Ecologist Cylita Guy finds unexpected adventure when she studies bats in the field.
Cylita Guy is a PhD candidate and ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational and Data Science Fellow in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. Broadly interested in zoonotic diseases and their wildlife reservoirs, Cylita’s research focuses on bats and their pathogens. Using both field surveys and computational methods she is investigating why bats seem to be good at carrying viruses that they sometimes share with humans, but rarely get sick from themselves. When not in the field catching bats or at her computer analyzing data, Cylita looks to help others foster their own sense of curiosity and discovery about the natural world. In conjunction with the High Park Nature Centre Cylita has started a Junior Bat Biologist program to engage young, future scientists. She also works as a Host at the Ontario Science Centre, educating the public about diverse scientific topics. Finally, Cylita’s hilarious field exploits are featured in a general audience book titled Fieldwork Fail: The Messy Side of Science! In her down time, you can find your friendly neighborhood batgirl chasing her next big outdoor adventure.
This story originally aired on Nov. 24, 2017 in an episode titled “The Bats and The Bees.”
Story Transcript
When I started my PhD, I made one thing abundantly clear. Under no circumstances did I want to do any type of fieldwork. Now, this always surprises people, like how can you be an ecologist and not want to work hands-on with the animals you study? The truth is, guys, fieldwork is hard. Hours are long, animals don’t cooperate and situations can be dangerous.
But despite this, five months into my PhD, one of my supervisors calls me into his office and he tells me that he wants me to work with a postdoc on a project examining the behavior of bats living in an urban park. As much as I reminded him that this was the last thing I wanted to be doing, he told me it was a wonderful, career-building opportunity, which was his way of saying I didn’t really have a choice.
So I started to think of all the ways that I could fake excitement for doing the one and only thing I didn’t want to do in my degree. But you know what? Over the next few months, Krista, my postdoc partner, and I started to get ready for the project. I actually did start to get kind of excited. I found myself thinking, “Hey, I can totally do this whole fieldwork thing.” And that incurable optimism lasted me right up until my first night in the field.
It was like all of my worst nightmares had come true. We got rained on, I would sit in the dark for hours and catch nothing, equipment broke, I had to deal with people trying to sell me drugs and steal my stuff, I couldn’t adjust to nights and, to make matters worse, the project wasn’t even working. I wasn’t getting the usable data that I'd hoped for. I absolutely hated it.
Now, near the end of the summer, Krista and I found this colony of bats living in the chimney of a four-story house with a split roof. So we decided that to capture this colony, Krista was going to get on the upper section of the roof, about four stories up, and my job was going to be to hold the ladder and provide moral support from the lower section of the roof about three stories up.
So Krista and I get into position no problem. After about an hour or so, she's handing me down a bag full of thirty bats. Now, I don't know if you've ever wondered what a bagful of bats looks like… I’m guessing probably not until this point in time. But together, the bats formed a mass about the size of two fists put together. All individual parts of that mass were kind of squirming, trying to claw their way out of the bag, making a ton of noise as they did so. The worst part about a bagful of bats, though, is that they smell so incredibly bad. But irrespective of the stench, the trapping had been a success.
So now it comes time for Krista to get down from that upper section of the roof. I assume my ladder-holding position. She slowly begins to lower herself down to the first step of the ladder and then she misses.
Now, as I saw Krista come tumbling down from the upper section of the roof I thought to myself, “This is it. I’m gonna die, she's gonna die, and like all of my worst fieldwork nightmares will come true.” Spoiler: I’m here talking to you today so nobody died.
I managed to soften most of Krista’s blow using my body, and then as she hit the deck and started rolling towards the edge of that lower section of the roof, I lunge forward, grabbed her by her belt just before she went over the edge. Like I said, fieldwork can be dangerous.
This near-death experience had reaffirmed for me why I wanted no part in it. No, thank you. I was done. So Krista and I we decided to skip discussing what had happened and just get on with processing our bats.
When I talk about processing, for every bat that I capture, I have to collect information on things like age and weight and sex, as well as give everybody a microchip so that I can tell them apart later. We decided it would be best to take our bats back to Hyde Park and process them in one of those big shelters full of picnic tables.
So we start processing and it’s not going that great. None of our bats are cooperating. To be honest, I can’t really blame them because if someone showed up at my house, threw a bed sheet over me as I was trying to leave, and then poked and prodded me while shining a bright light in my face, I'd probably be pretty pissed off too, to be honest. But to complicate matters, it was also getting insanely cold. Not only was I freezing but so were my bats.
Now, when bats get cold, they go torpid. Torpor is kind of like this mini-hibernation strategy that lots of small mammals use to save energy. Torpid bats are slow and sluggish, which means when you try to release them, they try to fly, can’t, and then kind of just go thud on the ground.
