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FAR NORTH QUEENSLAND, Australia — Australia is famously a place with some of the world’s most dangerous and frightening animals. Venomous spiders. Deadly snakes. Jellyfish with fatal stings.
But it is also home to one of the world’s cutest: the flying fox, also known as the giant fruit bat. I mean, look at this animal.
This is a baby bat taking a bubble bath. If it doesn’t melt your heart, nothing will.
In northeastern Australia, not far from the coastal city of Cairns, is a place called Tolga Bat Hospital. It is, as its name suggests, a hospital for bats — one of the only such facilities on the planet. And it’s also one of the few places you can see a baby bat getting a bubble bath.
The hospital, which has just one full-time paid employee but a cadre of volunteers, has been treating bats for more than 30 years. It comprises a few small buildings with treatment rooms, cold storage for fruit, and a nursery for orphan bats, as well as several outdoor wire enclosures. The largest cage is akin to a long-term care facility; it’s for bats that can no longer fly and will live out their lives at the hospital.
Tolga Bat Hospital cares for as many as 1,000 bats a year, the bulk of which are spectacled flying foxes, an endangered species and one of four distinct kinds of flying foxes in mainland Australia. They come in with disease, heat stress, or injuries from barbed wire. The hospital also cares for hundreds of baby spectacleds — named for the lighter fur around their eyes that makes it look like they’re wearing glasses — that have lost their mothers and can’t survive on their own.
On a warm afternoon in December, I visited the hospital with Australian photographer Harriet Spark. We met a lot of cute bats — and they were hard not to love. Flying foxes are furry with expressive eyes, large ears, and a dog-like snout. But it was the hospital founder and director, Jenny Mclean, whom I found even more endearing.
“You meet a bat, and they’re worth caring about,” Mclean, 71, told me that afternoon, as she fed a sick adult bat fruit juice from a syringe. “They have serious threats that they’re facing, all of them human-induced.”
Mclean, who works around the clock at the hospital and doesn’t pay herself, said she feels a responsibility to help these creatures — not only because they’re suffering at our expense but because they help keep our planet healthy. Flying foxes are exceptionally good at pollinating plants and dispersing their seeds, Mclean said.
Giving back to these animals in some way, she said, is the least we can do.
Why Australia’s flying foxes need a hospital
The nursery is a small, two-story building with a verandah that looks out onto the lush grounds of the hospital. Most of the babies were outside when we visited, hanging with their feet on several mesh metal shelves. Spectacled flying foxes are enormous: These animals were about 2 months old and already football-sized. By the time they grow up, their wingspan could reach more than three feet.
The bats, still too young to fly, hung upside down, wrapped in their own wings, alongside stuffed animals. The stuffies, which Mclean buys from a local secondhand store, are meant to mimic mother bats, and the babies will often cling to them for comfort, Mclean told me. Some of the bats were drinking from bottles of flying fox formula attached to the shelves.
Even younger bats were in a room inside the building. Infants under one week are kept in an incubator because they have trouble regulating their body temperature. Slightly older babies are kept in plastic boxes with heating pads and socks that they can cling to. For feeding, “box babies” are swaddled in cloth around a small rectangular pillow so their wings are contained — forming baby bat burritos. A few had silicon pacifiers in their mouths.
Nearly all of these orphans lost their moms to Australian paralysis ticks: parasites that carry a potent neurotoxin in their saliva. When paralysis ticks bite bats and other animals without natural immunity, such as pet cats and dogs, the insects can, as their name suggests, cause paralysis and, eventually, heart failure.
During tick season, which typically runs from October to December, hospital workers search the ground below colonies, or “camps,” for infected bats, which often fall out of trees. If the infection is mild, workers treat the animal with an anti-toxin at the hospital. The babies, meanwhile, are often spared from paralysis. Mothers likely pick up ticks while they’re foraging without their young, Mclean said, and the parasites latch on before they have a chance to crawl onto the babies. That leads to an abundance of orphans in need of care.
Paralysis ticks live all across eastern Australia, but they only seem to affect spectacled flying foxes in the Atherton Tablelands, where the hospital is located, Mclean told me. The reason is still a mystery. One explanation, Mclean said, is that spectacleds in this region feed on the berries of an invasive shrub called wild tobacco, where they encounter the ticks. While the plant grows in other parts of Australia where both ticks and flying foxes are found, Mclean said, the moist climate of the Tablelands may make ticks more likely to venture out of the grass and into the branches of the invasive shrub. That’s where the flying foxes feed.
