Sky Kittens with Daniel Istvanko

Join Kosta and his guest: Daniel Istvanko, Wildlife Diversity Coordinator for Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency in Biodiversity.

The Mission of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency is to preserve, conserve, manage, protect, and enhance the fish and wildlife of the state and their habitats for the use, benefit, and enjoyment of the citizens of Tennessee and its visitors.

Today we’re talking about bats, their role and impact on Tennessee and how we can protect this critical species before it’s too late.

In This Episode:  What the daily work of a wildlife researcher looks like,  how global warming and climate change are impacting bats and their habitats, if we should be worried about the collapse of cave systems in Tennessee. 

Better Together with Kosta Yepifantsev is a product of Morgan Franklin Media and recorded in Cookeville, TN.

Find out more about Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency:
https://www.tn.gov/twra.html

Find out more about Kosta and all the ways we're better together:
http://kostayepifantsev.com/

Transcript

Daniel Istvanko: 0:01

What we don't know is not only is it going to just affect the insects, but what else is it going to affect? You know, when one keystone species just all of a sudden kind of disappears from the surface? That's the real question is what is the next to take the fall? What happens next?

Morgan Franklin: 0:17

Welcome to Better Together with Kosta Yepifantsev, a podcast on Parenting, Business and Living Life Intentionally. We're here every week to bring you thoughtful conversation, making your own path to success, challenging the status quo, and finding all the ways we're better together. Here's your host, Kosta Yepifantsev.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 0:37

Hey, y'all, this is Kosta. And today I'm here with my guest Daniel Istvanko, Wildlife Diversity coordinator for Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency in biodiversity. The mission of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency is to preserve, conserve, manage, protect, and enhance the Fish and Wildlife of the state and their habitats for the use benefit and enjoyment of the citizens of Tennessee and its visitors. Today, we're talking about bats, their role and impact on Tennessee, and how we can protect this critical species. Before it's too late. Daniel, I want to get straight into it because we have a lot of ground to cover in this episode. Take us back to the beginning. How did you start working with bats? And when did you officially become the Batman?

Daniel Istvanko: 1:26

You know, my career with bats was completely on accident. Okay, just to back up a little bit for that my background before that. I grew up fishing, which transitioned into hunting with my dad. And then that transitioned into why don't not know about anything else out here that I that I love so much. Sure. So from there, I went and got a degree with wildlife. And after that pursued my master's, and grad school actually went, I just took the first project I could get I wanted to go to grad school couldn't get a job, just kept out of school. Sure. So I went to study coil. Basically, the funding got flushed down the drain. And my roommate at the time was studying bats. And he kept saying, and I was making fun of I was like, no, no, no one cares about bats. I want to study bad. Lo and behold, he gave me some ideas and kind of took me under his wing, literally. And from there, it just turned into a project which turned into a passion. And now I wouldn't change it for the world.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 2:16

And you were the Graduate Student of the Year at Arkansas State, right? Correct. Yes. And your thesis was on.

Daniel Istvanko: 2:24

So I basically studied differences in male and female evening bats, which is a force bat, it's present throughout the eastern United States. And I chose that bat because no one studies them. And they're pretty much everywhere.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 2:36

Yeah. And so was there like an inflection point that happened where you were like, Oh, my gosh, I love bats.

Daniel Istvanko: 2:43

I think the first bat I ever called I felt that way. And honestly, a lot of the interns and people that I've mentored over the years the same way, there's been very few who have like, got to catch one and hold one and it hasn't really just fallen in love with them. From that point on.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 2:57

How do you catch a bat? We're gonna have to start there. Like that's fascinating.

Daniel Istvanko: 3:02

It depends on the scenario, I guess the most common way to do it is basically what we call a mis net system. And these can be I mean, any length and height, but generally, they're about 24 feet tall, and will span them across roadways, rivers, whatever. But basically, it's thread like nets. So in the bats are flying around at night, they don't see it, they fly into it, we just come pluck them out and work them up.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 3:24

Amazing. And I think a lot of people don't know that bats kind of like run the world. Right? So give us some background into why you're researching bats. And why should the general public be paying attention?

