Bats are awesome. How could you not love something that uses echolocation, lives in caves, and is the only truly flying mammal?
They also are really important to humanity. Bats fill a unique and important niche in our ecosystem, “one bat eats about 2,000 to 6,000 insects each night” according to BatConservation.org. And Bat Conservation International says, “A single little brown bat can eat more than 1,000 mosquito-sized insects in just one hour.”
So while they are good at keeping our ankles bite free, they also help our economy. According to The Nature Conservancy, “A recent study estimated the value of bats to Tennessee agriculture at over $313 million annually”, certainly not chump change. Not to mention how mosquitos are carriers of diseases.
And while these little guys are great eaters and pretty cool to watch, they also are under threat. An epidemic called White-nose syndrome, is killing off massive numbers of America’s bats.
The disease has killed more then 5.7 millions bats since 2006, and is known to cause 100% mortality rates in some colonies.
“Named for a cold-loving white fungus typically found on the faces and wings of infected bats, White-nose Syndrome causes bats to awaken more often during hibernation and use up the stored fat reserves that are needed to get them through the winter. Infected bats often emerge too soon from hibernation and are [can be] seen flying around in midwinter. These bats usually freeze or starve to death.” –Bat Conservation International
This is bad news for farmers and ankles alike, so how do we help them?
Behold, the Bat Cave!
Photo courtesy of PopSci.com, photo by Paul Kingsbury of The Nature Conservancy
While it seems more bunker then bat fungus cure, this man-made bat cave is just the start of the battle against white-nose. The picture above shows the human entrance to the winter hibernation cave, so once the bats leave in the spring, people will clean and disinfect to prevent the spread of white-nose.
Image: Shanghai Expo
Imagine the bubble architecture students find themselves trapped in while pursuing higher education: long hours cradling a mouse demote food and sleep, much less investigations of non-disciplinary theory. How wonderful, then, that the Roth-Symonds Memorial Lecture Fund supports lectures and small-group meetings to expose Yale School of Architecture students to speakers outside architecture; past lecturers have included sociologist Loic Wacquant, urbanist Saskia Sassen, and media and cultural theorist Thomas Y. Levin. This spring, Neil Smith, distinguished professor of anthropology and geography at CUNY, delivered “Toxic Capitalism: Neoliberalism, City Building and Crisis.”
This past Monday the anti-establishment infiltrated Yale School of Architecture in a dashing gold scarf. Seducing the audience with a breathless stream of “Frenglish,” whose charm derived from the speaker’s sheer enthusiasm for his subject, François Roche rose to a god-like status typically only afforded movie stars. And if there were a god in whose likeness he is modeled, it would have to be Janus, the forward-backward-looking deity of beginnings and transitions. As Roche drifts nebulously in and around the purview of art and architecture, human and mechanical, historic and futurist, he raises questions of authorship and agency that strike a nerve for a profession coming to terms with its post-recession identity.