That afternoon, I followed Mclean into the main hospital building, where she treats adult bats with paralysis. Rows of small metal cages and cloth boxes sat on shelves along the wall. In some of the enclosures, large flying foxes hung calmly from the top, whereas in others, the animals — still facing the effects of paralysis — were lying down.
Using a towel, Mclean gently grabbed one of the bats from its cage to see if it would eat. The animal was having trouble swallowing, Mclean told me, as she placed a syringe with apple and mango juice in its mouth. The bat took a few sips and then pulled its head away. Mclean moved it into a small plastic bin for plan B: seeing if the animal would eat a small piece of pear instead. The bat began to chew, but then spat it out. “You have not got a good swallow, my girl,” Mclean said.
Tick paralysis is just one of the threats to Australia’s flying foxes, many of which are getting worse. Little reds, another species, get tangled in barbed wire, causing tears in their wings. Spectacleds in the Tablelands, meanwhile, are increasingly born with cleft palate syndrome (for reasons that are not yet clear), which makes it hard for them to feed. And more recently, severe heat waves tied to climate change have decimated flying fox populations. In 2018, unrelenting heat killed about 23,000 spectacled flying foxes in Far North Queensland, nearly a third of the entire population. Mclean says she received about 500 orphans that year from the heat wave alone.
Nonetheless, these animals lack support — they’re “maligned,” Mclean said — especially compared to koalas and other furry animals in Australia. “There are not that many people who will champion them,” she told me.
Bats have a bad rap, in part, because they can carry diseases. Flying foxes are no exception — in rare cases, they can carry Australian bat lyssavirus, a relative of rabies. What gets less attention is the fact that humans almost never contract a disease from flying foxes. “We get about a thousand sick and injured bats a year, and we get a lyssavirus bat once every three years,” Mclean said. (Workers at Tolga Bat Hospital get vaccinated before handling bats as a safety precaution.)
Ultimately, flying foxes are not a real threat to humans, she said. Disproportionately, humans harm them. “It’s this whole thing of, are we willing to share the planet or not?” she said. “If you’re not willing to share the planet, you are going to destroy the planet.”
If flying foxes continue to disappear, so will essential services like pollination and seed dispersal that keep forests alive, Mclean told me. “You can’t have a healthy person unless you’ve got healthy wildlife and a healthy environment.”
These three bats at a wildlife rescue center look like characters from a storybook. In this video you can see them tucked into a little bed together, safe and cozy. Each one's wrapped in a pretty blanket like a tiny fairy. — Read the rest
The post Watch: Baby bats cuddle together during wildlife rehabilitation appeared first on Boing Boing.
General Electric researcher C. D. Graham wrote the following Glossary for Research Reports in a 1957 issue of Metal Progress. Thanks are due to The Science Magpie for assistance with the post and to Futility Closet for valuable discussions.
It has long been known that… I haven't bothered to look up the original reference
… of great theoretical and practical importance … interesting to me
While it has not been possible to provide definite answers to these questions … The experiments didn't work out, but I figured I could at least get a publication out of it
The W-Pb system was chosen as especially suitable to show the predicted behaviour … The fellow in the next lab had some already made up
High-purity …
Very high purity …
Extremely high purity …
Super-purity …
Spectroscopically pure … Composition unknown except for the exaggerated claims of the supplier
A fiducial reference line … A scratch
Three of the samples were chosen for detailed study … The results on the others didn't make sense and were ignored
… accidentally strained during mounting … dropped on the floor
… handled with extreme care throughout the experiments … not dropped on the floor
Typical results are shown … The best results are shown
Although some detail has been lost in reproduction, it is clear from the original micrograph that … It is impossible to tell from the micrograph
Presumably at longer times … I didn't take time to find out
The agreement with the predicted curve is excellent … fair
… good … poor
… satisfactory … doubtful
… fair … imaginary
… as good as could be expected … non-existent
These results will be reported at a later date I might possibly get around to this sometime
The most reliable values are those of Jones He was a student of mine
It is suggested that …
It is believed that …
It may be that … I think
It is generally believed that … A couple of other guys think so too
It might be argued that … I have such a good answer to this objection that I shall now raise it
It is clear that much additional work will be required before a complete understanding … I don't understand it
Unfortunately, a quantitative theory to account for these effects has not been formulated Neither does anybody else
Correct within an order of magnitude Wrong
It is to be hoped that this work will stimulate further work in the field This paper isn't very good, but neither are any of the others in this miserable subject
Thanks are due to Joe Glotz for assistance with the experiments and to John Doe for valuable discussions Glotz did the work and Doe explained what it meant
Previously:
• Scientist's cat discovers a new virus, AGAIN
The post Decoding scientific papers: 1957 guide to what researchers mean appeared first on Boing Boing.
