Bats v Flies

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Now, over to Robin and Brian.

Welcome back to the Infinite Monkey Cage.

I'm Robin Itz.

And I'm Brian Cox.

We've been away for some time.

Or we've been away for no time.

Depending on your understanding of time.

Yeah, this is really, I suppose, because some physicists suggest that we may seem to experience the passing of time, but that's just our delusion, which is why more of them are being employed by parcel delivery companies.

Then again, physicists also tell us that we're holograms, that in fact we are merely projections, two-dimensional images, which is insane.

It's not a consequence of the thermodynamics of black holes.

Bekenstein showed that black holes have an entropy, which is proportional.

Okay, right, anyway, so

for the purposes of today, let's just presume that the passing of time has occurred, so we're sorry we haven't been about, but now we are here as well, and we've always been there in the block universe too, so don't worry about that.

What's today's show about, Robin?

Today's show is about flies.

Flies and bats.

What the entropy of bats?

I always know that when it comes to us dealing with any form of biology, in some way you will turn it to being something about physics.

If you throw a bat into a black hole, like two bats, throw two bats into a black hole.

By the way, this is something you will never get past an ethics committee.

If the first line is, I would like funding for throwing two bats into a black hole, that will not get past.

Anyway, look, we're going to do biology.

I don't care whether you want to deal with entropy, right?

So today we are going to explore probably, I would say, the most profound question in biology, which is bats or flies, which is better.

To debate this profound question of central importance, we're joined by a bat expert, a fly expert, and a referee who will ensure fair play between the two, and they are.

Hi, my name is Dr.

Eric McAllister, and I'm a senior curator of flies and fleas at the Natural History Museum.

And my favourite bat, actually, it's just one bat.

Her name was Susie, and she's a Jamaican fruit bat.

And I hand-reared her when I was in the Caribbean, and I hadn't realised that bats purred.

And she used to sit on me and purr.

And that's, I've just lost it for flies saying that.

I'm really sorry.

Hello, I'm Kate Jones.

I'm a professor of ecology and biodiversity at University College London.

And I guess if I had to say my favorite fly,

I would probably go for the most dangerous animal on the planet, which is a mosquito.

It's not, it's not, you know, it's not.

We'll deal with this later on.

Hello, my name is Dave Gorman.

I'm a university dropout.

My favourite fly is butter, and my favourite bat is wom.

And this is our panel.

I just want to clear up.

So, I thought mosquitoes were the most dangerous.

They transmit, they're vectors, but a mosquito itself, she doesn't kill you.

So, you can't blame her.

She's just being a mother, doing what she's put on the planet to do, and you're having a go at her.

She's being manipulated, full stop, by the flair, you know, everything going on.

Those plasmodium, no one has a go at them.

It's not just plasmodium, is it that?

It's all the other things that take advantage of her.

She's obviously like dengue fever, chicken gunya.

I know.

That's a brilliant name for a virus.

But, you know, a few things.

A few things.

But mosquitoes are a lot of good as well.

Seeker.

And it's not her fault.

No one cares about this.

I'm worried about this with fleas as well because more fleas die during the plague than humans.

Again.

No one cares about that.

And these sort of things, you know.

This is a fascinating thing to see entomology playing the victim card.

Well, I worked out if you, if you like the only way a mosquito could kill you personally is to exanguinate you, so drain you of blood.

Now, it would take about 414,000 mosquitoes in one feeding event to drain you of blood enough for you to die.

And we physically don't have that much skin.

Do you?

Okay, look.

I don't really understand how I'm supposed to referee this, but I'm pretty confident it's right now it's one nil to the bats.

It was the more more flies died

in the black plague.

That was was it for me.

I was like,

fleas.

Fleas, yeah.

I was interested.

You can't care for fleas.

I'm sure last time you were on, you were curator of flies at the National History of the Flight.

No, I'm Flies and Fleas.

It's a promotion.

What?

I love the idea that you go, well, it started off as an infestation, but then we thought we could turn it into a promotion instead.

Fleas, they're very closely related to flies.

Okay, that they've got the issue of no wings, but a lot of flies have no wings, so that's fine.

Well, I'll tell you what, let's start the show actually, because I can see now our producers gone, well, none of this is what we were meant to be talking about.

