Webinar: Spooky Collections and Spectacular Bat Adaptations!

Spooky Collections and Spectacular Bat Adaptations! 

Aired October 28, 2022

Maggy Benson:

Hello everybody. Welcome to Smithsonian Science How! We have an extra spooky edition today, celebrating the season. Actually, let me get in spirit right now. We are so happy to be joining you live from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History with today's edition of Spooky Smithsonian Science How.

We have our experts coming to you from the Division of Vertebrate Zoology here at the museum to talk all about our favorite spooky specimen, bats. And I'm going to introduce them in a moment. For now, I just want to share a couple of logistics for today's program. So, today's program is a webinar, so you cannot turn on your video or your audio, but you can send us questions through the Q&A where we have a team of wonderful Smithsonian educators, thank you, Smithsonian educators, for responding directly to questions.

We also have live captions for today's program, so you can turn those on by going to your Zoom menu bar and activating show subtitles. And we also have an ASL interpreter today who will be joining us just in a moment. And so, today's program is super fun, and we hope that you enjoy it. So, it looks like about everybody is joining us here. Hello, Taylor, we do get to see real bats today. So, without further ado, let me introduce our wonderful experts. We have Ingrid Rochon and Lauren Caspers, and they also look like they are in the Halloween spirit. Hey Ingrid. Hey Lauren.

Ingrid Rochon:

Hello. Hello and welcome to the collection. I am Ingrid Rochon, and I am a collection technician here in the Division of Vertebrate Zoology. And we are in the Halloween spirit. We love Halloween. And I love Halloween because it gives us a chance to take a closer look at spooky things, to see how wonderful they are when you look at them more closely.

Just like my favorite specimen, who I have right here. This black and orange painted bat, who is in the Halloween spirit already, is my favorite specimen in the collection. We are coming to you today live from our bat collection. We have 600,000 specimens behind the scenes here at the Smithsonian and 138,000 bats. This collection is used every day by scientists who come to visit from around the world. And it's my job to take of things like this. These are some of our spooky bat specimens.

Maggy Benson:

Wow. So, every drawer behind you is filled with bats that are prepared in that way?

Ingrid Rochon:

Exactly.

Maggy Benson:

So cool.

Ingrid Rochon:

They are used by scientists who are looking to discover all sorts of new things about bats and their habitats and the natural world we live in. And Lauren here today is here to learn too. Lauren, will you introduce yourself?

Lauren Caspers:

Hi, I'm Lauren. I'm a graduate student intern. I'm in the Museum Studies program at GW and I've been working with Ingrid to learn more about the day-to-day care and management of a natural history collection. So, like Ingrid said, lots of different people are using the collection for lots of different reasons and it's important that we make sure that the collection is still around for years to come in the future.

I'm also very excited to talk about bats, as you can see, I very like much bats. I think they're pretty cool. They tend to have a bad rap and can be kind of spooky on the outside, but they're really interesting. They're very diverse. They live in diverse places; they have diverse behaviors. And I think if you look at bats in Hawaii versus bats in Virginia, they can be very different. And I think it's those differences that actually make them very interesting.

Ingrid Rochon:

And before we get into our activity for today, I wanted to tell you a little bit about bats and about how different and crazy they are. And if you could share, I think we have some slides to show, that's more of our behind-the-scenes collection. Bats are flying mammals. So, mammals are furry, fuzzy things. They have hair like you and me, they feed their young with milk. Bats are unique in that they're the only mammals that actually can fly under their own power.

Bats are found all over the world, so they're on every continent except Antarctica. And all over the world, they make their living in different ways, but a lot of them echolocate. So, you probably know a lot of the bats that live in North America, where we are today in Washington, D.C., use echolocation to find things to eat. And echolocation is this method of making a sound picture of the world. A bat will chirp or sometimes we even say they shout out into the world, and they make sounds, and they listen for the returning echoes and use those echoes to make a sort of sound picture of the world.

So, many bats actually see with sound. And what do all bats have in common, even if many bats are different? Well, we think they're all adorable. Bats do many different things. There's giant bats that eat fruit. There's tiny bats that live in little tents that they make out of leaves. There're the bats that live in your backyard that eat mosquitoes. But all of them are special and perfect, we think so.

Maggy Benson:

We really do think so. And we got a wonderful comment in our chat that said, "Calling bats spooky, may be doing a disservice to them because they're really important animals." And that's one of the main reasons that we wanted to focus on bats today. Isn't that right, Lauren and Ingrid?

Ingrid Rochon:

Exactly. Lots of things that we're scared of, we're scared of because we don't understand them. But what we're going to do today is we're going to practice looking very closely to understand what we see.

Maggy Benson:

And how are we going to do that?

Ingrid Rochon:

Well, first I wanted to ask, what do you think we can learn from studying bats? Because we have all sorts of questions that scientists want to answer. And I think we have a poll about what can we learn by studying bat collections. Can we learn about diseases? I know many of you probably you're thinking about bats, because they carry diseases. Can we learn about their habitats? Can we discover new species of bats, or can we learn about things that we don't even know yet?

Oh, man. And I see those results coming in and I love all the people saying things we don't know yet because that's my favorite answer.

Maggy Benson:

That's wonderful. That one is in the lead, so that is a really big piece of the collection you know, and we have collections that are over 100 years old, some of the bats in this collection. And what people thought 100 years ago, they didn't know what was going to be learned from them that you're learning today, right?

