus. Now there are countless coronaviruses that aren't harmless but they wrote a report speculating that this one could be deadly and it was urgently important to look into that. These kinds of speculations are really not warranted. I asked right after that, I talked to the head monk who had been there for at least 40 years and I asked him, do you ever see strange diseases in these people that gather the guano? And he just laughed and said, some of my oldest parishioners are guano miners and he sent me to talk to a 96 year old man who is still in perfect health and his 80 some year old wife who had spent nearly every day of their lives extracting guano from caves. Yeah, I just wanna comment perhaps editorially that this is a really interesting instance of how science often doesn't look at the individual story because that's just considered an anecdote and not data but instead they're happy to do enormously complicated statistical analyses of genomic data but not necessarily see the trees that make up the forest. Let me ask another science question here. This is from my colleague, Benedict Calan. She says, I heard from a virologist that bats have a less active immune system, something having to do with its mitochondria and their rapid metabolism which allows viruses to intermingle more in bats than I guess in other species. Is that true? Bats seem to be more resistant to being having ill effects from viral attack just like their seldom afflicted with arthritis or cancer but that doesn't mean that they're more dangerous. In fact, I recall a paper done on Strucklard flying foxes which found that they were so resistant that when they were artificially infected with Ebola in the lab, they did contract it detectably but they were so resistant that they shed so few viruses that the authors of the paper suspected that they might not be capable of infecting another animal. Fascinating, fascinating. Now, you've really, I think, stimulated a fairly common theme in a number of questions here and that theme is, what can I do? People wanna know now, where are the opportunities? This is coming from both scientists and non-scientists, I see, where are the opportunities for citizens and scientists to make a difference on behalf of bats. And here's a very interesting specific example. This is from Hannah Curtis, a wildlife rehabilitator, as you probably know, this in some states are prohibited from rehabilitating bats. I see that means injured bats who were discovered injured until further notice due to COVID. So what can, what are the avenues that people have to make a difference here? Well, the first thing we gotta help share the word is that there was a recent study done in China. I reviewed it the other day, it hasn't been published yet, but I found it quite interesting. They interviewed well-educated Chinese is their attitudes about bats and they tested on them, what kinds of edification they could provide that would make a difference in their attitudes to wanting to save bats? And to their surprise, it wasn't telling them about the importance of bats and how essential they are and all the good things they do for us. That wasn't the most powerful argument for saving bats. The most powerful argument for saving bats was simply reassuring them that bats weren't out there about to give them some deadly disease. So in other words, the best tactic seems to be the one that really contradicts the notion that they're dangerous as opposed to appealing to their ecological value or broader value. Yes, I found that to be true lifelong. I have often found that people were far more ready to protect bats when they got over their fear than when you told them about the value of bats. Fear is a strong motivator and we can document that millions of bats at a time have been incinerated in their caves by people who simply feared disease from them. These free-tailed bats that are so valuable, they form the largest aggregations of any warm-blooded animal, live in caves, up to 10 or 20 million can live in a cave and they can all be destroyed in minutes by just one human who is inappropriately afraid. Have you found, what about the openness of some of the larger environmental, international environmental groups that often take on as a cause celebrate a variety of species like whales or harp seals or something like that. Have they been willing to take on bats? One of the problems that was identified in the study I just reviewed was that even among bat researchers and people who dealt with bats that there was a strong tendency to accept these claims of deadly dangers without really questioning because they don't know that much about viruses. Most people studying bats haven't been doing it for a terribly long time. I started studying bats back before we even knew you could contract rabies and we didn't protect ourselves from anything. And yet none of us ever got sick. And that's not to say that I would be careless about the issue of rabies. What I would say though, and this is key, share, if you wanna save bats, share this notion. Bats do not transmit, there's no risk of any kind of disease. Let's just say there's virtually zero risk of any disease being transmitted to us by bat for anyone who simply doesn't handle bats. If you leave them alone, don't try to handle them. There's virtually zero risk. Now here's a really interesting question about thinking about how we might motivate, economically motivate conservation of bats and it speaks to the moment of panic I had when you talked about the tequila industry and I'm thinking about where could margaritas disappear if bats are not conserved. But the interesting conservation question, this is from Adriana Rodarte is, is the tequila and mescal industry, are they being proactive in helping to protect bats? Increasingly, it's taken years to get the point across, but in recent years, they have had some problems