But no, I love it, it's my fault.

Let's start with you, Kate, on actually

the first kind of, well, the only round, I suppose.

We're going to give you one minute.

So we've stolen a bell from Sue Perkins that she likes to use for just a minute.

There's a lot of pressure.

Yeah.

Can I just interject here?

Because it's not really an unfair question, is it?

Because you're a professor at UCL and you're here because you're an expert on bats.

And all he said is, can you give us a minute on bats?

Fine.

I

I'm just trying to get the parameters of the competition.

That was all.

Professor, please give us a minute.

In a wreathian manner.

Educate, inform, and entertain on the subjects of bats.

Right, bats are awesome.

They're over 1400 species.

They're the largest group of mammals on the planet, apart from rodents, and they're found all over the world, apart from the poles.

There's a huge range in sizes from the bumblebee bat, which is the size of a bumblebee, two grams, to the false vampire bat or the Indian flying fox, which is one and a half kilograms.

They're important pollinators and seed dispersers.

Over 500 species are pollinated by bats and rely on bats.

That includes mangoes, durians, avocados, and of course agave plants, which make tequila for margaritas.

They're an important controller of insect populations.

In the US alone, the services provided by bats save over 23 billion a year in pesticides not being applied.

They're only mammal capable of a powered flight.

They include the fastest flying mammal in the world, flying animal in the world, 160 kilometers an hour.

The longest-lived animal for their size, 41 years.

No, it's all right because it's not that game.

You're allowed to go a little bit longer.

There were like two more things I needed to say.

Yeah, that's fine.

They're good at repairing DNA.

They've got sophisticated use of echolocation and their squeaks are louder than a rock concert, 140 decibels, which is 15 decibels higher than our pain threshold.

I just want to object to one thing, though, because they're not the only mammals capable of powered flight, are they?

No, they are.

Because Neil Armstrong.

Oh.

By the way, if you've ever wondered, he's really annoying at pub quizzes.

Okay, they're the only non-human animal capable of powered flight.

You say they repair DNA?

Yeah.

I mean, genuinely, is there some practical purpose that we can take from their repairing of DNA?

Yeah, there is actually.

So, bats are these amazing flyers, and it means that you have to have a really high metabolism in order to power that flight because it's really costly.

And that puts enormous metabolic pressure on cells, and it means that they get oxidative damage quite a lot.

And so, oxidative damage damages DNA, and they've evolved to kind of cope with that and repair DNA.

So, they're really, really good at repairing DNA, and those are things which cause cancer, for example.

So, bats hardly ever ever get cancer, and also they're just really good at fighting infections.

So, we could actually learn from them about how they deal with horrible diseases.

And yet,

bats and horrible diseases,

there's a sort of elephant in the room here right now, isn't there?

We've cast a shadow over the last few years of our lives.

If you get bitten by a bat, you don't suddenly get a cure for cancer, you get a bloody pandemic.

Okay, well, can I just address that straight on?

I think really it needs to be addressed.

So, the reason for this Covid pandemic is about our actions rather than any particular animal.

Like, demonizing a particular wildlife species is never going to be helpful because it's how we've transformed the landscapes, which have made us come into contact with different animals and in different situations than ever before.

So, all species have their own microbes and own pathogens, you know, every single one of us in this room and every species on the planet.

But it's just how we've changed that transmission dynamics means that we're creating these really unhealthy landscapes for us and for wildlife, and it means that those microbes can have a bigger chance of getting into the human population.

Erica, let's move on to you now.

So, as you know, it's slightly changed now.

It's what is better backs on Neil Armstrong.

And

you

have one minute on Neil Armstrong

starting now.

Well actually the first animal in space was a fly.

So I just say that in 1947 and that was that's the nice thing to start.

Now a number of there's a lot of them and I know a lot of people won't like the fact there's a lot of them but we do need them.

There's 165,000 described species so far on the planet.

There's over 7,000 alone in the UK.

So they absolutely dominate.

And we need them to dominate because they're so important when it comes to all ecosystem services.

So you would often come across a fly when they're maybe, I don't know, rolling around feces.

And you might not like that.

But just imagine if they weren't rolling around a feces.

You'll be swimming in a quagmire of it with a long dead relative floating along beside you.

So they're really important recyclers of the planet.