So for every bat that we process I had to somehow warm them back up. The best way to warm up a torpid bat is to take that torpid bat, put it in a little cloth bag with all its other torpid friends, and then take that cloth bag full of bats, put it down your shirt, preferably in your armpit.
You're all laughing like you think I’m joking. I’m being serious. That is like our standard operating procedure for warming up bats.
So that’s how the next few hours went. Every bat that we processed went in the bagful of bats, back down my shirt.
Then all of a sudden we start hearing these voices getting progressively louder. They're hooting and they're hollering and are clearly quite inebriated. All of a sudden, this group of seventeen-year-old kids comes into our view. Before I can even think about hiding, one of the girls calls out, “Hey, what are you guys doing over there?”
I will never be able to adequately describe to you the sheer panic I experienced as these twelve drunk seventeen-year-old kids descended on my picnic tables. All I could think was that one of these kids was going to get bit. I was going to have to drive them to the hospital, explain to a public health official why we needed rabies vaccine, and then I was probably going to get sued by their parents.
I thought about my fancy twelve-hundred-dollar radio receiver going missing. I thought, “You know what? I think these kids are drunk and high enough to like try pit-tagging each other, try microchipping each other.” It has happened before. But you know what? None of that happened.
The kids asked what we were doing and they asked if they could watch, so I told them, “Sure, so long as you don’t touch anything.” And for the next hour and a half, these twelve, drunk seventeen-year-old kids sat and watched me process bats and asked me some of the most insightful questions I've ever been asked. It was crazy. I didn’t think that they could do that. Okay, well, eleven of the twelve did. The twelfth was like passed out on the floor. I digress.
They were so incredibly excited to see science being done and their excitement was infectious. Everything was going so well, right up until the cops showed up. Next thing you know, we've got these headlights being shone on our picnic tables and this voice gets on a bullhorn telling us that we have to disperse because the park is closed. The kids grab their stuff and, with rushed thank-yous and goodbyes, they took off into the darkness.
Then this big, burly police officer gets out of his car, comes over to Krista and I and asks what we’re doing, so I explain. Looking skeptical, he asks if he can see one of these so-called bats. Like who makes up something like that? Really?
Anyways, Krista obliges. She pulls one of the bats out of the bag. Shows him. He seems satisfied but also slightly terrified, which I did not expect from a man his size.
He then looks back at me and all of a sudden his eyes start getting really, really big. Then, in a very serious voice, he leans in and he says, “Ma’am did you know that your shirt is moving?”
I looked down at my shirt, I look back up at the police officer and I said, “Of course. I've got twenty-five bats down there and they're starting to warm up.”
I need you all to understand that at that point in time my response seemed perfectly normal but, retrospectively, I understand how crazy I must have been sitting in the park at 1:00 a.m. with twenty-five bats down my shirt for no apparent reason whatsoever. The police officer took off pretty fast after that.
So 3:00 a.m. rolls around. For the record, just when you think things can’t get any more exciting, they always get more exciting at 3:00 a.m. Krista and I are left with a single bat to process when all of a sudden we hear this growling in the bushes behind us. I'd like to say that in those next moments Krista and I acted accordingly, but instead we both screamed, jumped up on the picnic table and held onto each other.
We unanimously decided, “No. This is not for one night. I’m done. We’re out.” Lucky bat number thirty got to go free without any processing. Krista frantically begins packing up all the field equipment. I then sprinted over to our car and turned on the headlights in the hopes of scaring off whatever was in the bushes. I then remembered that I still had like twenty-nine torpid bats down my shirt, because you forget those sorts of things in that kind of situation.
So I cranked the heater in the car, I put the bats under the heater and within minutes the bag was squirming. I ran out, I grabbed the bag, I ran out to the center of the main road going through the park and I began to release the bats one by one telling them to be free. I think that if there had been bystanders, it might have looked a lot like the scene from the Wizard of Oz where I was the Wicked Witch of the West telling my pretties to fly. “Fly, my pretties. Fly!”
I really do think that the ridiculousness of that night is kind of what kept me going. It showed me that I could handle a lot and still have a really good cathartic laugh about it later. Since that night, I've done a second summer of intense fieldwork. It was hard, but I have some really cool data to show for it. Along the way, I've had a lot of other hilariously ridiculous experiences but none quite as ridiculous as the night of the colony.
As for the girl who didn’t want to do any fieldwork in our PhD? I’m currently trying to figure out how I can get myself down to Panama next summer to work with exotic species. Turns out fieldwork kind of was my thing. It only took a near-death experience, twelve drunk teenagers, one police officer thinking I was bat-shit crazy, and a Wizard of Oz moment to help me realize it. Thank you.