where they had disease attacks on their agaves that alerted them to the fact that they need to maintain more genetic diversity. And right now, Rodrigo Medellin in Mexico, one of the few colleagues who has really stood up in defense of bats on this disease issue, he is spraying the word among the tequila industry and doing a great job of it. And similarly in terms of getting economics incentives and actors motivated, what about ecotourism trade? So here's a question, I'm working on large African mammals for my PhD and ecotourism has helped a lot in conservation of animals like elephants. What are the opportunities for ecotourism as a strategy for helping to protect bats? Those are great opportunities. The more people friendly to bats come to enjoy seeing emergencies out of a cave entrance as the fewer vandals can go and threaten them with disaster. I've been to the park in Zambia where eight million Struckler flying foxes congregate once a year. That is a totally unforgettable site that can't be forgotten. Seeing eight million three-foot wingspan bats take off at night. And these kinds of places are just wonderful opportunities. The bats at Congress Avenue Bridge are incredibly spectacular and people come from all over the world to enjoy them. That's the one that lost them. Yeah, and the tourism brings in probably tens of millions of dollars each year just from bat watching. So it seems like on some level there's an organizational problem here. There needs to be more awareness. I mean, you said this really in your talk that the opportunities scientific but also economic and ecological that bats offer are so enormous. And yet somehow they have not attracted the kind of advocacy that you'd think that they should given their virtues. Well, back when I first resigned in my full-time research position to devote my time exclusively to conservation of bats I don't know of anybody who didn't think I was stark raving mad. In those days it was rabies. Everybody thought that most bats are rabid and they're extremely dangerous. Nobody not even conservationists wanted bats around. But we had to before we could make any progress we had to show people how rare it was to get rabies from bat. Rabies from bats, if somebody wants to scare you they can tell you that nearly 100% of human rabies cases in America come from bats. That's true, but that's 100% of one or two a year out of 300 million. Now I can think of a whole lot worse things to worry about. In fact, I used to point out that perfectly healthy dogs kill more than 40 Americans annually. But how hypocritical it would be if we were to try to rid our neighborhoods of dogs when our own spouses kill us off at the rate of 1,000 a year. I mean, if we're brave enough to own dogs and get married. Let's see, so we have another question on this captive bat problem. Apparently a Texas wildlife agency is directed that captive bats and rehabilitation not be released until further notice. I wonder if, I think this question is getting at has the formal research been done? So you have great stories that are very convincing I think to anyone listening to you but sometimes a published peer reviewed article can pack more of a wallop. What sort of research would show that captive bats if released are not likely to spread diseases acquired in captivity? That's a virtually impossibility. In the first place, nobody would allow that kind of research. You'd have to infect the bats with something, use a statistically significant sample size and take a real risk on having something bad happen. But the truth is that it's an extremely remote likelihood. Bats are not dying off from the COVID relatives in Southeast Asia where they occur. And we know that they have not succumbed to coronaviruses anywhere in the world in noticeable numbers. And so we have very little reason to fear communicating from humans to bats. I think we're under greater danger with what's not happening, all the research and good things, conservation activities that are now on hold because we got to be worried about infecting bats when in fact there is no evidence that that is likely to happen. But it's something that can't be tested scientifically without being called into court for immoral behavior. Yeah, I have a question about this maybe beyond your considerable expertise here with just a historical perspective. So in many of these communities in say tropical countries that end up going after bats, burning them out of cages and out of caves and things, is that kind of, is that a new phenomenon or are there long cultural practices aimed at destroying bats or is that something that they've learned from the media in the last, in recent decades? Well, there's long been a tendency for people to fear the unknown and bats are certainly part of the unknown. But even in Kenya, when I was there many years ago, I was rather amused by the fact that two tribes live in adjacent to each other. One of them held bats in high esteem that if a bat came into your hut, you should do everything possible to make it feel welcome because this would help your cattle herd grow and you'd be rich. And the next tribe over viewed bats as horrible things that brought bad luck. But showing the impact of modern media education, it was shown in this recent survey done in China that although bats have long been held in high esteem in China, almond symbols of good luck and happiness. Since this COVID outbreak has been blamed on bats, there is mass killing of bats and attitudes that dramatically reversed widely across China. It's not because one day they found they weren't as valuable as they thought they were. It's because one day they thought they found that they were really, really dangerous when they hadn't believed they were before. That's really interesting. Now, one questioner wants to know, are there any public health concerns related to bats that we ought to