Daniel Istvanko: 3:39

I think in general bashes get a bad rap. I mean, you know, growing up as a kid, you always hear bats drink blood baths are scary. Your hair, they do all these things. Most of them are myths, but that in tandem with decades of habitat destruction, let's talk back in the 50s 60s and 70s, use of chemicals, just disturbance in caves, all these things that we were doing and harming the environment, bats really took a huge hit, and their populations declined to the point where, you know, the US Fish and Wildlife Service started listing species as threatened and endangered. And so that's where our first batch got listed back in the 70s. So from there, the importance was, hey, let's research the bats that are rare. And let's see if we can help the conservation of the species for the long run. Going forward after that, things were looking better for many species and then the introduction of white nose syndrome 2006. It's a fungal pathogen that was brought here from Europe, probably by a caver.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 4:37

So it was brought in by a human being who spunks

Daniel Istvanko: 4:41

correct on it on accident, okay, so what happens is, it's basically just a fungal Spore, can't see him, it's just dust in the wind, and it was probably on some of their dirty gear that they brought over. And as soon as it got in our caves, it took off from there. And so it actually started in upstate New York. So ever since the introduction of whiteness Andrew him, you know, we've lost over 90% of most of the species that we have because of that disease. So basically, a wildlife crisis that we've an orange generation have never seen in North America. Unheard of this is probably one of the biggest wildlife diseases of our time, honestly.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 5:15

So you're saying that we've lost 90% of bats in North America?

Daniel Istvanko: 5:23

Well, for most of our species that either swarm use caves, some part of the year, yes, they've declined as much as 90%. Now, there are some forest species and things that are not susceptible, because they don't go into caves, they're doing fine. But the majority of our species have suffered major declines.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 5:40

What exactly are bats doing, that makes them so important, and that statistic about losing 90% of them so scary.

Daniel Istvanko: 5:49

So for us in Tennessee, it's simple. All of our bats eat insects will pretty much everything, they eat a lot of beetles, moths, they, you know, also you hear mosquitoes things, but obviously, if it's a bigger, larger moth, they're going to take that over. But opportunistic, they're aerial Hawking these insects out of the air at night, basically, you know, the nighttime equivalent of what birds do. So without those bats, basically, we're gonna have a lot more pest problems, we're going to be more irritated. And I, that's probably in turn going to affect a lot of different things from just the vegetation to our gardens to the amount of pesticides we

Kosta Yepifantsev: 6:21

use. Yeah. And so I want to talk about that, though, because there was a statistic that I was reading that it's estimated bats eat enough pests to save more than$1 billion per year in crop damage and pesticide costs in the United States corn industry alone. If these bats aren't protected, and if their habitats are destroyed, what are the implications?

Daniel Istvanko: 6:47

I think the the major implications would be, you know, use of more pesticides and higher prices on the front end, not just what those pesticides probably are doing to the environment, but then you're gonna see that trickle down to the food weed is going to continually to inflate could create like a food crisis? Absolutely. I think it could, because what we don't know is not only is it going to just affect the insects, but what else is it going to affect? You know, when one keystone species just all of a sudden kind of disappears from the surface? That's the real question is, what is the next to take the fall? What happens next?

Kosta Yepifantsev: 7:21

When you start your day, and you encounter these problems? You obviously know, like the big picture, somebody like me, I don't research wildlife at all, nor do I really know much of ecosystems, whether its ecosystem decline, or what have you. Do you ever wake up, kind of disheartened, as you see all of this development, and you work in the upper Cumberland, so we're like, booming. I mean, at some point, we're not gonna be able to find a patch of dirt that somebody's not trying to build something on. And I've seen it in Germantown and Nashville. And there's like one lot that I run past in the mornings, everything else has a house on it. What happens? I guess, essentially, how do you feel confident that we're going to preserve these ecosystems, these caves? Keep that safe?

Daniel Istvanko: 8:12

I'll just back up to what you said about waking up every day. I absolutely. This career overall, is very depressing, because the things you love and care about, I'm just seeing them disappear. In my lifetime. I've seen that myself. So that's disheartening. On the other side, it's also very rewarding because you're you're trying to do something to change the flow of things right here. But yeah, that's always been a struggle I felt like from college on were like, wow, this is truly the most depressing field I could have gone into for something I cared about so much.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 8:42

Let's talk about your work. What is your typical day look like? What are you researching and collecting data on? And are you going into caves? Like, every day,