They're really important pollinators.

Yes, you have tequila, but I'll give you chocolate.

And more people like chocolate, and that's because of the flies.

They're really important as predators, and they're not just really good predators.

Some of them are completely amazing because a lot of them are venomous.

And so,

my God, I haven't even started.

That's what happened to me.

You were even better this time in putting people off their tea.

In the fact that not only did you mention dead bodies in excrement, but then you went straight into chocolate.

So, you made the link so

I don't like chocolate at all.

Right, I'm just going to say silk production, bioluminescence, smart needles, and cryo freezing.

They can go, they can desiccate and they can go into liquid nitrogen back off

so just gonna just the liquid nitrogen thing then just run us through that right there's a it's called it's a sleeping chironomid and actually NASA are looking at the sleeping chronomid because it does all sorts of crazy stuff and I'm a bit nervous'cause Brian's sitting there and I'm like oh I'm I'm venturing too far out of my territory here.

But this chronomid, it's called a sleeping chironomid, it lives in the desert and when it went and it lives obviously, these are non-biting midges, sorry, for non.

And the larvae live in little water bodies, and water bodies desiccate quite quickly.

So they make a little cocoon out of mud and they stand up in it, this little maggot goes,

and then they basically just desiccate.

And they desiccate 90% of their body.

That's it.

Three percent is liquid left.

And therefore, they are able to survive extreme.

And in a lab, they lived for 17 years like this.

Now, what lovely scientists are doing, they're being really horrible, they're trying them out in all sorts of different things.

So,

they've boiled these.

It gets worse.

So, they boiled them at 100 degrees for five minutes, and then they've taken them out and put them in normal water, like room temperature, and they gradually rehydrate and they're fine and they carry on to adulthood.

So, they thought, okay, let's try something more.

So, they've boiled them at five minutes at 200 degrees, and they've survived.

They have taken them down to minus 190 degrees for a couple of minutes, and again, they've survived.

They've taken them to minus 260 degrees, and they've survived.

They've put in 100% ethanol, and they've survived for seven days.

They have thrown radiation at them, and they can, is it greys?

Is it yep, they can survive 7,000 greys.

So, I mean, they're a bit weird afterwards.

That definitely is.

But these little creatures can do all sorts of amazing things.

What do you mean they're a bit weird afterwards?

You've got to run me through that.

Are all these experiments hosted by Anton Deck?

Well, they don't, these ones haven't made it to adulthood, so they will survive a couple of weeks.

But the fact that they have been revived, because they go through what's called cryptobiosis,

it's not like a hibernation.

They just don't metabolize one bit.

It's interesting, so essentially, you said they can survive for,

well, almost ever in this state.

One reason is because all the water comes out, and I suppose that's why you can freeze them, because the thing that destroys organisms when they freeze is the expansion of the water in the cells, isn't it?

Yeah.

So I understand that.

But in terms of boiling or subjecting to very high temperatures, you would think that the proteins and the structure of the thing would break down.

But I suppose

the question is why?

Because obviously, you know, from an evolutionary perspective,

is it just a byproduct of the fact that these things can be frozen at normal temperatures?

But it happens that you can take the thing down to minus 170?

I'm guessing that.

I'm guessing they didn't think.

Where do they live, Erica?

Do they get desiccated?

Not to that extreme.

Yeah, but they will get desiccated a lot, but they are not going to be subjected to boiling temperatures like that.

I mean, the water bodies will get very hot, but they're not boiling lakes.

When they're not having these awful experiments of withstanding torture, in their natural habitat,

what do they actually do?

Everything.

Because

the reason I want to survive is because I want to watch Homes Under the Hammer tomorrow.

I want to read a book.

I want to go for a bike ride.

I want to hang out with my wife and my child.

That's why I like surviving.

But these things I sort of get the impression they're really good at surviving, but then they don't take advantage of that.

Okay, they're not.

I like the idea that the fly's failure failure to enjoy homes under the hammer may well be its reason to be destroyed on the planet.

I just want to know what they do.

They have a lot of sex.

They have a huge fertility rate is one of the reasons they're the model organism on the planet.

Animals.

So Drosophila, why Drosophila became such an amazing lab animal was because basically the turnover, they were small, they ate basically bananas, it was great, and they were very reproductive.

