Coronavirus Fact-Check, Poetry of Science, Social Bats. March 20, 2020, Part 2
Science Friday
Science Friday and WNYC Studios
4.4 • 6.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2020
⏱️ 47 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski, sitting in for Ira Flato, and I just want to note here, |
| 0:07.1 | Ira is fine. He's just spending this week at home, like most of you. He had planned to go to |
| 0:12.5 | spring training to see some baseball, and as they used to say about the Brooklyn Dodgers, |
| 0:16.1 | you're going to have to wait until next year. But you will not have to wait for Ira that long. |
| 0:20.6 | He's going to be back next week. Later this will not have to wait for Ira that long. He's going to be back |
| 0:21.2 | next week. Later this hour, our experts will weigh in on this week's coronavirus news stories, |
| 0:26.8 | plus a little science poetry to cleanse the palate. But first, since we're missing a lot of social |
| 0:32.0 | contact these days, let's talk about what we've learned from other social mammals. Take vampire bats, |
| 0:37.3 | for instance. Sometimes they get |
| 0:38.8 | along and sometimes they fight. When bats have strong bonds, they'll do things like groom each |
| 0:44.3 | other and share food by regurgitating blood into each other's mouths, which sounds gross unless |
| 0:50.3 | you're a bat. But when a vampire bat gets sick, it changes the way other bats interact with |
| 0:55.4 | them. In fact, the way they act is similar in some ways to how humans have reacted to COVID-19. |
| 1:01.9 | Jerry Carter is an assistant professor and behavioral ecologist at Ohio State University. |
| 1:07.2 | Jerry, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for being here. |
| 1:10.2 | Hi, yeah, thanks for inviting me. |
| 1:12.1 | So before we get started on connections to coronavirus, maybe you can give us an idea of just how social vampire bats are. |
| 1:20.7 | Yeah, so they have this food sharing behavior, which seems to be something that is an extension of parental care. |
| 1:27.3 | So all the mothers regurgitate food, blood, to their offspring. which seems to be something that is an extension of parental care. |
| 1:31.7 | So all the mothers regurgitate food, blood, to their offspring, |
| 1:34.7 | but they also do this for other adults, including unrelated adults. |
| 1:42.7 | When you study these vampire bats, you're just studying the females, right? |
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