Daniel Istvanko: 8:53

there's no typical day at work for me, I learned that from the get go. It does have its own kind of patterns and cycles to it. It's very seasonal dependent. Okay. You know, along with the fun stuff, which we'll talk about. There's also the data management side of it, the administrative, there's all the other there's an office day, every week, that kind of fun stuff. So seasonally, like caving season starts for me pretty much in the winter, sometimes December through March, that's where I'm going to be in caves, counting bats and doing other things. However, caving can be year round, because also do other endangered species surveys for cave crayfish cave fish, our state salamander is being proposed to be listed right now. So there's a lot of life under the ground outside of bats that we also do surveys for, for me, I cave a lot more than my counterparts just because of the region. And I actually love it too. So it's kind of fun. But yeah, my job kind of flows with whatever projects we're working on. We do a lot of disease sampling. We do a lot of population monitoring for threatened endangered species. The last couple of projects we've worked on have been Hellbender propagation, we released Hellbenders you know, back in the middle test See, I've worked with golden eagles. We've worked with documenting spotted skunks. We do a lot of wildlife tracking. Pretty much everything we're studying. We're either doing disease or tracking on it. We don't know where it's going or what diseases it has.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 10:14

I know the episode is not about skunks, but my dogs love skunks. Staci, my red Doberman got sprayed yesterday after they got out. They get out all the time. Now, I guess they just don't like living with us. But anyway, that's back to it. You said disease monitoring. So I was watching a 60 minutes episode like two or three weeks ago. They are capturing bats in Uganda. And they're testing them for Coronavirus. And so they're trying to develop vaccines if they identify a an unknown Coronavirus so that it can kind of get out in front of another pandemic, as you were talking earlier in the episode about the stigma around bats, you know, vampire stuff like that. How often do you encounter people who say bats equal COVID?

Daniel Istvanko: 11:02

I felt like it was an everyday event after COVID especially working with bats. You know, everybody was looking at me like, Oh, don't do that. And it just, it was like any ground I had gained with family and France was lost, basically.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 11:13

Yeah. How are you not scared, though, that if you get bit by a bat, that you may, you may develop some type of virus that has no vaccine and may cause serious illness.

Daniel Istvanko: 11:22

It really just the nature of my work, that's completely possible. There's really not something that I haven't handled, that hasn't been me, I've been bitten by 1000s of rats. Wow. The majority of them, it's just a hard pinch don't break the skins. There's a few species that will leave marks make you believe that the worst thing is probably to worry about his rabies. I mean, that gets tied with bass a lot. But any mammal species can be a vector for rabies, you have a better chance of getting it from a stray cat, then you actually do a bat. But it's possible that a bat can have rabies. So you always have to keep that tagline on there, you know, rare but not unheard of.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 11:58

So do you have any opinion on whether or not COVID came from bats?

Daniel Istvanko: 12:04

I don't have an opinion, because I just I simply don't know the facts. I've heard that it jumped from maybe a pangolin to a bat and all these other stories and things like that. The bottom line is the way that bats can control their body torpor and go in and out of deep sleep, their immune systems can be at a much higher lower temperature than ours and their bodies can be so they can actually harbor a lot of diseases that are not harmful to them. However, they're harmful to us. So yes, it's very possible that getting bitter handling means I could get sick from something. In that scenario, I'm assuming the bat was eaten? I don't know. But the reality of that it could have been any species that can harbor disease. And bats just again seemed to take the fall.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 12:46

Have you ever been bitten by a bat? Oh, every

Daniel Istvanko: 12:49

1000s 1000s of bats.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 12:50

So the next pandemic, I'm gonna give him your number, and I'm gonna be like, listen, I know patient zero and I know where you can find your vaccine for mass production. You don't have to even do clinical trials. I know exactly who you need to call. What's your craziest caving story? Like, did you ever get a call from somebody that says, hey, I've got a cave and you get down there? And it's like, Bruce Wayne, you know, that massive cave with a waterfall inside or anything like that.