know about? There are public health concerns, there are mortality concerns related to everything. The most dangerous thing we do every day is getting our car and drive to work. And the most dangerous animal we're going to meet is another human. We can get more viruses, more diseases. In fact, I've had a number of deadly diseases encephalitis, two kinds of malaria at once and I got all those from being around people, not bats. Everything we do has some risk to it, but as long as we just leave bats alone and don't try to handle them, I mean, look at our record in Austin, millions of people have come here to enjoy watching those emergencies and the bats are flying by within like two meters of these people. And we talk about, you know, I don't like to talk about this aspect, but it's been said that if they defecate on you, they can give you deadly diseases. And I can assure you that if that was true, there'd be a lot of dead people in Austin because the kayakers gather under where the bats come out and it virtually rains when they first come out. They are blessed with bats. So this really does seem like above all, bats are in need of a PR campaign, a global PR campaign. And many of the early questions asked today had to do with what can be done to get the media more focused on getting the story right here. So what do you think? Here's what I see as a base problem. Time after time after time, I see articles, even the ones that are well-intended to help bats, they start out with a scary headline about despite all the many diseases bats carry, they're extremely valuable and should be protected, they're essential, don't ever kill them. But the essential don't ever kill is the last thing in the story. And most readers just get the first thing that they're dangerous. And that's all they take home as a message. Yeah, well, as an editor, I can tell you why that is because all editors care about is how many people read their articles. That's right, absolutely. So maybe we need to kill all the editors. Or at least, well, never mind, I won't go any farther than that. And don't take that one too seriously either, Merlin. Okay, so I think we're, we've still got some questions, but they're all on the same general theme. And I think just to summarize, there was really a lot of, I think, energy in your audience here, Merlin. I'm sure you experienced this for going out and actually doing something now. So do you have any final parting words of advice for our audience, if there's maybe one or two things, simple things that they could do on behalf of bats, what would they be? Show your faith in bats by putting up a bat house in your backyard. All right, tell us about bat houses. Quickly. Well, I'm the one that first introduced them to America. There are now hundreds of thousands of bats living in backyard bat houses all across the U.S. and Canada. And, you know, attracting bats to your yard can be really beneficial. I'm asked by those sometimes who want to scare people about bats, well, what do you do if you find a bat in your yard? And I say, celebrate. There are a lot of people that go to great expense to attract bats to their yards. And, you know, you can have fewer pest insects, less need for spraying pesticides. In fact, a study done in Wisconsin recently showed that two of the most abundant bats in the state, the ones that live in bat houses most frequently, loved to feed on mosquitoes, catch large numbers throughout the whole season. And in that study, they found them consuming, I think it was like 15 species of mosquitoes, including several that are major transmitters of West Nile. Well, so if I want to learn how to build a bat house, I assume I could just get onto Google and I'll find some instructions. Well, you can, most people probably when it comes down to it would rather buy one than build one, although there are plenty, and I'm always happy to provide information for people that want to build them. But we also have a resource on my website that will help anybody that wants to purchase one or even build one to know what bats are really looking for and how to be successful. I know I have to ask as a matter of transparency, Merlin, you don't stand to make a profit from people building bat houses, do you? I don't sell bat houses and I don't get a commission for sale of bat houses. All right, well, as with your written work, your presence is even more inspiring. The, again, the outpouring of desire from your many hundreds of listeners here today to know what they can do to help tells something about how compelling your story is. Your action that we can all take for those of us with backyards to build bat houses, to install bat houses is a wonderfully concrete step to take. And I wanna thank you for working with issues in science and technology, for helping us get a really clear strong message of how to use science on behalf of a very positive action here. And if you'd like to make any final statement, I welcome that, otherwise we'll wrap up. Well, I'm very appreciative for your help in spreading the message, The Truth About Bats. All right, well, to everyone in the audience, thanks for joining us today. We will have more such events in the future and we look forward to seeing you then. Merlin Tuttle, thank you for sharing your lifetime of expertise and commitment to this marvelous animal with us. And we can now go forth with at least one less source of fear in our life. And let me add one final word. If you wanna know more about bats, my website at merlintuttle.com.org has thousands of pictures of bats doing virtually everything that a bat can do has resources. It'll tell you how to choose a good bat house, how to do almost anything you want to know about when it comes to bats. All right, a wonderful place to end and take care of everyone, stay safe. But you don't have to worry about staying safe from bats because bats are safe.