So they were able to do very complicated experiments.

When previously, when they're looking at genetics, they were using hairs.

And that's just a long time of waiting.

What range of lifespans do flies have?

What's the shortest-lived and the longest-lived?

Well, shortest-lived for the whole lifespan, this is what we're going to talk about.

The whole lifespan is a couple of weeks.

But there are some adults that only survive for two hours.

The male, actually, the male survives for two and a half hours, and the female is half an hour as an adult.

It's rapid.

That has made the, and they go through this experiment and survive into adulthood seem less impressive.

That's right.

But bats, on the other hand, live an inordinately long time, don't they?

Yeah, they're the longest lived mammal.

If you do a whole graph of like lifespan along the bottom and size, they're you know outliers because they live the kind of similar size mammal to a bat, say, would be like a little mouse, which would be living 18 months or something.

And the similar size bat would be 41 years or something like that.

So it's because of this kind of DNA repair mechanism that they have, we think.

So 40 years.

That's the record, 41.

I just wonder if they could have lived even longer.

And then one scientist went, it's lived till 41.

I wonder if it survives in liquid nitrogen.

Oh, no, it doesn't.

There we go.

I find it interesting, though.

You know, looking from an evolutionary perspective, it's interesting that you could ask the question, why only live half an hour as an adult?

Or you could ask the question, what advantage does a bat have for living forty years?

I suppose you're suggesting it's a side effect of its ability to repair itself.

And it's also a side effect of the fact that it has very little mortality, so that it tries to optimize.

You know, life is a huge optimization game, right?

So that you grow as large as you can be and then you start reproducing.

And you know, evolutionary in evolutionary terms.

And so, bats have very low mortality, they take ages to kind of get to adult size compared to a similarly sized mammal like a rat or a mouse.

So, they just like live in live in the slow lane, they give birth to one baby each.

You know, they have a low reproductive turnover, which makes them more vulnerable to you know, things that might happen, like you know, deforestation or a disturbance disturbing a roost, because they have such a slow life, slow reproductive strategy.

They kind of totally

really focus on living slowly.

And so, if anything disrupts that, it's a big problem for them.

That's interesting because there's a lot of flies that only give birth to one young at a time.

And these flies are found on bats.

Are they?

Yeah.

No bats.

Yeah, no, that's why I met Susie because we were checking out for flies on bats.

Who's Susie?

My little fruit bat from her.

Oh, we're seeing.

And honestly, you don't pay anything.

No, I do.

It's such a pity because suddenly there was common ground and then

she blew it.

Perfect second reel of the movie.

Hey, they're getting on.

Oh, no, in this Mills and Boone romance, they've fallen apart again.

These are wingless flies living on bats.

And they give birth to one.

They give birth to live young, so the flies themselves get pregnant.

Wow.

Yeah, they've got internal lactating glands.

What?

Tits on the inside.

And they will nurture.

I don't know if I'm allowed to say that for radio four.

Tits on the inside.

Also, if that is not going to be sampled within the next year by someone, a tits on the inside is undoubtedly.

It might not be a Christmas number one, but I could see it being an Easter number five.

So

the life cycle of the bat flight, what's it called, by the way?

There's two family.

Well, we're arguing because we may sync them into one family, but there's the Nick Terrobeards and the Strebs, Streblidae.

And they,

most of them, if they've got wings, they won't have them for long.

Some, arguably the weirdest bat, weirdest fly I think I know of one is that when she gets pregnant, she then sticks her head in the side of the bat and she rips off her wings and her legs, and then she basically invaginates her abdomen over her body.

So she looks like an inverted pear.

Just looks really weird.

But yeah, and she will then give birth to maybe four or five young.

I love the fact, again, someone at home they've given up on their chocolate they went i'll just have this pair oh but this is getting ridiculous how does she always know

these flies the their their offspring is like 40 of their body weight that's true for bats too actually we have

got we've got to do right a paper on this i i got there's a word invaginate

i mean that's not just tits on the inside that's everything on the inside then isn't it that's yeah imagine pulling your butt cheeks so far apart and then wrapping them over your head.

It's a really interesting period of a show, isn't it?

Where you go, does this one just become the legendary one that never went out?

This is, and it seems to me, but I'm fascinated.