Daniel Istvanko: 13:19

Okay, so I guess I don't have one, but I can tell you that from the caves that I've been in Tennessee, I've seen prehistoric Jaguar tracks to Aboriginal footprints to finding a human skull. I've been in the deepest caves in Tennessee. Wow, actually one cave system in this part of Tennessee that has a eight acre room and it can fit the entire I hear the Astrodome. So basically, professional stadium can fit inside the room that you've dropped down into. And is

Kosta Yepifantsev: 13:44

that like here in the upper Cumberland? Oh, yeah. Really Van Buren County. So is this area just is it more predominant in terms of caves, then other parts of the state or other parts of the country,

Daniel Istvanko: 13:58

different parts of the country, you'd have to look at a course map Missouri, Arkansas, there's places that have plenty of caves, Indiana, other places, but we're kind of in the epicenter of what people call Tag, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. And that's where you're going to find the Cumberland Plateau. diversity of different formations and a lot of caves. So looking at Tennessee, the density kind of falls off as you go east and west, but along the curve of plateau is the highest density all the way up and down North, the South the state.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 14:25

Amazing. I've been to a few so I've been to Underground Atlanta, Ruby Falls. I think that's underground. That was my face when I was a kid. And no, I mean, just imagine the person that discovered it like I don't know, the background of Ruby Falls, but like imagine somebody you know, goes into a cave and they find a massive waterfall. I mean, right like that's never happened to you, right?

Daniel Istvanko: 14:47

Well, I've been in a time with beautiful waterfalls and formations and there's no shortage of beautiful sites in there. But I've never found an amazing when I most caves I found were pretty horrid and grungy. I always

Kosta Yepifantsev: 14:59

want wonder like what it would be like to repel down into a cave. But we're talking about bats. So let's talk about our changing planet. How is global warming and climate change elevating the danger to bats? Are the impacts of these events reversible? And should we be worried about the collapse of cave systems?

Daniel Istvanko: 15:21

In general, we should be worried about climate change and its effect on bats less so on the effects of cave systems. What we do know is that cave systems seem to lag far behind as far as what the effects of climate change are. So they will happen on a much slower scale. However, all the other species that depend on using trees for all or some part of their their life, those are the ones that we have to worry about. Because the climate changes, are some areas going to be more susceptible to extreme weather, arid conditions or, you know, just changing environments. So we don't know what that's going to do to the landscape. And those bats.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 15:57

Yeah. And I mean, if you think about that ice storm in Monterey, like how many trees went down because of that storm, you know,

Daniel Istvanko: 16:03

that actually probably did some good for bed. On the flip side, well, what's not good for bats, I'll say this is you got these pretty old age, just even beautiful forests that we see all over the plateau. We want to see heterogeneity, we want to see different ages of stuff. So when something natural like that happens, and it breaks all these trees, you created this whole forest of snags. There's a ton of bad species that depend on those snags for maternity season or all of their life. So by doing that, essentially, you just made the perfect bad habitat in a way

Kosta Yepifantsev: 16:34

we'll learn. So that's great fire does the

Daniel Istvanko: 16:38

same thing. That's what we try to mimic nowadays, with with cutting things. But historically, fire and tornadoes and all these things, I stammered, that's how forest maintain heterogeneity.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 16:48

Yeah, absolutely. That's a really interesting perspective. And, you know, there's controlled burns that are happening, like specifically in California and the West Coast. And it's so interesting, because we never had to do those things in the past, you know, but now, in my opinion, because of climate change, and because of extremely dry conditions, I think that it just Do you ever think that you can go too far in terms of like a fire that's way out of control? Or do you think that that's just the natural progression of a forest?

Daniel Istvanko: 17:21

Oh, absolutely. There's different scales of burns. Okay, that's a whole nother subject. But basically, when you run fire through something, you don't want a huge fuel load, like we saw in Gatlinburg. Okay, you want it to be a nice ground fire to basically just provide some nitrogen, and you'll see some greenery if it's scoring the trees, so it's way too hot and too much fuel. So that's what we want to avoid,

Kosta Yepifantsev: 17:41

right? Because there's a lot of people that say, Well, climate change, this is like the world's natural, you know, way of changing and evolving, right. And so there's nothing to worry about. But I mean, obviously, from a professional like yourself, no, massive wildfires are not a good thing.

Daniel Istvanko: 17:59

My whole point with that is, is it changing faster than the species and us as well can adapt to those changes? That's the real question.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 18:07

So aside from habitat loss, how else can climate change affect bats and the bat population?

Daniel Istvanko: 18:15

I think the next thing following just a decline in habitat would be disease, you know, we're gonna have species moving, congregating, probably wiping themselves out, I'm not talking disease that would impose a threat necessarily to us just within themselves, we actually have a disease in just about every group of wildlife in Tennessee that's causing major declines. Why nose is just kind of been the forefront of it, if you will. We've got the same thing going on with snakes here in the upper Cumberland. The same thing with salamanders and things like that. There's one actually an agent that if it gets over here, it will wipe out this country's herpetofauna for sure, wipe out whatnot. So basically, salamanders and frogs and things like that the equivalent of white nose for those species, and it's in the pet trade over in Asia and certain salamanders and those species are fine with it, but it's the same scary thing we're trying to prevent, right for the human, but it's just, you know, when's it gonna get here? Or is it already here? And no one's detect it?