Ingrid Rochon:

Exactly. Lots of these specimens were collected many, many years ago and it's part of our job to make sure they last for another 100 years to come and we're continually learning new things about them. So, there are people who said diseases, habitats, new species, and things we don't know yet. And I am happy to tell you that every one of you is right. We can learn all of these things by studying the bats in our collection.

And today we're going to learn about what makes those different species of bats unique. We are going to use the specimens in our collection just like scientists do, to learn about their adaptations. One tool that I like to do this is scientific illustration and I know that's what you're all here for, we're here to draw.

So, scientific illustration is not about making a beautiful work of art. It's not about making a painting to hang in a museum, should I say? But it's about making, it's about training your eye to see important details. It's about making a drawing that you can learn from. It doesn't have to be good. There are a few guidelines that I like to use when I'm making a scientific illustration.

When I'm drawing something to observe it and learn about it, I want my drawing to be accurate. So, I want to draw what I see. I don't want to add anything that I don't see. I don't want to use my imagination; I'm going to use my eyes. I want my drawing to be accurate. I want my drawing to be big. If I draw it too small on the page, I can't get in all of the things that I want to see. So, I want it to be big.

I want it to be colorful because I see in perfect color. Not everybody does, but I want it to reflect as accurately as I can what my eyeballs see. I want it to be detailed. So, I want to draw all of the little things that I think are important and I want to capture all of those details. And then maybe the most important part is that I want it to be explained. I want to label what I see and take notes when I'm done with my drawing so I can know what I'm looking at and I can remember later, "Ah, that was what was so important."

So, I like to use a variety of different kinds of evidence to make my drawings. And the good thing is I have many different kinds of specimens that I can work with to train my eyes and make my drawings. And Lauren is my specimen handler for the day, and she'll be showing you all of them. We have in the collection, skulls. And the thing about bats is most of them are very, very tiny. So, this is the size of a bat skull. And today, we will be putting this under the microscope for your benefit because that's how I work in the collection. I put things under the microscope so I can see all the little details. I make it big.

We have skins, so these are dried. They're almost like a taxidermy specimen. So, I have the fuzzy bat skin, and this one I can see the skin does such a good job of preserving the colors. And I can see these orange patches of fur that this bat uses to communicate with other bats. They show off their colorful fur patches to each other.

We have wet specimens, which Lauren will show because Lauren's wearing gloves, and wet specimens are preserved in alcohol. They preserve all of the soft details of a bat, like its nose and its wings that you can still spread. And then we also have a library here and we have a lot of photographs that we work with. And so, we can use photographs as well so we can get all of those details that might be lost when we turn a bat into a specimen.

So, all of these things come together to help me make a complete scientific illustration that I can use for reference later. Today we are going to pretend that we're scientists. We're going to pretend that we're out on an expedition somewhere in northern Mexico and we'd actually gone out and caught three different bats in our net. We don't know anything about them, we're seeing them for the first time. But we have the benefit of everything we learned from the collection to identify them.

So, we are going to look at each one of these three mystery bats and we want to know what does it do and what does it eat, specifically. The way an animal makes a living has a lot to do with what it eats. And we're going to look at adaptations. So, features of an animal, body parts that help it make a living in the world, that help it find what it needs to live, and specifically what it needs to eat. So, everybody here's the part you're waiting for. We are going to get our pencils and paper and start to draw and observe.

And while you do that, we're going to ask you a question. What part of the bat's body do you think is going to be the most useful for us to look at? Because I can look at all different kinds, all different parts of a bat's body. I have things like wings, I have the whole body itself, I have the skulls. Which one are we going to be looking at in detail today? Maggy, I think you had a poll for that.

Maggy Benson:

I have a poll, but my screen is a little bit frozen so it's not quite coming through. There we go.

Ingrid Rochon:

There we go.

Maggy Benson:

There we go. So, which part of the bat's body should we draw if we want to learn about what it eats like Ingrid said? The skull, the wings, the body, or the whole animal. So, just take a moment and think about which adaptations are going to be important to observe to figure out what it eats?

Ingrid Rochon:

There's that little, tiny skull.

Maggy Benson:

It's so small.

Ingrid Rochon:

So, small. [inaudible 00:15:01]

Maggy Benson:

Right? Well, done everyone on finding the Q&A and the polls. We see all of your answers coming in and we are going to close this poll in five, four, three, two, one. All right, well done everybody.

Ingrid Rochon:

Very good. I see in the lead, the whole animal. And you know what, the people who chose that are secretly right. Because all different parts of the bat are involved in what it eats. But we're going to focus today, and specifically, when I want to think about what a bat eats, I want to look at its skull, and skull is the second choice. So, everybody who picked skull, you're thinking deep. Good choice. Now we're going to introduce our first mystery bat. And I've already shown you the skull of the first mystery bat.

Maggy Benson:

Ingrid, just wait one moment here. We have a whole bunch of questions. I want to make sure that all of our friends are ready with some paper. So, we are going to draw three different bats until about two o'clock Eastern Time. So, you can get one sheet of paper and do three drawings on one sheet or get three different pieces of paper. And this could be lined paper, it can be anything you have and a pencil.

Now, if you want you can get a black marker to go over your final drawing, but really all you need is paper and a pencil. So, why don't you make sure that you go get that? And while you do, I do want to ask a couple of questions. A lot of people have asked where have those bat specimens, that are in our museum collection, where did those come from?

