At Home - Bill Bryson [135]
The world has far more bats than most people realize. In fact, about a quarter of all mammal species—some eleven hundred in all—are bats. They range in size from tiny bumblebee bats, which really are no bigger than bumblebees and therefore are the smallest of all mammals, up to the magnificent flying foxes of Australia and south Asia, which can have wingspans of six feet.
At times in the past attempts have been made to capitalize on bats’ special qualities. In the Second World War, the American military invested a great deal of time and money in an extraordinary plan to arm bats with tiny incendiary bombs and to release them in vast numbers—as many as a million at a time—from planes over Japan. The idea was that the bats would roost in eaves and roof spaces, and that soon afterward tiny detonators on timers would go off and they would burst into flames, causing hundreds of thousands of fires.
Creating sufficiently tiny bombs and timers required a great deal of experiment and ingenuity, but finally in the spring of 1943 work had progressed sufficiently that a trial was set to take place at Muroc Lake, California. It would be putting it mildly to say that matters didn’t go quite to plan. Remarkably for an experiment, the bats were fully armed with live bomblets when released. This proved not to be a good idea. The bats failed to light on any of the designated targets, but did destroy all the hangars and most of the storage buildings at the Muroc Lake airport, as well as an army general’s car. The general’s report on the day’s events must have made interesting reading. In any case, the program was canceled soon afterward.
A rather less harebrained, but ultimately no more successful, plan to make use of bats was conceived by a Dr. Charles A. R. Campbell of Tulane University Medical School. Campbell’s idea was to build giant “bat towers,” where bats would roost and breed, and then go out to eat mosquitoes. This, Campbell believed, would substantially reduce malaria and also provide guano in commercially worthwhile quantities. Several of the towers were built, and some actually still stand, if precariously, but they never worked. Bats, it turns out, don’t like to be told where to live.
In America, bats were persecuted by health officials for years because of inflated—and at times irrational—concerns that they carried rabies. The story began in October 1951 when an anonymous woman in west Texas, the wife of a cotton planter, came across a bat in the road outside her house. She thought it was dead, but when she bent to look at it, it leaped up and bit her on the arm. This was highly unusual. American bats are all insectivores and none had ever been known to bite a human. She and her husband disinfected and dressed the wound—it was just a small wound—and didn’t think anything more of it. Three weeks later the woman was admitted to a hospital in Dallas in a delirious condition. She was “wildly agitated,” and unable to speak or swallow. Her eyes were filled with terror. She was beyond help. Rabies can be successfully treated, but only if the treatment is immediate. Once symptoms start, it’s too late. After four days of unutterable distress, the woman slipped into a coma and died.
Now scattered cases of people