SciShow Tangents is the lightly competitive knowledge showcase from the geniuses behind the YouTube series SciShow. Every other Tuesday, join Hank Green, Ceri Riley, and Sam Schultz as they try to one-up and amaze each other with weird and funny scientific research... while not getting distracted. There will be tangents about video games, music, weird smells, surprisingly deep insights about life, and of course, poop, but it always comes back to the science.
https://scishow-tangents.simplecast.com
episode 21: Bats
Bats have a bad reputation because of the ones that drink blood or spread disease, but these furry flying critters can be pretty cute! This week, we’re talking about everything from echolocation to weird potential uses for bat poop. Are there really bats with suction cups on their wings or is that just a cool toy idea? What is white nose syndrome and could vaping mushroom compounds… help? And what do you really think about Hank’s Dracula impression?
Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out themes for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions!
And if you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:
[Poem]
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-pitcher-plants-call-bats-get-their-poo-180956014/
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsbl.2010.1141
[Truth or Fail]
Bats that spend time on the ground:
http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2005/03/vampire-bats-keep-out-trouble-running-study-shows
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16621953
https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/creatura-blog/2018/01/why-fly-when-you-can-shuffle-the-lesser-short-tailed-bat-prefers-the-ground/
Diurnal bats:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/11/daytime-bats-help-explain-nocturnal-evolution/
https://blogs.plos.org/ecology/2017/06/29/bat-species-found-only-on-islands-in-trouble-worldwide/
https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/mamm.ahead-of-print/mammalia-2017-0128/mammalia-2017-0128.xml
Suction cup bats:
https://www.wired.com/2010/04/how-sucker-winged-bats-hang-on/
[Fact Off]
Bat & dolphin echolocation:
https://evolutionnews.org/2012/05/tangling_the_tr/
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2010/01/hear-bats-and-whales-share-sonar-protein
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(09)02073-9
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12511
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/refined-fine-tuned-placental-mammal-family-tree/
Moth echolocation blocker:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2009/07/moths-block-bats-sonar
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/325/5938/325?keytype=ref&siteid=sci&ijkey=GbDjRlkoHfRnY
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2009/07/17/tiger-moths-jam-the-sonar-of-bats/
http://jeb.biologists.org/content/214/14/2416
[Ask the Science Couch]
White-nose syndrome:
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/bat_crisis_white-nose_syndrome/Q_and_A.html
https://www.whitenosesyndrome.org/static-page/what-is-white-nose-syndrome
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-bats-could-bounce-back-devastating-white-nose-syndrome-180969378/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02441-z
https://www.mdpi.com/2309-608X/4/2/48
[Butt One More Thing]
Bat guano gunpowder:
https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/dkc09