Ingrid Rochon:

They come from everywhere that bats live, all around the world. And scientists have been collecting bats since there has been science. The Smithsonian came into existence in the 1850s, so hundreds of years ago. And we have bats from the 1850s up until today, and it's my job to make sure they last. Scientists go out and they do collect bats occasionally to learn about things. And our collection is so big because we are the national museum.

And so, scientists want to deposit or leave things with us so that we can be a sort of one-stop shop. We are the place to come to if you want to do this kind of work. So, the collection has been built over a long time by many, many people and it's continually used by many, many people. Does that help?

Maggy Benson:

And the other question is, are any of the bats preserved alive?

Ingrid Rochon:

Yes, because the National Zoo is a part of the Smithsonian and bats at the National Zoo are also researched, they're a great resource for learning about bat genetics. So, people take samples of blood that they get when they get their regular vet checkup like your dog, or your cat does. And sometimes that's used for research. And I don't take care of live bats because that's an entirely different skill set, and I would have to learn an entirely new job. Mine is a little easier.

Maggy Benson:

And this is a great moment to say that there's so many different ways to study animals and animal science. There's a lot of people, typically think about a veterinarian, but there are living collections at the zoo. There are other collections that have been collected over so many years, 150 years here at the Smithsonian that you can still learn about today. So, this is a wonderful career space that you can get into.

Now we want to draw, and I have some comments here that people have their pencils and papers ready. So, we are going to start with mystery bat one. Now, remember, we are going to look at different kinds of preparations of this bat to bat draw our bats and then we're going to figure out what it eats. Now I am going to turn my camera off, but I will be here, Ingrid, if you need anything.

Ingrid Rochon:

Perfect, thank you, Maggy. And I might pop off to the side as I am your artist in the drawing cam, which I think I can see for sure.

Maggy Benson:

Perfect. It looks great.

Ingrid Rochon:

Wonderful. So, I like to start with the skull because when I'm drawing, I don't start with fine details, I start with shapes, and I want to get the shapes right. The shapes can tell us a lot about that just in and of themselves. So, Lauren, if you could put under the specimen cam, the skull of our first bat, and I think I see him up there. Yeah, there we go. If you guys can all see on Lauren's gloved hand, I am going to start.

I see a big circle of the bat and now that's the cranium, that's the back part of the skull. And you have a cranium too. It's this back part of your head. That's where your brain is. So, I'm going to draw a kind of circle right here for the back part of the skull. And then I see a long, rectangular projection to the left of the skull. And that's the snout, or we like to call it the rostrum.

So, to the right or left of my circle, I'm going to draw this long rectangle and it's so long on this bat, it's very interesting. It's almost the same length or even twice as long as the cranium, as the circle. So, now I have my basic shape. I know that this bat has a really long nose. And, Lauren, the skull is so good you're looking at teeth and I can see tiny, tiny little teeth when I look at that specimen.

I see right to the front a little fang, which is the canine. So, I'm going to draw a triangle onto my rectangle to draw the canine tooth. The canine tooth is a tooth you might see if you have a dog or a cat. It's often a little fang that's sticking out. But the teeth behind it are very, very small. And I think, Maggy, you had a picture of the skull. So, we can look up really close and we can really magnify it and see those tiny little teeth and they look like itty-bitty little triangles. And I count one, two, three, four, five of them.

So, I'm going to draw these five tiny little triangles on the bottom of my rectangle to give this bat little teeth. But I noticed that they're pretty small and the back ones are actually blunt. So, I've made a mistake, and it's okay, I can just draw over it. I'm going to make the back ones more like rectangles instead of triangles because they don't seem very sharp to me.

I think that's pretty good. But I want to see what the outside of the bat looks like. Lauren, could you show us the skin of this bat?

Lauren Caspers:

Sure.

Ingrid Rochon:

Lauren's my expert specimen handler. All right. Oh. And I can see something completely different when I look at the skin. I can see that there's fur but I'm not going to draw that yet. I see these little ears and eyes. And the eyes are white because they're filled with cotton. This is a stuffed specimen, like taxidermy. And I'm going to draw the eye. It's a medium-sized eye and I think I'm going to draw it right here at the front of my circle. That looks about right because I can see that this bat has a long nose, even in the skin.

And I see these little ears, they seem small. So, I'm just going to give him almost Mickey Mouse ears. I'm going to do a half circle on the top of his head, and I'll do another one over here because he's got two ears. And I also see that I need to draw his lower jaw. So, I'm going to give him another rectangle on the bottom. So, he has a closed mouth. But what I want ... Oh, what is that thing on his nose, Lauren? There's a little thing at the end of his nose.

Lauren Caspers:

On his nose he's got a nose leaf. But I think there's another preparation where we can see it a little bit better.

Ingrid Rochon:

Can you get another preparation, another type of specimen so we can see the end of his nose a little better? That would be great. All right, I'm going to color in his eye.

Maggy Benson:

Ingrid, I'm going to pop in here just for a moment. We are working on our settings to make sure everyone can see what Ingrid is drawing and the specimens and the ASL interpretation at the same time. But make sure to send us a message if you cannot see it. And you may need to change your view. If you click on the view settings in Zoom, it's usually located at the top right of your screen. You may need to click that and select gallery if you have the choice.