Kosta Yepifantsev: 19:10

Yeah, for sure. Wow. Okay. So, rabbit hole, I

Daniel Istvanko: 19:14

told you. Well, no, no, I

Kosta Yepifantsev: 19:16

mean, listen, there's a there's a lot there, though. There's a lot to unpack. And I mean, if you think about the next 10 years, and we have development going, you know, without stop no contingencies. We're destroying habitats. We're bringing different species of animals together. At what point do you think we should maybe have like a national area of preservation? Like should we sort of annex certain areas of the country currently so the reason that I bring that up as I was watching another episode of 60 minutes, and the Bill Gates and Melinda Gates Foundation are buying up massive swaths of planes land in the middle West and they're trying to bring back, you know, bison and other animals that were there, you know, 200 years ago, should we be doing the same thing in Tennessee.

Daniel Istvanko: 20:10

So we actually do have a playbook for what similar what you're talking about is called Tennessee State Wildlife action plan. And every state has one RS is a huge book, you can Google it. But basically, it's going to break down our state into resources, yours, you all these things. And it's going to assign certain areas, what we call conservation opportunity areas. For instance, the closest one to here is the one around Roaring River and Blackburn fort. So those are areas that basically meet the criteria for development, they have rare species, you know, they're worth preserving. So when lands come up for sale, and those places, we work with partners a lot of times to try to acquire those lands. One of the rewarding things of my jobs, I've been a part of five or six land acquisition projects, you know, just say preserving land forever and ever complements like the 12,000 acre addition to Skinner mountain just a few years ago, okay, I've been working on that since I started with the agency. So a lot of what I do is go out and find rare things and try to save lands that are for sale, which I enjoy doing that you get to go explore and look for things. So our fundings a little different, we don't have the money just to buy up everything. But we are always trying to acquire lands, especially when they join ours, or they're adding connectivity to our plan.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 21:22

How do regular everyday citizens get involved to help the bat population to help your agency to spread the word,

Daniel Istvanko: 21:31

the bases, like you just said, spread the word educate people, in this part of the world Cookeville we have so many bad nuisance problems in people's houses, they just ran with water hoses or, or people have caves and their yard. Some of these caves have 1020 30,000 bathroom in the summer, there's a couple caves in Cookeville that have around that there's numbers that you can go watch. So just just meeting those people making them care about it, if they don't, there's a lot of landowners we work with who, you know, we're doing all the wrong things. And we get in there and tactfully try to say no, hey, here's what you could do and do that, and then get them on board. So it's a case by case scenario.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 22:10

And we're gonna switch gears just for a second and sort of throw a wider net. So if you have like snakes or salamanders, like nests of snakes, or if you have a cave in your yard, you can call the TW Ra. And you guys will come out and at least like have a discussion about what you guys can do to maybe, I mean, here's the thing, nobody wants like a snake nest under their house, right? Pretty much. Right? So like, what do you do? Do you call the TW era and you guys say, let me move this snake nest to to a more secure area and out of your basement? Or, you know, how does that how does that work?

Daniel Istvanko: 22:46

So this is one of the parts of my job that I really do not like because you can't help most these people, we get 1000 calls every month. Okay? Anything you can imagine from I saw this too, I found this too. I want to know you name, I sometimes get the K when someone says I gotta cave in my property, I want to know if anything's in it, and I'll come check it out. As far as removing wildlife, we typically don't do that. Basically, you have to get an animal damage control operator. It's a professional exterminator that can handle certain wildlife, okay, and they'll come out and they'll remove them from your house. Otherwise, we that's all we would do. We do it sometimes on a case by case scenario, if I'm coming through and there's let's say, for one year, there is some freetail bats and the dermatologists office right now from my office in Crossville. I just went in there and got them off the wall probably saved I'm sure quite a bit of money. Wow. But for the most part, we don't do that if it's an injured one. And officer somebody can come pick it up and take it to a rehabber. But there's often more calls than can be address.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 23:46

So have you ever run across like a extremely rare and unique species of animal while you're not just in case but just doing your job in general? Like have you ever come across like something that you would consider to be like a snow leopard, it's impossible to see.