Well, actually, just in terms of these things like the loss of wings, the idea that there is something that you develop that you will use very, very briefly, it will then be destroyed because its function has been wreaked.

Yeah, loads of flies do it.

There's a group of a family of flies called forids, the horrid forids, because they're quite difficult to identify.

But there's the ones that live in coffins, so they're very important for forensics.

So, if you were to bury a body, please, I don't want to know about it if you do,

when they talk about them being six foot under, because these flies, the males will lift the females up.

Sometimes they don't have wings to start with at all, but if they do, they kind of throw them down, and the female then rips her wings off to enable her to bury down to the coffin, to the corpse, to lay her eggs on it.

Which is that, I mean, how that starts in the first place, the evolutionary advantage of like those those sorts of things happening, I just think are quite fascinating.

There are some

bats which haven't lost the ability to fly, but they do like hopping and running on the ground.

See, that's what I wanted to ask you about.

So, I'm fascinated with things like the development of, well, at what point we see the ancestor of the bat that there is the mammal that flies, because there are so few mammals that do fly.

Yeah, it's a bit of a contested issue, actually.

We think it was probably an animal that was arboreal in a tree was kind of leaping off those trees to start to fly, you know, and spreading wings, and then that evolved into flight.

But the flight in bats is really different to birds.

Bats are called chiroptera, so which means hand-wing,

and it means that they have expanded their hand basically into a wing.

But some of the wings have evolved into

that they use them to jump.

So the vampire bat, there's only three vampire bats, three bats, which drink blood out of 1,400.

Just saying.

I mean, I went to a school with 1,400 kids in it, and someone said only three of them drink blood.

Would seem that was pretty bad odds.

So

see what he's saying there.

But

they do.

So vampire bats can leap really high into the air from a standing start because they need to get onto the things that they're drinking, like cattle, for example.

But this is great.

But like hoverflies can do all of this, but better.

You know, they do jump jet.

In fact, there's lots of people at Imperial right now looking at hoverflies for jump jet technology because they're amazing at their vertical lifts.

They can like stay mid-air, they can yaw, they can roll, they can fly upside down, they can do all of these huge migrations as well.

There's a fly that flies over from Africa to UK.

So this little thing, not a big flappy thing, little thing, people forget how amazing these wild animals flying around your living room really are.

Well, that's I mean, it's you know, at the beginning we were talking a little bit about the fact that both you are dealing with you know creatures that are vilified and and have been vilified in popular culture and generally as well.

Do you feel you're beginning to win the war to stop people swatting them away?

No.

I hope so.

And I've just I just the fact that it's really hard to swap them.

Have people not thought about this?

So the processes, they are they are they've got such fast neurological pathways.

So they see everything.

There's just their eye facets, you You know, they may only have 5,000 eye facets, which like the omatidia.

So dragonflies have 36,000, or bats have two eyes?

Two, just saying.

But, you know, you've got all this, and they, but within it, how they differ from the other insects is that their photo cell, which in the other insects is eight fused together, the flies have got them all separated again.

So they are seeing all these multiple angles.

Then why can't it find the open window?

Now there's a difference.

There is a difference.

Right, now that's a brilliant question.

No, no, but

I have been asked this a lot.

I have been.

Now, they see in UV A, UVB, okay?

So that is refracted by the glass anyway.

So they've got weird things going on.

Plus, loads of things land on the window.

They taste with their feet.

So they're tasting all sorts of strange things going, oh, you know what, your house is stilthy.

I don't know you personally,

but your house is stealthy.

And they can smell it from ages, you know, far, far away.

So they're in there.

Why would they go outside

when they've got a warm, like, very nice, protective environment?

They don't register home ownership.

They don't get it.

That's one of my issues with them.

It's one of the reasons you're always watching Homes Under the Hammer.

Can't live in this smelly old house full of flies.

I've got to find somewhere else to live.

I mean, you mentioned echolocation, and that is, you know,

Erica, you know, went, oh, they've only got two eyes.

But I remember someone once saying, how do bats get around?

They basically just shout at things to find out where they are, which is such a beautiful

description.

Oh, there's someone over there.

So, can you run us through a little bit about how that works then and what we know of how it works?

