Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1932 - Merlin Tuttle
Uploaded: 2023-01-27T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1932 - Merlin Tuttle' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-01-27. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1932 - Merlin Tuttle' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-01-27. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1932 - Merlin Tuttle

well welcome to the show Merlin what a great name by the way thank you your
parents named
you Merlin did they make you get into magic at all my mother actually named me
Merlin DeVere
and her hope was that she would get a kick out of me being a medical doctor M.D.
Tuttle M.D. but it didn't work out that way well you're a bat scientist how
does one how does one specialize in bats how'd that journey start well I was
always interested in anything in nature I start out to collecting monarch
caterpillars and watch them make cocoons and hatch into butterflies and and
then I went into a snake phase
in which my mother was not happy with that phase at five I was dragging in
sometimes snakes four or five feet long and they'd get loose in the house and
oh no
we moved into a new neighborhood one time and uh a welcoming committee came
over to welcome my mother to the neighborhood
and I had a few days before caught a seven foot eight inch coach whip snake
that I was really proud of but it got out and we couldn't find it in the house
we thought it had gotten out of the house
the group sitting around welcoming my mother to the neighborhood and all of a
sudden she sees everybody with a look of horror on their faces and they're
heading for the door
and this snake had reared up behind the couch and was looking for all the world
like a cobra looking around
and only one of those women would ever even speak to my mother again
that's hilarious you're crazy son with his snakes um so uh you are a bat
scientist
right the secret lives of bats is one of your books and the other one is
the bat house guide
that's the most recent one
um there's a lot of bats in austin texas
that's right uh
actually i moved to austin because there are a lot of bats here but there
wouldn't be probably still a lot of bats if it hadn't been for my moving
when i first
began to be interested in conserving bats austin was making more negative
publicity about bats than any other place probably in the world
there are news headlines from coast to coast saying that
hundreds of thousands of rabid bats were invading and attacking the citizens of
austin
and was that nonsense
absolutely
why why do you think uh people have this fear of bats
fear of the unknown
i mean
you're probably
not totally unaffected i mean i know i am
when i i'm much more nervous about taking off in a plane than riding to the
airport in a taxi
and yet the taxi is far more dangerous than the plane
statistically speaking
right
right but we fear what we don't know and it's very
very few people know much about bats and so they're easily misunderstood and
scared and in those days if a bat
tried to catch a mosquito near somebody the person would run like hell thinking
that they're being attacked and they'd never even look around to see the bat
catch the mosquito and go on his way
and in fact i had one guy that claimed he was actually the bat actually did
attack him and when i looked at the evidence of the attack i found these big
scratches on his arm that a bat couldn't have inflicted and turned out he'd run
too close to a rosebush on his way to the house and got bit by the rosebush and
blamed the bat
so uh bats in austin what's interesting is this bridge on uh near uh ladybird
lake
right right and that that bridge is
is famously a home for millions of bats right up to 1.5 million that's a lot of
bats right it's a beautiful thing when you watch them fly out the one of the
first times i've ever come here yeah
there you could see jamie has a photo of it happening one of the first times i
ever came here um we we went next to it and you could hear the bats right you
could hear them squeaking right and stuff in there
well when i first came to austin i had to face people who were signing petitions
to have them eradicated they were terrified of them the health department had
warned that they were mostly rabid and would attack people
mostly rabid oh yeah and what were they basing this on in the early 1980s there
were all kinds of planted stories in the news media by pest control and health
people that made money off of fear of bats
and like family circle and good housekeeping magazines were running articles
like three years of terror real life ordeal and one of these stories had the
family trapped in their home for three days and nights with bats attacking the
windows and doors trying to get them
and so people were really frightened genuinely but all it took to overcome that
is i ended up getting a bat of the kind that lives under the bridge and i'd
take him around and show him to people and i remember one lady actually it was
uh ms crenshaw the famous golfer's mother she uh thought you know when she
first heard i was conserving bats
she told her friends she said what next somebody's gonna be trying to conserve
cockroaches but the first time i
actually showed her a live bat in the hand she was like oh isn't he cute you
know a whole different response
and so bats once people meet them they're their own best ambassadors they're
gentle animals that
almost never bite anything except an insect or fruit in except in self-defense
and uh all i had to do was
come to austin and point out that this was a a treasure not yet recognized and
because of convincing
austin not to eradicate the bats today they're they bring millions of tourist
dollars every summer to
austin and they eat tons of crop and yard pests every night so that's what's
important for people
to understand is they actually serve a very important purpose in the ecosystem
right yes a major part of
my success in conserving bats has been that i look at it from a standpoint not
just that bats or other
animals have rights or anything it's a matter of like them or not we need them
and if we understand them
