Name: 【TED】Emma Teeling: The secret of the bat genome (Emma Teeling: The secret of the bat genome)
Uploaded: 2017-09-17T07:07:51.000Z
Duration: 16 min 23 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast

is to think of this mammal that I'm going to describe to you.

The first thing I'm going to tell you about this mammal

is that it is essential for our ecosystems to function correctly.

If we remove this mammal from our ecosystems,

The second thing is that due to the unique sensory abilities

we're going to get great insight into our diseases

of the senses, such as blindness and deafness.

And the third really intriguing aspect of this mammal

is that I fully believe that the secret of everlasting youth

Ah, I can see half the audience agrees with me,

and I have a lot of work to do to convince the rest of you.

So I have had the good fortune for the past 20 years

to study these fascinating and beautiful mammals.

One fifth of all living mammals is a bat,

Bats as we know them have been around on this planet

One of the most unique things that bats do

Now flight is an inherently difficult thing.

Flight within vertebrates has only evolved three times:

And so with flight, it's very metabolically costly.

Bats have learned and evolved how to deal with this.

But one other extremely unique thing about bats

to perceive their environment. They use echolocation.

they emit a sound from their larynx out through their mouth

or through their nose. This sound wave comes out

and it reflects and echoes back off objects in their environment,

and they turn this information into an acoustic image.

And this enables them to orient in complete darkness.

Indeed, they do look very strange. We're humans.

We're a visual species. When scientists first realized

that bats were actually using sound to be able to fly

and orient and move at night, we didn't believe it.

For a hundred years, despite evidence to show

that this is what they were doing, we didn't believe it.

Now, if you look at this bat, it looks a little bit alien.

Indeed, the very famous philosopher Thomas Nagel

once said, "To truly experience an alien life form

on this planet, you should lock yourself inside a room

with a flying, echolocating bat in complete darkness."

And if you look at the actual physical characteristics

on the face of this beautiful horseshoe bat,

you see a lot of these characteristics are dedicated

to be able to make sound and perceive it.

Very big ears, strange nose leaves, but teeny-tiny eyes.

So again, if you just look at this bat, you realize

sound is very important for its survival.

However, there are a group that do not use echolocation.

They do not perceive their environment using sound,

If anybody has ever been lucky enough to be in Australia,

you've seen them coming out of the Botanic Gardens in Sydney,

and if you just look at their face, you can see

they have much, much larger eyes and much smaller ears.

So among and within bats is a huge variation

in their ability to use sensory perception.

Now this is going to be important for what I'm going

Now, if the idea of bats in your belfry terrifies you,

and I know some people probably are feeling a little sick

Really, of course the famous book "Dracula,"

written by a fellow Northside Dubliner Bram Stoker,

However, I also think it's got to do with the fact

that bats come out at night, and we don't

really understand them. We're a little frightened by things

that can perceive the world slightly differently than us.

Bats are usually synonymous with some type of evil events.

They are the perpetrators in horror movies,

always have bat wings, whereas birds, they typically --

Now, this is Western society, and what I hope to do tonight

is to convince you of the Chinese traditional culture,

creatures that bring good luck, and indeed, if you walk

into a Chinese home, you may see an image such as this.