Yeah, I mean, it's really

fascinating that they've evolved this capacity to emit sounds and then bounce those sounds off objects and then understand how the frequencies are changing as they come back and interpret that and then turn that into an actual shape or where they are or what the object is.

And in fact, that kind of abilities can be trained into humans.

And some people that are visually impaired have been using that kind of technology and actually training themselves with clickers and to click and interpreting the echoes when they get back.

And there's some really fascinating studies where you know somebody who was visually impaired actually saw the stairs from their house for the first time after training their brain into having this input of sound rather than vision, which is really fascinating.

You know, when you think about how that actually works in your brain.

You can actually, because it's actually the brain is actually in a case, in a darkened case, right?

So it's just getting input of light from your eyes, but that's the same kind of input you're getting from these echoes as they're bouncing into

your ears instead.

So I think it's a really fascinating area.

And there's like huge arms races going on between insects and bats.

So moths, some moths can hear.

Sneaky moths.

Yeah, so some of them can hear bats actually echolocating

and will take evasive action.

So they'll fold up their wings and drop out the sky for a bit just to get out of the range.

Or bats can do a countermeasure where they can go silent for a bit just to eavesdrop on the moths.

Or some moths will jam bats so they make a jamming signal.

And so the bat's like, whoa, what's happening?

and can't spot them.

And it's not just insects either, like plants do it.

So some plants have evolved leaf shapes which are parabolic.

And so when the bat bat is coming in to pollinate, it kind of says, I'm here, I'm here, you know, because it's got this lovely kind of shaped leaf which sends the signal back out to the bats, so they can, it's like you know, waving flags at the airport, like park here, park here, come in.

I did just want to explore very briefly.

You talk, you mentioned pollination there.

We've talked about the threats from insects, mosquitoes, bats, and so on.

What would you say to people who think, particularly, let's talk about mosquitoes, for example, it seems as if it would be a good idea to remove mosquito just very naively, given that malaria is

probably the greatest killer of humans.

So, why is it that we shouldn't consider controlling species that are dangerous to us?

We can both answer this.

Okay, so there's 3,500 described species of mosquito, and they occur all over the planet in cold regions, Arctic, and in the warm regions that we know.

And of those 3,500, 150 of those species are important vectors for these diseases.

Maybe about 20 of them are the ones that really do all the damage.

But that's only the females that are the vectors.

The females and the males are also pollinators massively.

The males will never blood feed, so they're going around pollinating.

Now, we don't know.

We give these names to these mosquitoes.

We have spent so little time understanding their ecology.

Now, going back to the Arctic, there's 4,000 described species there of insects, 2,000 of them are flies, and quite a lot of them are the mosquitoes.

They're really important Arctic pollinators.

They exist in regions we don't know.

Now, they're larvae, there's a lot of them, and they are really good food.

So, if you suddenly get rid of a food source for the lot of the higher animals to feed on, you're suddenly having a massive knock-on effect.

So, we do not know the unintended consequences of eradicating the species.

They have looked in areas where cities in the Congo Basin have gradually hit forests.

I mean, we've seen what happens when we do that.

And the malaria has jumped into these new species.

So, even if we did eradicate these mosquitoes, what's to say something isn't going to come in and fill that vacuum?

I mean, I would just add, you know, I just completely agree with Erica.

I know, shocking.

I completely agree with you.

I think that there are loads of unintended consequences for doing such a thing.

I mean, there was a mass spraying of DDT to control crop pests and mosquitoes in the States in the fifties, and that kind of led to a huge environmental problem where DDT went up the food chain into birds and caused a huge devastation in populations, and that led to the environmental movement, because that was Rachel Carson who said

this is a silent spring.

She wrote a book called Silent Spring.

But you know, these are really hard questions because controlling populations of mosquitoes does help people survive.

When we've used smart technology, when we've used different technology, that's always backfired.

The best things that have helped are bednets and things like that.

When we've understand the ecology, we've said, hold on, these are night feeders.

Let's give them that.

Let's give protective clothing.

We create a barrier.

We break that rather than trying to use this kind of massive hand that's going to slam down on populations.

Can't you also control it it by drinking a lot of gin and tonic?

I'm trying.

It does work though, doesn't it?

Yeah.

You know, actually, there was

a beer created when there was a black fly outbreak in Dorset in the 60s.