Daniel Istvanko: 24:05

Nothing for me that's necessarily exotic, and you wouldn't expect to see it, although that is common also in the field isn't for releasing exotic pets. But as far as what I've done for the agency, in the most part was to go and find rare things. The primary part of my job is to document those rare species. And from there, it's like then we do research and we do disease, then we do all these other things. But the very basic premise of it is what do we have and where is it? Every year I make what I consider an exciting fine whether it's you know, the expansion of some species range into a county we didn't know they existed or a colony of bats that no one's ever found. Not that the K was unknown. Just no one knew those bats were there. So I've I found some things for me that were amazing. I don't know how most people feel about them. But

Kosta Yepifantsev: 24:51

so when you say that people are releasing exotic animals, like what type of exotic animals are your staff running into?

Daniel Istvanko: 24:58

There's some stories from the 90s Where people basically had home zoos would let all these exotic big cats bears things go and, and they were having to go out and shoot song tranquilize them. And you know when people call and say I saw this or I saw that I don't immediately discredit them. A lot of times it's not what they say. However, there's so many scenarios where there was a came in that was found here or there was, you know, an albino rattlesnake at Taco Bell, or Wow, it's possible so I don't write it off. Now a being a wild animal, if it's, you know, it's like a cheetah or something, you know, but somebody definitely could have set it free. I mean, think about how much food it would take to feed an animal that size. That's why they end up landing. Oh,

Kosta Yepifantsev: 25:40

yeah, exactly. Are there bears in the upper Cumberland? There are really and so is that a recent thing because I was always told that there was bears in the Smoky Mountains, but there wasn't any bears here.

Daniel Istvanko: 25:52

One of our closest bears zones would be Big South fort Pickett State Forest Fentress County into Kentucky. And that connects all the way up over with North Cumberland. So basically, they've been expanding the range for years and years, and they do yearly come through the upper Cumberland Cookeville. Seems like we always have one that gets hit on 111 or right. You know, I had one on one of my trail cameras in Jackson County that I presume was a mom with cubs most time it's a transient male, that's what you're seeing, okay, he's leaving his home range getting away from the other males. And that's the ones that turn into nuisance issues.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 26:24

When was the first sighting I don't know if you know off the top of your head, but when was like the first sighting of bigs out of a bear and think Southfork,

Daniel Istvanko: 26:31

it's funny you asked because I was just at a meeting where the bear biologist gave a presentation all this and I can't remember, but he has a map. And I think you can get online and actually put your observations in but it'll show how they've expanded across the state because there's some all the way into like Wilson County, really in places in south of White County now. So I'd say it's extremely rare to see one even up in the part where you can have them not like the Smokies, but they're definitely out there.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 26:56

Let's talk about local stuff. Okay, how are the bats doing here locally.

Daniel Istvanko: 27:02

So it's the opposite of what you think some of our endangered species right now are doing quite well like are gray bats. However, a lot of the other species have pretty much completely disappeared. For instance, there's one called the northern long eared bat that's been federally threatened for the last several years now, and it should be getting upgraded to federally endangered soon. But anyway, when I was in graduate school, I can catch 60 to 100 of those a night. We call it so many. We didn't even work them all up. We're just worried about letting them go. We didn't want them to die. Since I've been in Tennessee and came over here. 2015. I've only seen 12. Wow. That's why affirmed probably seeing over 500 In two years to 12 in the last eight years. Yeah.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 27:41

So are there any extinct species of bats

Daniel Istvanko: 27:44

throughout the world? Absolutely. We're still holding on to all the species that we've known have since been kept records pretty much. However, in some of the case systems, it's absolutely possible to find some skeletal remains of species that may not

Kosta Yepifantsev: 27:58

be around. Yeah, absolutely. So before we wrap up, I just want to and we touched on this briefly earlier about how you know, bats eat pests, and that crops could be affected. If this white nose virus continues to spread, and we continue to destroy habitats, what's the end game for our ability to eat, to survive? The how susceptible we will be to diseases? I mean, have you ever pondered on that?

