Follow Mexico's 'Bat Man' on a Search for Vampire Bats | Short Film Showcase
[Music] To an untrained eye, you see a rainforest, but someone who has a little bit of information of what was going on there can see the effects of humans all over the place. [Music] The Maya lived here for over 1,500 years, sustaining densities that were higher at some point than what we have today. Even when you see the forest as somewhat pristine, it shows the Maya hand right there. [Music] The word for bat in Maya is "tots" and "tots" permeates the whole Maya universe. My name is Rodrigo Medellin, and I'm a professor at the University of Mexico in the Institute of Ecology.
Bats live in pretty much every ecosystem in the world. They’re incredibly diverse; everybody does a different kind of job. You can see that just by looking at their faces, the structure of their wings, and the structure of the whole body. Forty-six years ago was when I first had a bat in my hand. For many years, I've been documenting the ecosystem services provided by bats all over Mexico. But in the back of my mind, I had always had this dream of working with two of the most spectacular species of bats in the world.
These bats are very rare; they're the biggest in this continent. They're the apex predators; they are the Jaguars of the background. [Music] All we know really was studied in the 60s compared to many other species of bats that we know about. They are absolutely unknown, full of mysteries. [Music] Finding roosts is a major, major conundrum for anybody working on bats. The researchers were able to find a couple of fantastic roosts of false vampire bats, which provides an awesome opportunity to get some of the first pictures of these species in their natural habitat.
My name is Anand Varma. I'm a photographer for National Geographic magazine. The greater false vampire bat roosts in these trees and a cavity inside a hollow tree. It's the first known roost of the species in the country. So, I climbed this tree and I put a camera trap, and that's going to photograph the bats as they leave their roost every night. When I first got here, I thought, "Wow, this is gonna be easy; this is straightforward. There's a tree, the bats are living, it's not that far off the ground."
I got some pictures; I didn't quite nail it. They're never quite in the right spot, but the trigger's working—a bunch of bats leaving. I thought, "Done. You know, we're gonna get some amazing images." Like many things, this project has hit some snags. I found out, three days into working on this tree, that I'm allergic to it. I ended up in the emergency room with an infected rash. It's like, "Okay, first of all, we're gonna need to be a little bit more careful with that."
What are you gonna do? The camera's already up there. So, look—no bats. No bats; they're not there. No bats. I guess we can try and see if we can find them there. Yeah, I guess they must be switching back and forth, and that's one of the big mysteries about these things. We don't know how reliably they're using a particular roost.
And that's why we want to put some radios on them to follow them around. But we know that there's this other roost, at least a second roost, so we have to find out. This is one of the least known Mayan archaeological sites. It turns out that it's got a couple of rooms in there, and we found a colony of a bat that is really rare. It is threatened under the Mexican legislation, and it's one of the first species to disappear once you disturb the rainforest.
Walli falls, vampire roost—there are really powerful animals, carnivorous bats. Wow. Seeing those bats happening into them is an incredible experience. Very little has been done to study these bats, either in captivity or in the wild, and so we're just getting started at trying to see what we can do to document these animals and what we can do to understand these animals.
What I was really excited about with this project is the prospect of being able to lend my expertise in photography to help the research that Rodrigo is doing here in Mexico. I've brought a number of infrared cameras and triggers, and that's going to help us photograph them in the wild, in their natural habitat, without disturbing them, as well as trying to capture some of their behavior and some of their movement. [Music] [Music]
The species is incredible. They live in these family groups, and so it's really cool to be able to come here and try to help understand the basic biology of these creatures that are incredibly charismatic and we just don't know very much about them. [Music] Bats tend to get kind of a bad reputation. There are these kind of almost mythical creatures that you can hear as a whoosh by you at night, but you can rarely see them. What I want to do with my photography is do justice to these mysterious creatures of the night. [Music] [Music]
This is why I'm a photographer: to be able to come to a new place in the world, see incredible species in its natural environment. Even though it's secreting this, you know, toxic resin, to be able to climb this thing and then to be able to review pictures and see how they're moving through the night. I mean, a typical wing is coming out like that; that one seems to have taken off above further than the other.
It just feels like the cutting edge of this exploration of the species of the natural history and being able to contribute something to the research of these animals—that's an incredibly rewarding aspect of this work. They're all grooming. They spent a long time. That would be an amazing picture! All their heads in different angles, wings in different angles. This is the best time to be studying these bats. We have the technology, we have the people, we have the population.
To me, studying these two bats is a keystone to understanding the whole bat universe in Maya. [Music] You [Music]