But it was really strong, it had ginger in, and I guess it works if you have enough.

You can just take care.

And in terms of bats, I mean, clearly, well, Dave mentioned it, of course, COVID came into humans from bats.

We think.

We think.

So,

in terms of that, is the answer really to limit our interaction as much as possible?

Is that the way we're going to prevent future coronaviruses or whatever it may be, jumping species?

Well, I think the biggest issue is that when we degrade landscapes, when we chop forests downs and turn them into something else, you change the communities of animals that are present in those landscapes.

So, this could be insects too, right?

And you have these animals which

can survive in these degraded spaces, they invest less in immunity, they reproduce faster because they're kind of more stressed, you know, they have to survive.

And it tends to be those species which host these pathogens.

And it and we can show globally that this is what's happening to our environments, which they're becoming more degraded, the communities of animals in them are changing because they're trying to survive, and they're more likely to be hosts of these pathogens, which are you know, jump into humans.

So, the answer is to restore these habitats and make sure that we're living in an environment which is healthy, not just for them, but for us as well.

Yeah, we need to kind of get the balance back.

We need to, and we have one planet, and if we carry on at the rate we're doing, we're not going to do the, you know, you're seeing it already with species loss of insects and things like that.

And it's only taken people now to realize why insects are important.

So it was like, you know, save your panda.

I mean, at the end of the day, no offense to bats, because I do like bats.

You can get rid of all mammals and it won't have any consequence to the planet.

Some bats can stay, okay, because of tequila.

I'll do that, right?

Those can stay.

But if you get rid of insects, we would just fall apart within months.

And that's, you know,

I want to live with them.

I think they're very nice.

So we've got to the point now.

I suppose the reason for doing the show was the ultimate message: kill all mammals.

And

I did want to ask one question.

We had a question.

We thought, you know, often when we speak to scientists, we speak about a scientist, for example, who studies Mars

and they'd want to go to Mars.

Brian Blessed, famously,

wants to go to Mars, you little bastard.

So we thought we'd ask a, so you know, we talked about the way that bats experience the world, insects experience the world, and we thought it'd be quite a bizarre question to ask you both.

So, Erica first, if you could experience the world like any particular insect, it's almost like a David Cronenberg film.

If you could become a particular insect, what would you, what, what, what, what, which insects would you become?

Which fly would you like to be?

And this is eventually going to be like a version of stars in your eyes.

Tonight,

I'm going to be Drosophila.

I can't decide whether he's either a robber fly or a beefly.

Robber flies, because they're just the most amazing aerial predators out.

They're highly venomous.

They've got supreme sight.

Their flying abilities are amazing.

They're hard.

They look amazing.

But beeflies, like they're really naughty, but really good pollinators.

I mean, their larvae eat baby bees, and she's basically got a machine gun.

Well, she has a little bum bag, which I think, you know, I've got a COVID bottom as I describe it.

And I quite like, you know, just laying eggs mid-air and just hurling them around the garden.

I think

my level of it.

And Kate, what's the bat with the lifestyle you most envy?

I think it might be the hammer-headed fruit bat.

So, I don't know whether you want to have a look at this online later, but it's got an enormous head.

The main one that looks like a dog.

Yeah,

and they have this enormous kind of nose that they go around honking.

Honestly, they honk, honk, honk, like this.

And so, when the males are attracting females, they gather all into a little

leck, which is called a leck, and the males are performing for these females that come and go, oh, yeah, amazing.

And they do this honking, and it's it's just incredible.

Absolutely incredible.

What a lifestyle to go around with this massive

show.

Not the image now.

Basically, you two with your different life.

You're down there honking.

She's chucking eggs around and eating bees.

Dave, have you.

So, Dave, what have you decided?

I think the winner

is the plant that's parabolic.

I think that's better than both bats and flies.

I think that's amazing.

I think it's all interesting, but when you say, you know, you shouldn't have a go at the mosquito, it's just doing what it was put on this earth to do.

I think a human instinct is to try and swat a fly.

So we're just doing what we were put on this earth to do.

Well, I think, yeah, I think we'll throw this to the audience, by the way.

Let's just have a quick vote in terms of we're going to do bats and flies.

Yeah, well, I don't know how we're going to do it.

All right, put your hands up.