Daniel Istvanko: 28:28

Oh, all the time. But I think the most likely scenario would be, let's say some of our bats do disappear in the northern longer, they go extinct. I feel like as long as we can still maintain some of these other bat species, they're going to fill that niche, there's going to be more of those bats, we will have less diversity in the long run. So I think we'll maintain and we won't see that catastrophic Fallout, hopefully. So the end game here would be to basically hold on to what we have, and let it go back to being better for future generations. So I think what we're seeing right now is we're still seeing hard declines for some species, but for other species, almost maybe a plateau at the bottom. And so if we can take away all those other additive factors, disturbance habitat, and we can basically give them one less thing to worry about, maybe we'll see those populations rebound now won't be in our lifetimes, and probably not the next generation, but maybe by the next generation, things will be different. You know, this happened in Europe, and likely the populations, they reflect what we'll never know. So this has played out before in time, but he's just holding on to what we had, right? You know, because we're at the point where we can completely erase it from, you know, the planet if we're not careful.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 29:34

I mean, I was hearing some experts discuss how climate change is going to affect wildlife and I mean wildlife just in general terms, and they say that we in 25 years, will eliminate 90% of our wildlife in the world, which is insanity. Right? And so, I am optimistic like you that we will not get there and we will say You've all of the different species. But I have a kind of a personal question that I wanted to ask you. So we bought this house in Cookeville. And we were doing some landscaping and we found a tunnel. And when I say tunnel, the landscapers called me and they threw a rake down there, and it just swallowed that thing up. And I'm kind of like a little kid, you know, I'm like, Well, how far does it go? Where does it go? That's how you get hooked. Yeah, exactly. So they said, listen, we're not going to find out because as we start digging this trench to wherever it leads, that may turn into something much larger than what you want to deal with. So long story short, they put in, they put some gravel and they fill it up. Now, let's just say that this thing leads to like, Bruce Wayne's cabin, and the bat flies into my house, what do I do to get it out? Because I don't want to kill it. And I don't want to hurt it. Do I call you or the TW Ra? How do you if a bat flies into your house? What do you do?

Daniel Istvanko: 31:01

So that scenario happens all the time. And usually people immediately call us, nine times out of 10, someone's going to direct you towards one of those animal damage people that will kind of get it. But the one thing I can say if it's just that scenario, there's one it's sitting on your couch, it's not flying around the room and causing problems. Walk up to it, put some very big gloves on leather. don't handle this at all. Just put a shoe box over something stupid and don't let it outside. Okay, you can put it on next to a tree or a wall so it can climb up and then it'll drop and fly away. Or using NET just use anything other than your hands. Don't touch it. Don't let it get any of its, you know body fluids in your ears, eyes, nose or mouth because that's how you can track rabies. So basically, just put some gloves on, get it out of the house. If you're wearing really thick leather gloves. Even our biggest big brown bats are probably not going to bite through that. And now they're gonna pinch you pretty good, but that's the best scenario because someone's gonna come charge you a ton of money to come to your house and get that one bad. I'm in the wrong field. I think

Kosta Yepifantsev: 31:58

I think you are Yeah, I was gonna say I am afraid of all reptiles. I am not really a big fan of insects. I am lukewarm towards mammals. Bats, bro. If I had a bat sitting on my couch, just chillin. Now that room would be closed off of Intel. That bad is gone. Nobody's walking into that room. And I have I have a guy that helps me around the house name's Patrick. I might call Patrick and be like, Hey, man, he's from Macon County. So he probably figured out you know, but yeah,

Daniel Istvanko: 32:30

if you see what I'm close, I'll give you this. They are very cute. And I always refer to them as Sky kittens because that's what they are. They're basically just little kittens with wings. But I don't know how anyone can see one and hated

Kosta Yepifantsev: 32:43

Morgan this the name of the sub so the sky kittens. Alright, so we always like to end the show on a high note. Who is someone except for bats that make you better when you're together?

Daniel Istvanko: 32:54

Oh, that's definitely my wife Hannah for sure. She is basically the column to my story, my sanity. So you know I come home from being depressed about all these things right there. She just cares to listen about all of it. Except birds. She hates birds. So

Morgan Franklin: 33:09

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Better Together with Kosta Yepifantsev. If you've enjoyed listening and you want to hear more, make sure you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts, leave us a review or better yet, share this episode with a friend! Better Together with Kosta Yepifantsev is a Kosta Yepifantsev Production. Today's episode was written and produced by Morgan Franklin post production mixing and editing by Mike Franklin. Want to know more about Kosta? Visit us at kostayepifantsev.com. We're better together.