Study: Dying Bats Lead to Dying Newborn Babies

My parents bought their first house circa 1970. It was a housing development & the house was brand new. No fences, patios, landscaping etc. All the dads got together & poured concrete for patios, put up fencing & laid down seed for lawns. The then smallish town was a bedroom community for Silicon Valley where my dad worked as an electrical design engineer. It had been farm land prior to the housing developers buying out the land. Anyway, I distinctly remember bats at night, especially in the summer. I also remember worms on the sidewalk after it rained, crickets & frogs. I lived in the suburbs my whole life & cannot remember the last time I saw/heard bats. Or saw worms on the sidewalk after it rained. We do have LOTSof frogs where I am currently because we back onto a creek. Squirrels & the occassional skunk & supposedly coyotes but I've never seen one in our present neighborhood (did see them near our home in Wa) Oh, & we also have RATS. We had RATS in Wa too. They had taken up residence under the house we were renting & it smelled really, really bad. It wasn't our responsibility or decision but the Property Managements to hire a rat catcher. I think he used traps but I'm not sure. He would come & crawl under the house with a bag & traps & emerge later with ...a full bag. I avoided him when he came.

I do appreciate an economist using his dark spooky powers for good and not evil.

I wake up every morning to the ho ho ho of an 🦉. Then the geese come followed by ravens and crows. What ever happened to roosters 🐓 🤔

You are awesome.

I live on rural farmland and the groundhogs are a big problem, they’ve chewed through wires in my car multiple times. We tried to have a vegetable garden, but the groundhogs ate everything before it even ripened. 🤬

I always understood the economics of antibiotics in cattle/pigs etc but I am surprised that modern farmers would care about giving painkillers to livestock. Is it just a thing in areas like India with a large Hindu population where cows might be work animals instead of human food? Video of veal calfs or stockyards at slaughter houses taken by animal rights activists does not suggest compassion or kindness as a part of agro-businesses game plan.

I miss bats. When I was a kid, we had so many. My brother and I would sit by the window at night watching them. Now, none. No bats anywhere near here.

something I found works for gardens and keeping moles, mice, and gophers out of them was to save my cat's litter and bury it in a line about a foot to foot and a half down in a 1 foot wide trench around the garden, after doing this for about 6 months to go around a 10x8 sized garden (two cats only) I found that even 5 years later, the burrowing still did not cross over that line to enter the garden area (rest of the yard was still soft and fluffy from them burrowing under the ground eating the grass's roots and such)

One of the best books I've ever read is James C Scott's Seeing Like A State, which expands on the principles discussed here in far too much depth for me to summarize at 4 in the morning.

I'm thankful to have a large number of vultures as my neighbors who are squatting in an empty house next door because people don't know how to not run over deer constantly down my road.

Do not tell your neighbours that flamethrowers are legal and available for sale in the US. It’s not as crazy as it first appears, they are used to clear brush. What is crazy is the lack of regulations for them.

Thanks!

Thanks

Another impact of diclophenac use: a lack of vultures to consume the dead for the Zoroastrian community. Traditionally, they were the most efficient consumers of human remains, but now, an ancient religion is struggling to adjust to a lack of vultures.

The podcast 99% Invisible did an episode about the vultures in India being killed by diclofenac a while ago. Episode 579, "Towers of Silence", if anyone wants to have a look or a listen.

Gophers (being from the gopher state): Lace Peanutbutter with Citric acid. Not a whole lot but just enough for the next step. Get a small animal water feeding bottle. Lace the water with Sodium-Bicarb (baking soda). You know when you get the right mixture when the PB is added to the water and you get just a hint of fizz. You need it to be a HINT because you need to entice them to have dinner and a beverage. Rodents can't burp or fart so they rupture their guts from the inside. Owls routinely vomit the hair and other things they can't digest. It is not as high a success rate as poison but worth a shot. I do it to the tree-rats eating holes in the side of my house.

I miss the Bay Area coyotes! In Austin (self-proclaimed Bat City) I feel we have a little better public understanding about bats and vultures in our ecosystem. But out here in the suburbs, where we hear firearms at any time of any day, I suspect our coyotes are scared further out of the area.

LOL, interesting that the assumption is the gophers will leave because the dog poop will make them worry about predators...instead of, just like anyone else, they don't enjoy having dog poop laying around in the middle of their homes. 😂

I recently went to a birds of prey talk and the speaker told us some really interesting stuff about vultures! -
- they help to reduce disease by cleaning up the carcasses of animals who carried disease bc their gut bacteria is so strong to the point of their poops being antibacterial !!
- they're a secondary victim of poaching, since they circle poached animals in large numbers, alerting rangers. e.g. some poachers have a practice of cutting open elephants and adding a chemical fatal to vultures and returning once they're dead to retrieve the ivory. Also apparently they don't get much conservation support due to how they're percived despite being endangered
- they aren't very dangerous to humans despite 'looking scary' since they're scavengers
- their heads look like that because they stick em in their messy dinner

also great video, thank you for your work! ❤

Lizards and turkeys get urban too. I've seen them in Vallejo and Pt Richmond frequently. Also spotted a coyote in the Chevron refinery.

Ive caught a lot of gophers with traps.(Like mouse traps) .works great

Some bats actually do have rabies, rare, but it can kill children. I like bats, but ewww, find a place for them; they need love- away from kids. Human greed, hubris or ignorance must account for massive human deaths-all under reported. Cheers from the Pacific West Coast of Canada.