Ingrid Rochon:

All right, well I hope you can all figure it out and if not, you can listen to my detailed descriptions. I am looking at a fluid specimen now, this is one that was preserved in alcohol. And boy, I see even more different things when I look at the specimen. I see that nose leaf and Lauren, can you point that out?

Lauren Caspers:

The nose leaf would be right here at the top of the nose, and it looks like it could be, not to be mistaken with his tongue.

Ingrid Rochon:

It looks like a little leaf. So, I'm going to draw a little round pointy triangle on the end of his nose. And I see its tongue sticking out. Look at that. It's so long. I definitely want to add that to my drawing. It's just, there we go. I'm going to give him a long tongue that's sticking out of his mouth, a long snake. And you know what? I think that's pretty good.

Lauren Caspers:

I think so.

Ingrid Rochon:

I think the final thing that we can do if we want to add even more details or take a look and see if what we've drawn matches up is we can look at the animal in real life. And I think we have a picture of that. Yeah, I think we do. If we don't, that's okay too because I think this wet specimen's pretty good. There we go.

There's a picture of what he looks like in real life. And I think we did a pretty good job. We got those small ears; we got his eye. I can see that nose leaf which is so cool. All right. And now that we've got our drawing, it's accurate, it's big. We will add our color later. It is detailed but we need to explain it. So, we're going to label all the things that we've seen so we remember exactly what we looked at. We're going to use those things to make a guess about what our bat eats.

So, I'm going to label small ears. Small ears. I'm going to label his long nose that was so unusual. Long nose. I want to label his nose leaf. Why does he have that leaf on the end of his nose? I want to label that long tongue, long tongue, and spell. And I noticed that his back teeth were small. Small teeth. There we go. Now, what do we think this bat eats, based on the adaptations?

Maggy Benson:

Ingrid, we have a poll for that. So, friends, we are going to launch a poll with some options, but we do have some guesses already in the Q&A, which is fun. Somebody guessed fruit. All right so here are some of our options. What do you think this bat eats? Is it nectar for instance, from a flower, insects, grass, blood, or fish?

Ingrid Rochon:

Now let me think. I see that long nose and it reminds me of something. It reminds me of a bird with a long beak almost, like a hummingbird kind of. And that long, long tongue. I wonder why it needs to be so long. And I notice that his teeth are really small, so he is probably not very good at chewing things. Probably not good at chewing things up because he's got pretty small chewing teeth. You chew with your back teeth, not your front teeth. So, I don't think he's very good at chewing.

And I see these guesses coming in and I see number one is nectar. And it turns out you are correct, though insects is a good guess because most bats eat insects, so you got close.

Maggy Benson:

So, Ingrid, this bat eats nectar from a flower like a hummingbird?

Ingrid Rochon:

It does. And there we have a picture of this bat hovering over a flower because this bat, just like a hummingbird, visits the flowers of cacti at night. And these flowers open specifically at night for this bat to come to visit and drink the nectar and pollinate them. And we can see that long snout and that long tongue fit into those long flowers. Now the nose leaf, I can hold up my own drawing as well.

Maggy Benson:

Yeah. And if you can just turn your camera right back on, we turn that off so we can...

Ingrid Rochon:

There we go.

Maggy Benson:

Perfect.

Ingrid Rochon:

Perfect. So, I've done my own drawing, and do not be intimidated. I spent a lot of time on it, and you can spend time later. I labeled that long tongue, that long nose and he doesn't need to chew very much because he only drinks nectar and he eats pollen, which is pretty much like dust. So, he is not chewing that. That nose leaf is used in echolocation and that helps direct his sound beam out into the world. So, he can direct it just like a pointer, like I'm pointing with my finger.

And he has pretty small ears that help him hear the sound of his own echoes. Bats echolocate at very high frequencies, which means they have very high voices. Yeah. Small ears help pick up high sounds, high-frequency sounds. So, he has small ears to listen to his own echolocation and he doesn't need to listen too much for anything else because he is out in the world looking for flowers.

Maggy Benson:

Well, that is a very professional scientific illustration. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Ingrid. And my picture looks a lot more like this black and white one, which is labeled, which is still really fun. Now we are going to do three different drawings, but before we move on to bat number two, we do have a couple of student questions. This one's from Matilda, who wants to know, "Do all bats have a nose leaf?"

Ingrid Rochon:

Ah, Matilda. Not every bat has a nose leaf. In fact, we're going to see bats that don't. Not all bats echolocate, most of them do, but other bats have evolved different adaptations that help them do the same thing. This bat, I didn't name this bat, this is the long-tongued bat. What a great name.

Maggy Benson:

Oh, so that's a good label for everybody to add: long-tongued bat [inaudible 00:33:30].

Ingrid Rochon:

I gave his scientific name, but his common name is long-tongued bat.

Maggy Benson:

Okay. And we have a couple of more questions that we can get through quickly is, "Are bats blind?" and "Do bats have bad eyesight?" has come in many times in different forms.

Ingrid Rochon:

Bats are not blind. No bats are blind. They all have eyes. Some of them see better than others. And some of the bats we're going to see today have bigger eyes than others, which gives you a clue that those bats might see better than other bats. So, it depends on what kind of bat. So, all bats can see. Some bats don't have great eyesight, but some have very good eyesight, depends on the species.

Maggy Benson:

Okay. And one final question before we go onto bat number two is, "Are there any bats that feed on fish?" We saw that in the poll response just a while ago.

