Bat Bites!

Why a fascination for bats is really not that strange ...

Since my last Substack mentioned my love for Anne Rice and Interview With The Vampire, and I’m currently enjoying Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire trilogy, a rollicking combination of every vampire-related detail you’d forgotten you knew, I decided to keep on a roll … I recently read an ABC news article about a woman developing a deadly communicable virus after being bit by a bat. This was in the Pilbara, to the north of Western Australia, a region that has seventeen species of bat. According to Wikipedia, lyssavirus is a virus from the same family as influenza, Covid-19, polio, measles, mumps, rabies, Dengue, SARS, Ebola … in other words, the stuff of nightmares! The woman was bitten when she tried to get a bat out of her house and it bit her hand. Thankfully she’s now on preventative treatment, consisting of four painful injections at a hospital, but apparently at least four Australians have died as a result of bat bites! The woman was bitten by a leaf-nosed bat, one of a type of vampire bats.

Famously, Bram Stoker’s Dracula had the ability to change into a vampire bat, and these types of bats actually do feed on blood. And along with blood ingesting, Dracula shared similar elongated canine teeth, but vampire bats don’t suck, they pierce with their teeth then lap up the blood. And they’re not found in Transylvania, though apparently young men of nineteenth century Britain, like Stoker, became familiar with vampire folklore through the popular grand tour of Europe, especially visits to Eastern Europe, where vampire stories abounded. However, stories of blood-sucking demons were also known in ancient Mesopotamia, which fans of Anne Rice would know – shout out to Akasha, the Queen of the Damned.

Those who know me well know that bats are actually my favourite animals. I’m fascinated by the idea of a mammal that flies, that sense of the combination of two things that don’t normally go together, fur and wings. When I travelled to the Daintree in Far North Queensland, one of the many highlights was visiting the Bat Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre, where I had the joy of getting up close and personal with injured flying foxes. Sadly, these amazing creatures sometimes injure their wings on things like barbed wire fences, and once the membrane of their wings is damaged, it doesn’t heal, and they’ll never fly again. I’ve included photos of Old Boy, who I had the pleasure of meeting there. The name wasn’t an insult, or a reference to the Korean movie, but due to the fact that bats can live to thirty years of age.

Old Boy was also a big boy, but bats range in size. The bumblebee bat, from limestone caves along the Thai/Myanmar border, is the world’s smallest mammal, around three centimetres long and weighing roughly the same as a couple of paperclips. Whereas, the golden-crowned flying fox from the Philippines, is a megabat. It weighs over a kilo, with a wingspan over five feet, though apparently they’re not the human-sized bat they appear from the viral photo of one that did the rounds some years ago, and by all accounts, they’re very gentle. But if, like many people, you’re fearful of bats, the Mexican or Brazilian free-tailed bat can fly at 160 kilometres an hour, so you’re not going to outrun one of those suckers. No, wait, lappers?