we'll probably like them too and so this uh eradication idea that people had
that would have been a
disaster like ecologically if they did decide to eradicate the bats and they
killed all those bats
that were under the bridge well what we forget is when people warn us about the
supposed dangers of
having bats around the real danger is not having bats around we could be
practically buried in insect pests
bats are the primary controllers of insects that fly at night like mosquitoes a
recent study in
wisconsin showed that bats living in people's bat houses in their yards they
looked at the droppings
of those bats and genetically analyzed to see what they were eating and they
found that those bats living in bat houses
were eating 15 species of mosquitoes nine of which carried west nile virus
do we get west nile virus in texas is that common
i don't think it's real common but it's possible yeah
so a bat house and this is a photo of a bat house that you have on the cover of
your book
i didn't even know that these were a thing they're like bird houses but it's a
bad house
yeah except that they're open at the bottom instead of a hole in the front with
a floor
and so you people put these up and construct them purposely so bats can live in
them
right and how do you get a bat to get in there
well just like birds they find them and decide they like them there oh wow look
at that picture
that's crazy that bad house was was occupied by 105 bats within a week of the
time it was put
up oh yeah you have a little batman logo on the front of it too so within a
week it was put up
there was over a hundred bats in there that's right now i wouldn't say that
that's what you'd
expect all the time it often takes six months to a year even sometimes a year
and a half to two
years to track bats but uh if you put up the right kind of bat house in the
right kind of place
you'll probably attract some bats and it can be a lot of fun and what is uh the
right kind of bat
house like do you have to put something in there to attract them no just uh
roosting crevices are three quarters of an inch to an inch wide usually the
bats like those narrow
crevices because they're used to snakes coming after them and like if a big rat
snake comes into a
bat house to try to catch a bat if the bat's roosting in a place only three
quarters an inch wide
the snake comes in he can't open his mouth wide enough to get around the bat's
head he
can but the bat opens his mouth and bites the snake's nose so i suspect that's
a large part of why bats
like those narrow crevices is protection against one of their dominant
predators that makes sense so
you would set one of these things up leave it and that would help control all
sorts of mosquitoes and
pests and pests and things that are on your property yes uh putting up bat
houses can be a big help in
many ways there's a recent study done in the mediterranean that showed that
when they put up bat houses
or strategically located around rice patties that they no longer had to use
pesticides really
that's uh that's that's that's amazing like how many bats do you need to
control pest like you know
what kind of bugs are we talking about besides mosquitoes uh those were moths
that they were
controlling and bats have been found helping protect rice in thailand where
they're eating white billyed
plant hoppers they'll eat a wide variety of insects uh one important point to
make you know we hear a lot
about the importance of biodiversity and the bat houses in the mediterranean
that successfully eliminated
the need for pesticides they didn't mean that there were never any more pests
or that there was no pest damage
what the bats have to do to eliminate the need for pesticides is just lower the
damage to a level where
the cost of the damage is less than it costs the pestis to put pesticides out
so the reason that worked
was that there was a national park not very far away and so you know if you
just have
miles of monoculture uh what do the bats do in the off season when your pests
aren't there they're going
to starve to death and so by having diverse habitat not far away in the off
season the bats had a place
to go eat until they were needed over the rice patties again okay that makes
sense so when you uh first got
here you you're dealing with these people that want to eradicate bats you had
to convince them that bats
are very important and how did you go about doing that like what did you do to
try to educate people
well this goes back a ways when i what started out i when i got my first job it
was a really great job i was
got a full salary just to go have fun in the world as far as i looked at it
because i could go anywhere
in the world i wanted stay as long as i want as long as i did good research on
some aspect of bat biology
and so when i announced that i was going to resign that to do full-time bat
conservation work
even my closest friends thought i was stark raving crazy because in those days
almost everybody especially
and they would much rather pay to have a bat killed than to have it saved and
uh so
it was very difficult at first you know we hear a lot from environmentalists
conservationists about
the need to win battles you know send us x amount of money so we can beat up on
such and such a company
and people there's a certain type of people that kind of love that and uh but
you know if you're
starting out to save something that everybody hates and they'd really rather
spend money to kill it than
to save it you got to get a whole lot more clever than just asking them for
money to save the animal
so i had i don't think it was because i was particularly smart or anything but
i had to
learn early on to win friends instead of battles and what i found was if i went
about it right
and i won enough friends i didn't need to win the battles and that's become
kind of a dominant part
of my approach to conservation is first of all you listen to people and i don't
care if they say you know
i had fun burning a bat cave in which i killed thousands of bats or whatever
they say you know
we shouldn't be dwelling in the past it's the future that counts and we've all
made crazy mistakes in
the past and we wouldn't want to be hated for the rest of our lives for 