Ingrid Rochon:

There are bats that feed on fish and they have very specialized adaptations of the ... Yeah. I'll show this bat, of the uropatagium. This membrane, they have a membrane between their legs that they use like a fishing net. This is not a fish-eating bat, but a fish-eating bat would have a very big tail membrane.

Maggy Benson:

And that's another great example of an adaptation to help this animal survive in its unique habitat and have a food source that's different from the bats that might live around it.

Ingrid Rochon:

Exactly.

Maggy Benson:

All right, friends let's move on to our next bat. And Ingrid and Lauren, I'm going to take off this camera view so that we can try to get the specimen in the drawing in the same shot again. Friends, if you can't see anything, send us something in the Q&A and we'll try to troubleshoot it with you. Some people don't have that view option. If you do have the view option, try to use the gallery view. If you're on mobile, you may need to scroll or click on the images of the videos to switch them. Okay, let's see bat number two.

Ingrid Rochon:

Bat number two. Bat number two also has a tiny, itty-bitty little skull, look at that. And it looks so much different from bat number one. Like bat number one, I see the cranium, which is that portion at the back of the skull and it's pretty big in this bat. It's a big round circle. So, I'm going to draw that circle again for my cranium, the back of my skull. And it has a very short snout compared to the last bat that we saw.

I can see at the front, it's going to be like a little rectangle, a shorter rectangle to the left or right of my circle. There's my rectangle. And can you show me the teeth, Lauren?

Lauren Caspers:

It's a little trickier on this guy because he is so small.

Ingrid Rochon:

He's even smaller than the last one, really tiny.

Lauren Caspers:

There we go. There we go.

Ingrid Rochon:

And what I can see is that there's a ... Looks like there's a lot of them.

Lauren Caspers:

There's a lot of little sharp teeth.

Ingrid Rochon:

A lot of little sharp teeth.

Maggy Benson:

And Lauren and Ingrid, a lot of people have made the observation that these skulls have numbers on them. What are those numbers?

Ingrid Rochon:

Every bat in the collection has a number from one to 138,000. And that's how I know which bat I'm looking at. Each bat, I know where it was collected and when. And I use that number as a reference to find the information about the bat. It is my job to number the skulls. And I want to draw those teeth, but I think I want an even closer view. Maggy, do we have a photograph that zooms in even closer?

Maggy Benson:

Absolutely. I'll share my screen.

Ingrid Rochon:

There we go. All right. I can see, now I can still identify that canine at the front, which is the longest tooth. It's the second tooth in the row, but all of the rest look pretty jagged. So, I'm going to draw a bunch of jagged, triangle teeth. I'm going to draw almost like a saw blade, a triangular saw blade in his mouth. I wonder what that could be for. Seems like he might be very good at chopping things up.

Maggy Benson:

Okay. And I'm going to stop sharing so that people can see your illustration.

Ingrid Rochon:

Perfect. And now, what I don't see, but I'm going to add is I know he has a lower jaw, so I'm going to give him a little rectangle below my medium size rectangle. So, he has a lower jaw just like you and me. But let's look at that skin to figure out what we need to add. What have we got there? So, first off, yeah, tell me what you see, Lauren.

Lauren Caspers:

There's something a lot bigger than the lower jaw that stands out.

Ingrid Rochon:

Wow.

Lauren Caspers:

His ears are quite substantial.

Ingrid Rochon:

Those ears are huge. So, I'm going to draw, can you put him on his back so I can see what shape they are? They look like big round triangles. So, I'm going to draw a triangle with a rounded tip on the top of his head to give him a huge ear. I'll draw his other one on his other side. I'm going to draw another triangle for his second ear right here. His mouth looks very strange because it's got cotton coming out of it. But can you turn him to see his eye? I think it's pretty small. Oh, you barely see it. So, we'll look at the wet specimen for that.

Lauren Caspers:

I think there's also something in the ears you might want to note on your drawing.

Ingrid Rochon:

Oh, what do you see?

Lauren Caspers:

He has a tragus.

Ingrid Rochon:

Oh, I see a triangle inside the ear. And I know that the scientific name for the triangle inside an ear is a tragus. You have one too, actually, yours is just tiny. It's that little triangle on the inside of your ear. But his is huge. So, I'm going to draw another rounded triangle within the triangle of his ear for that tragus. Now I think the wet specimen is going to show us a lot for this bat because the wet specimen's very good at preserving things like ears.

Lauren Caspers:

I think this is my favorite wet specimen.

Ingrid Rochon:

Oh wow, okay, so I can see his eyes.

Maggy Benson:

It's cute.

Ingrid Rochon:

I can see his eye very good now. And he has a little eye and it's kind of right here. It's pretty small. It's a little black eye. I'm going to color it in.

Maggy Benson:

Dmitri says it's cute. I agree Dmitri. It is very cute. We also have some great observations coming in about what those ears are used for. Somebody else said it hears everything.

Ingrid Rochon:

I think you might be right. I see he has a little nostril. So, I'm going to draw a little, tiny nostril. And he doesn't have a nose leaf.

Lauren Caspers:

He has this little ball cap.

Ingrid Rochon:

What is that? He looks like he's wearing a baseball cap. I have to draw that on.

Lauren Caspers:

You really do.