If you support the bats.

See, I've got to say, Brian, for radio, I'd have gone with the making a noise.

You actually, for once,

have a point.

Which noise shall we have the audience make?

Honking.

A honk.

If you support the bats, honk.

Which bat was it?

A hammer-headed fruit bat.

Honk like a hammer-headed fruit bat.

And if you support the flies, then what, Erica, what's the fly noise that's throwing egg at us, I guess.

Oh, it was 50.

Exactly balanced.

Flies are balanced.

The most successful vote given to the public that's happened in the last 10 years.

We also, we asked the audience a question as well.

We wanted to know, would you rather be a bat or a fly?

And we would like them to explain why.

I think you've got the bat ones, haven't you?

Yes, and Dave Jotson as well.

Right, and I think I've got some fly ones.

Those are the fly ones.

So, the first one is from Tim.

A fly.

Batman is no superhero, just a rich bloke who thinks he's tough.

The fly, on the other hand, starring Jeff Goldblum, is a clear winner.

And I totally agree with you.

By the way, Erica, just out of interest, how scientifically accurate do you think the metamorphosis of Jeff Goldblum from Brundle into Brundle fly is?

Well, actually, I've been asked to review it on that very basis.

And

yeah, this is what I get paid to do.

Now, honestly, this is...

So the feeding habits changed remarkably.

Absolutely brilliant.

His sexual appetite increased enormously.

Totally on.

It's only at the end when he starts...

dropping bits off and becoming weird that's when i kind of lost it because he would have emerged as a fully formed fly as it were from that stage because he's an adult so i mean you know the behavior, the appetite, all that his appetite is increased,

his drive, etc., that's really good.

Morphologically, it was a bit poor.

Then, Kate, can you review Batman?

Well, I mean, the Echolocation didn't really feature until far on on the movie.

So, I mean, I do like all the Batman, they are pretty nice.

But they're not very bat-based.

I mean, the fly is pretty fly-based.

Batman has a belt.

Now, all that I'm saying is that we've looked at it.

No, he's got a little visor as well, a bat-shaped visor.

Okay.

To be honest, I feel let down for you.

I'm not attacking the bats.

It just feels like it's a man with a belt.

I'm going to bring this back to the battle.

I want to bring this back to serious science.

So, Kristen Clara has said he'd rather be a bat than a fly because nobody ever got their foreskin jammed in a bat.

We had to explain that to the producer.

I don't get this this one at all.

And then we explained puns, which is amazing as a producer on Radio 4 to have come across a pun for the first time after 25 years.

I don't know how that's.

You explained that some flies do get things jammed in bats, didn't you?

Yeah, you did, the pear-shaped ones.

Barry, you've made a fundamental error here, Barry.

He says a fruit bat has a much healthier diet than excrement, to which I think the obvious rejoinder is: well, what about a fruit fly?

Yeah.

You know,

you haven't helped solve the debate, have you?

You've just fired it up again, Barry.

Some of us will be reading these as jokes, others will merely turn this into a moment of pedantry or footnotes.

Kath said, I'd like to be a bat because my husband says that I have the hearing of one.

Someone with the unlikely name of Max Power says, bat, because flies tend to get swallowed by old ladies.

And then Sandy says, tough call, but it's a bat by a squeak.

Well, thank you very much for your jokes and your answers.

And thank you very much to our panel, Erica McCouster, Kate Jones, and Dave Gorman.

Now, next week, we're moving from the skies to the seas and exploring the deep oceans.

We'll be asking, what's better, a fish or a sponge?

No, no.

No,

we won't, that's cheap.

And that's the line from Whitnell and I, isn't it?

No, Whitnell and I is, are you a sponge or a stone?

I'd rather be a sea squirt, because they eat their own brains.

They do, though.

Sea squirts eat their own brains.

Why do you want to be one?

Because it just mine keeps making noises and I don't like it.

So I'm going to eat my brain and watch Goggle Box or Home's Under the Hammer and just relax.

Well, you can't watch.

If you've eaten your brain, you can't even watch Home for the Hammer.

Oh, yeah, you can.

You can.

Anyway, so that's what we're going to be looking at.

Goodbye.

Shock or Seahor.

In the

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now, nice again.

Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, and you're dead to me from Radio 4 is back.

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