While I am just as averse as yourself to Vlad the Impaler as a gopher solution, we humans have become such wusses, we can't even act in our own defense and help out our fellow animals to boot. While we are on the subject of self-destruction, maybe have that economist look at the relationship between wussery and our penchant for electing sociopaths and malignant narcissists.

❤❤❤

White-nose syndrome? I guess all the Don Jr jokes have been deleted.

You should hear barred owls "laughing." Without any context or explanation for what you're hearing, a pair of barred owls flirting with each other is legit terrifying.

Here's an opinion I believe to be true. Just in the years of the United States of America. We've destroyed ecosystems upon ecosystems in just 400 hundred years. In just the last 70 years, we've unalived thousands of species. The human species is an ignorant and destructive one. We will piss in our rivers and drink from it a hundred feet downstream. With the number of people voting for republicans who deny climate change, we are guaranteed to be gone by the 21st century begins or 22nd ,however it's said. The bottom line is that there aren't enough smart, caring people to fend off our demise. ✌️enjoy your day 🙃🙃

Instead of telling the politicians that babies are being killed by the downstream effects of irresponsible use of pesticides and pharmaceuticals, tell them that they are causing "unintended post-birth abortions." They'll have it banned by dinner time. The only downside is that they might institute a travel ban on pregnant women from outside the area traveling into those communities... 🙄

A note on the great horned owls: We also have long-eared and short-eared owls, and they have a similar call pattern, just higher pitched. I live on a canyon and love hearing them, but I'm a touch tone deaf and often have trouble telling them apart.

EGOSYSTEM is my new favourite word, thank you

I thought it was largely untrue that rotting animal bodies cause disease.

Apex for the apex predator!

I don't know what that was at the end of the video, but I want it for our miniature Dachshund George.

Gophers for coyotes I know I know it's serious

sounds like the gopher thing is straightforward, but are we sure of the correlation/causation aspect? couldn't the vulture thing just as easily have been that both the vultures and the deaths have the same root cause but were not causative? like what if people were dying from eating the sedative laden meat?

i know that we could read the papers, but that seems like an important aspect to cover of we're going to tell others about these papers.

I want to love bats however they freak me out because of how many of them have rabies. But obviously for the sake of the ecosystem I don’t want them to die

OMG you fell off just Give it up cat lady 🤣🤣

Omg your Chanel has no substance,I bet anyone in this comment section that you sleep with your cats.
Omg bad aging ewwwwwwwwww.

Before video: I'm assuming more bats means less insect-borne disease, and more vultures means less corpse-borne disease, and less of either means more disease in general?
After: Hmm, seems similar, but it's a snowball effect where poisoning everything to improve profits by killing all the herbivores kills all the carnivores and scavengers way faster, which means more herbivorous predation of crops which means more poisoning while profits still fail to improve, and of course humans and bystander species suffer terribly from all the increased pestilence (and probably from at least some of the increased pesticides too, but if you suggest that you might suffer legal consequences).
So, the same thing as with the sparrows famously killed to protect seeds being critical to prevent locust swarms, but it's not our enemies doing it so it's not seen as 'funny' or 'characteristic of a foolish and morally corrupt cultural character' and is instead an inconvenient and uncomfortable-to-mention topic that's easily brushed off as an 'unavoidable cost of doing business' or something like that... Sorry for being such a downer...

Wow - it's almost like ecosystems are really complex and what we do can strongly affect them. And we are a part of these ecosystems (a fact that many people seem not to believe).

<sigh> So depressing.

Sorry this is off topic for the video, but I thought there was a better chance you'd see it-

You've made several videos about aspartame, so you at least have a mild interest in sweeteners, artificial and not.

Have you ever looked into the study about the link between Sugar and Cancer?

Specifically the review: Understanding the Link between Sugar and Cancer: An Examination of the Preclinical and Clinical Evidence

Maybe you addressed it briefly in a previous video and I missed it, but it's something I would be interested in hearing you talk about.

It's why I loved living near greenbelts, back when I was in the city. Waking up to go to loo late at night usually has spooky ruru/moorpork hoots echoing for miles. Weirdly not as common, for me, to hear them now that I live rurally near much more native bush.

Rebecca a new "report" from an "org" just claimed that 5k kids received "trans surgery" on USA, I looked at the documents and the methods sound extra bogus but I don't have what's required to fully disprove them, coul you give them a look? I'm scared that this will lead to another increase in anti trans laws

Higher ice cream sales lead to more shark attacks.
~boB

It blows my brain how no one is able to grasp the concept that we are ALL CONNECTED ⁉️ 🤯

Can't cook a turkey 😂😂😂😂🎉🎉🎉🎉❤❤❤❤

When I was a kid we had a crazy neighbor that lived near my stepfather's family that used to shoot gophers with a shot gun. When he died it was as if his yard looked like a movie set about WWI. Thank God, Massachusetts now has seriously strict gun policies.

What goes into making an animal a "Halloween" animal? Bats, spiders, owls and black cats are all halloween animals, and while they are
"spooky", they're not usually dangerous. Snakes, scorpions, panthers and hornets are more dangerous, maybe they should be our Halloween rogue gallery. Hippos kill more people than any other non-human animal, maybe we should be decorating our spaces with spooky hippopotamuses. Humans are the most dangerous animal since they're the ones wrecking the planet, maybe going as a human to your Halloween party is the thing to do (everyone will assume you forgot to get a costume). In this 93-page essay, we will explore the possibilities of new "Halloween" animals and investigate why the current collection of "Halloween" animals got their status as a staple of... sound of me talking lowers as you walk away