Ingrid Rochon:

So, that looks like a little flap of skin. I'm going to draw a half circle, a sort of a half oval over his eye and it's the brim of his baseball cap. And the scientific word for that I know off the top of my head is called a sella. And several different types of bats have a sella on their forehead, this little flap of skin. And now is there anything else you think we should add to this drawing? I see are those little lines on the inside of his ears. I'm going to add a few of those, a few little lines on the inside.

I think we're pretty good. I'm going to label what we see, and I want to label his huge ears. They're huge. I want to label his short snout because it's different than the last bat we saw. I want to label the tragus and the sella. And finally, those sharp teeth, lots, lots. All right. Now looking at this, what do we think this bat eats? Do you think it eats nectar like the last bat, or do you think it eats something different? I think it's time to make our guess.

Maggy Benson:

All right.

Ingrid Rochon:

We've got nectar, insects, grass, blood, or fish. I know he's got these huge, huge ears, which are probably good for hearing not just his own echolocation calls, but other things too. He's got these sharp teeth, he's got this weird baseball cap. I don't know what that's for. And I see lots of answers coming in. And most people say insects. And you are correct. This is an insect-eating bath. This is Allen's big-eared bat. Maggy, can we bring up the name so that people can label their drawings?

Maggy Benson:

Absolutely. And we have a lot of funny comments in here. Somebody said, "You can't tell secrets around Allen's big-eared bat."

Ingrid Rochon:

So, this is our final drawing, and we know that this bat's huge ears are so, so good for listening. Oh, thank you so much, Lauren, I turned on this video, it's turned on now. I have drawn these huge ears and these huge ears are good not just for hearing its own echolocation calls, but for hearing the sounds of insects.

So, it picks up not just really high-pitched sounds, but the low wrestling sound of insects. I know it's got these sharp teeth that are so good at chopping up bugs like moths. The tragus is like a satellite dish antenna that helps it locate the sound in space. Is a sound coming from up or down or to the side or around? The tragus helps him locate it. And this sella, like the nose leaf, helps him direct his echolocation beam out. But he does it a little differently. He does it with this little baseball cap instead of a nose leaf.

So, Allen's big-eared bat, like most bats, eats insects. You guys did a great job observing.

Maggy Benson:

Well, done everyone. So, while everybody prepares for the last one, because we have about 12 minutes left. So, we do want to draw our final bat. But we have a couple of questions, maybe we can answer them quickly is, "Do all bats hear insects and hear things from afar?"

Ingrid Rochon:

Many bats have spectacular hearing. But big-eared bats have probably the best hearing of any bat. They are unique in that their hunting strategy is to hunt hiding things. So, they specifically are looking for insects hiding in leaves on the ground. And so, they have extremely good hearing to hear a little moth or a little beetle crawling on a leaf, which I certainly can't hear. But Allen's big-eared bat can.

Maggy Benson:

And Miss Cardillo's class wants to know what is the most popular insect for that kind of bat to eat.

Ingrid Rochon:

This bat likes soft-bodied insects. So, it eats moths and small beetles that it doesn't have to crunch too hard. It actually has a pretty delicate jaw for a bat. So, it likes chopping up moths that are kind of soft. If you've ever been unfortunate enough to squish a moth, you know that they're not very hard.

Maggy Benson:

Okay, and two related questions to echolocation. "Can all bats echolocate?" and, "Do all bats have a nose leaf or the baseball cap?"

Ingrid Rochon:

Not all bats echolocate. There are bats called megabats because they are very big-bodied bats like fruit bats. And they do not use echolocation in the same way that smaller bats do to navigate around the world and to find prey. And not all bats have a nose leaf or a sella, but many of them do. These bats I have here, these are all part of the same family of leaf-nosed bats that are all related to each other.

And so, sometimes we can learn about ancestry from the features that bats share. So, shared features can tell us about the way a bat lives, but also can uncover shared ancestry, who's part of the same family, if that helps.

Maggy Benson:

Excellent. Thank you all for such great questions. Now let's get to drawing that third bat. We don't want to miss this one bat, but I do want to say because we are approaching two o'clock, that if you happen to leave our webinar soon, there will be a survey that pops up into your web browser after you leave Zoom, and we would be appreciative if you took that survey. And we will also email that after today's program along with a recording of this program if you want to watch it again.

We are still troubleshooting some of the views. It may have something to do with the Zoom browser being outdated, but we're still working with you. And thanks to Heather and our friends behind the scenes who are helping on that end. So, without further ado, mystery bat number three.

Ingrid Rochon:

Thanks for sticking with me, guys, because mystery bat number three is my favorite bat. Can you show us the skull of that mystery bat?

Lauren Caspers:

Sure.

Ingrid Rochon:

Let's start drawing what we see. All right. Oh, there we go. I see, much like our second bat, Allen's big-eared bat, a big round circle for our cranium. Now we're experts at drawing crania. Big round circle and a short snout. I'm going to draw a little rectangle right here to the left or right of my circle. And I got the shape, that looks like the right shape. But do you notice anything unusual about this skull, Lauren? What is that?

Lauren Caspers:

It's got some massive teeth right up at the front.

Ingrid Rochon:

Those are crazy. They're huge. I see two big triangles and they're much bigger and pointier than in any of the bats we've seen so far. And I count what one, two.

Lauren Caspers:

There are two on each side. But when the skull is turned like this, it does look like there are just two. It looks like there are two right up front and then two on either side.

Ingrid Rochon:

Two on each side. So, I'm going to draw my triangles. And do you see any other teeth? I don't see any.

Lauren Caspers:

Nope. That's it.

Ingrid Rochon:

That's it. What big teeth? Can we look at the skin? Do you think that's going to give us any other clues?

Lauren Caspers:

I think so.

Ingrid Rochon:

Let's take a look at that. Oh, wow. Okay. This bat has a very ugly face, but all bats are beautiful. Who am I to judge?

Lauren Caspers:

It's got little ears like our first guy.

Ingrid Rochon:

I see he has bigger eyes than our last bat, he has pretty big eyes. I'm going to give him a big eye. I'm going to color in a little bit, and I see his ears are sticking up. So, I think they're medium-sized ears. I'm going to draw a triangle for a medium-sized ear, not as big as the big-eared bat, but a little bigger than the long-tongued bat. I'm going to give him his lower jaw by drawing another skinny rectangle underneath his snout. And I think the fluid specimen's going to show us even more.

Lauren Caspers:

I think so too. I actually have two fluid specimens.

Ingrid Rochon:

Oh, you have two?

Lauren Caspers:

I have two favorites. And we'll start with my favorite.

Ingrid Rochon:

Favorite. Oh, my goodness. I can hear Maggy laughing. All right, I see he's got those teeth. I'm going to draw his snout to cover up a little bit more of them. And I see he's got almost a nose leaf. It kind of looks like a little pig nose, but I can see some leafy projections on it. So, I'm going to draw a rectangle at the end of the nose and draw some big nostrils in it, like a pig nose.

Lauren Caspers:

In this one, you can see his nose pretty well.

Ingrid Rochon:

Oh, that's so good. I can see that it sticks out a little from the face. I've got his teeth. I see his tongue sticking out. So, I think I want to give him a medium-sized tongue. I'm going to draw his tongue as a little triangle inside his mouth. And if I look at his lower lip, he's got a little groove in his chin, doesn't he?

Lauren Caspers:

Yeah.

Ingrid Rochon:

I want to draw that too. I'm going to draw a V on his chin to show that groove. Do you see anything else we should add?

Lauren Caspers:

I think he's got also those little grooves in his ears.

Ingrid Rochon:

He does, he has. I'm going to draw some grooves in his ears which help with echolocation, and he has a tiny little triangle inside his ear, I think. Oh, it's hard to see.

Lauren Caspers:

Yeah, it's [inaudible 00:54:37].

Ingrid Rochon:

Oh, it's very tiny. It's very tiny. But I'll draw it because I see it.

Maggy Benson:

Ingrid, do you want me to share a picture of this bat?

Ingrid Rochon:

I would love for you to share a picture of this bat, Maggy. Hey, that's helpful. Look at that. So, we see that groove in his bottom lip. I see that he has a little tiny tragus, triangle in his ear. I see his pig nose and his big eyes, and I think it's time to label what we see. So, I'm going to label his huge teeth, which are like knives, they remind me of steak knives. I am going to label his short snout. Short snout. Oh, I want to label his grooved lip because that stood out to me. That was interesting. And these medium-sized ears. Medium-sized ears.

Maggy Benson:

And we're going to go ahead and launch the poll because we do have friends that are already guessing what this bat eats in the chat. So, while you're labeling, you can also vote when you feel confident.

Ingrid Rochon:

There we go. I think that's it. We've labeled in and I see the votes coming in.

Maggy Benson:

All right. And I think we have a lot of friends who also are bat appreciators today. We have a lot of friends who said that this bat is very cute, I agree with them.

Ingrid Rochon:

I think they are pretty cute. Oh, look at that face.

Maggy Benson:

All right, we are going to close this poll in five, four, three, two, one. And we have a pretty unanimous choice here.

Ingrid Rochon:

I think you do because you all know that it's Halloween. And we couldn't have a Halloween program without the vampire bat. So, let me show my completed scientific drawing of the vampire bat. Here we have it.

Maggy Benson:

That's beautiful, Ingrid.

Ingrid Rochon:

Thank you. And I want to say that every scientific drawing starts with the basic drawing that we just did. But I can see that that tongue is used for lapping up blood. Those sharp, sharp teeth are like knives, and they make a little cut in a big animal like a cow or jaguar, or tapir and they drink a little bit of the blood. That groove in the bottom lip is perfect for his tongue to slide right out and lap up blood. He's got medium-sized ears because he needs to hear the sound of his prey, but his prey is a lot bigger than a beetle. It's the size of a cow.

So, he is somewhere intermediate between our other two bats. And those are some of the adaptations of our vampire bat, who's adapted to drink blood. There we have him.

Maggy Benson:

That is so cool. And now I'm going to share a final image because our friends, you have successfully now drawn three different kinds of bats, all of their different kinds of adaptations, and you have figured out what each one of them eats based on those adaptations. That is the work of scientists. So, well done. You really are.

So, Ingrid and Lauren, do you have any final message to us about bat adaptations, about the different bats that we drew today? And also, Ingrid, how to get from our black and white drawings to your really beautiful colored ones?

Ingrid Rochon:

Absolutely. So, the final message I want to leave you with is that bats come in all different shapes and sizes. They have many ways of making a living in the world. They eat many different kinds of things, and their adaptations suit them to these different ways of making a living these different food types, and different ways of life.

So, different bats have different variations on the same body parts that are adapted to either drink nectar or eat insects or drink blood or even eat fish. There's more different kinds of bats than I ever believed there were when I first started working here. And I'm excited to work with them every day.

Maggy Benson:

It was really fun to see how you could see some of those different body parts in different specimens and how they were preserved. So, it's really cool to see how important a museum collection is in all the different ways that you collect that animal to be able to learn different things. Now, Ingrid, about those drawings ...

Ingrid Rochon:

So, scientific illustrators never make a beautiful drawing on the first try. The first step to making a professional scientific drawing is to make a lot of mistakes.

So, my final drawings that I did today are the product of doing it over and over and over again and using other tools like measuring and doing it until I got it right. The second step is making that underdrawing that we did today. And that's the first step that those basic lines and getting the shapes of the things you see. Then I add details over it and then finally I start coloring the bat and adding on my labels. And the only way to get better is to make 1,000 mistakes. And once you've made 1,000 mistakes, then you will achieve mastery.

Maggy Benson:

And you can draw anything around you. If you don't have a bat, you can draw grass, you can draw house plants, you can draw fruit, you can draw anything. So, thank you so much, Ingrid and Lauren. Now we do have a couple of questions about the vampire bat. We are three minutes over, but maybe we could spend two minutes just answering some final questions about those vampire bats. Some folks have asked if that vampire bat hurts the animal that it drinks its blood from.

Ingrid Rochon:

So, it's not painful. When a vampire bat bites, it has an anesthetic in its saliva, so it numbs the site of the bite, and the animal does not feel it. That way the bat can drink without a cow waking up and rolling over and squishing the bat. They take a pretty small amount of blood compared to the giant size of their hosts. The bat is this big, how big a cow is or a-

Lauren Caspers:

Size reference.

Ingrid Rochon:

And vampire bats can be problems in places where their natural habitats have been destroyed. And lots of livestock, like lots of cows, have been brought in. But in their natural state, the way they evolved millions of years ago, they were eating animals like tapirs and jaguars in the jungle. And their numbers were very low. There are not many vampire bats per tapir or jaguar in the forest. So, they're not going out and killing the thing they drink blood from. They want it to survive another night so they can come back and have another drink tomorrow.

Maggy Benson:

Wonderful. Now do all three of these bat types, so we saw a vampire bat and a nectar feeding bat, and an insectivore one that eats insects. Do they all live in caves or what is the habitat of all these bats?

Ingrid Rochon:

The vampire bat can live in caves, and it can also live in hollow trees. I think Allen's big-eared bat also roosts in trees. And I think the long-tongued bat roosts in caves but not all bats live in caves. Some bats live in tents that they make out of leaves. So, they chew leaves into the shape of a tent and that's their home. Some bats live under a loose piece of bark on a tree. They live in many different places. Caves just happen to be a good, safe place for a lot of bats. So, there you have it.

Lauren Caspers:

You can build bat boxes and put bat boxes in your backyard. Because like we mentioned earlier, some bats eat mosquitoes. And I know I would like a few less mosquitoes in my backyard. So, you can always build bat boxes.

Maggy Benson:

That's a great point. And you can find so much information online about building bat boxes. A question about adaptations, can bats walk?

Ingrid Rochon:

The vampire bat is special. Bats can walk, but they're not good at it. The vampire bat is different because it needs to crawl around on a large animal. So, they're the only bat that is good at running and the only bat that can run. All other bats are very awkward, and they don't like being on the ground. They prefer hanging upside down or flying. But the vampire bat is a star on the track team.

Maggy Benson:

And we'll do two more questions because we do have to go, we are over time. Another adaptations question, "Do bats have fingers, digits?"

Ingrid Rochon:

They do. And the fingers make up their wing. So, the wing is the hand of a bat. The thumb is a little tiny, you can barely see it, a tiny little thing on the top of the wing. And like us, they have five fingers. There are two very close together near the top. So, the thumb is one, two, three, four, five. And the skin structure between the fingers of their hand makes the wing.

Maggy Benson:

Very cool. And I did have another question here, which is, "Do bats hibernate?"

Ingrid Rochon:

Some do. Some bats in the United States and regions where it gets cold will hibernate in place. You may have heard of white-nose syndrome in bats. Some bats in the United States can get sick over winter when they get infected with a fungus in their caves. When their body temperature goes down, when they hibernate, they become more susceptible to that. That's a threat to bats. Other bats migrate. So, they actually fly great distances to find better places to go in the winter. So, not all bats hibernate, no, but some do.

Maggy Benson:

So, we still have a lot of unanswered questions, but I encourage all of you to go to the library and take out a book about bats. Go on the Internet and search up bats because a lot of these questions have to do with bat adaptations. How big are bats, how small are bats? Where do bats live? What do they eat? Those are all questions that you can start piecing together from research and you can get clues about it from that bat's body.

So, I encourage you to go to the library and check out a book about bats and try to answer some of the questions you have that we didn't get to today about our wonderfully spooky in the best, cutest, most amazing way possible, friend the bat. Thank you, Ingrid. Thank you, Lauren, so much for being here and being our special guests. Do you have any special advice as we sign off for our friends this Halloween? To celebrate the bat?

Ingrid Rochon:

Bats are everywhere. We love them. Stay spooky.

Maggy Benson:

Lauren will be flying away now. Bye friends, thank you so much for joining us. We had a great time.

Ingrid Rochon:

Bye.