¨Murcielago¨ is my favorite word

Though I have yet to say anything about my classes here, I actually have been doing something relatively productive at the University. I’m still not going to talk about most of them in this entry, but I want to mention the most unique class. I’m auditing this class on the Ecology of Cuba in the Biology department of the University of Havana because it is designed specifically for these three US students from Sarah Lawrence, and they just let me sit in. Every week is a different aspect of the ecology here, such as biodiversity, conservation, insects, mammals, etc, covered by a different professor in the department. They also take us on excursions every now and then, so this weekend we went to a cave to study bats! We went with two bio professors (Emanuel and Ari) who specialize in bats, and use this particular cave fairly frequently. It was about 40 kilometers South-East of the city, in tiny town called “El Mudo” (the mute). We got to stay at a Buffalo farm there because Emanuel and Ari are friends with the family who owns it. This on its own was an interesting experience, because it is a very different way of life than we’ve seen in Havana. It’s a fairly “primitive” farm, with no machinery, meaning the family does all the milking and harvesting and everything with their hands. They have about 40 buffalo on the farm, which is a government owned farm (of course), but they also make a fair amount of money selling the buffalo meat to touristy hotels. Despite extremely hard work and lack of a lot of comforts, for instance assured running water, the standard of living seems to be a little better in the country, or at least on a farm. First of all, there is motivation for work. In the city, a house painter makes the same amount of money if they paint 30 walls a day or half a wall, and the same if they do a perfect job or if it is spotty and ugly, so they have very little motivation to work fast or well. But on the farm, if they don’t milk every buffalo, or harvest their crops, they and their animals will suffer directly. There is more self-interest involved in their work, which makes it mentally easier to complete. Also, they have plenty of food, as much fresh milk as they need, and much less pollution and chaos. The fresh milk is kind of a big deal, because it is close to impossible to get fresh milk unless you have a child under 3, and even powdered milk is expensive.
So on to the bats. Apparently Cuba has one of the highest densities of caves in the world, but someone should check that fact because they love to exaggerate here. This particular cave is interesting to scientists because it is a hot cave. This means, that its bats live in a very tall cavern with a tiny entrance at the very bottom. The every day activity of the bats creates a huge amount of heat that only rises to the top, so the environment stays constant, only varying about 0.5 degrees C in a day. And the temperature stays at 41 degrees, only 1 degree below the temperature at which proteins denature. That’s hot. To get there, we crawled army style on a ground that was only guano (bat poop) and cockroaches, all the time dodging bats that fly right into you, despite their echolocation. I don’t have to tell y’all it was intense. Inside the cavern, it was pitch black, hotter than anything imaginable with 100% humidity, and chaotic. Our mission was to capture a couple different types of bats to bring back for studying, so we took turns waving a net back and forth hoping to grab something. We ended up with about 6 bats, 3 different species, and then we crawled back out. We were absolutely disgusting, covered in cockroach guts, poop, and soaked in sweat, but we couldn’t shower because the farm’s water hadn’t come yet that day. They have to wait until a big truck comes and fills up their containers, then take showers by pouring water over their heads from a cup. So instead we had a lesson on bat identification. It’s pretty straight forward. First you determine whether it is an insect bat or a fruit and pollen bat, which is determined by the presence of an urapatagio (a net in between the bottom feet that catches insects). Then you narrow down the species by wing shape, then look at the face. Usually there are two species that are easily confused, so we looked at comparison charts to be sure of the exact specie. We each got to hold one of the bats while we were iding them, and mine went crazy (or was crazy, I don’t know). It was trying to bite anything it could, and when no part of me was in reach, it chomped down on its own wing. The weird thing was, I couldn’t even get it to let go, even though it was chewing so hard that it drew its own blood. It couldn’t even fly afterwards. It was really creepy, and really shook me up for the rest of the day.
After a break for exploration and dinner, we went back out to the cave to learn about echolocation and scorpions. Apparently, bats make echolocation noises all the time, but also communicate with each other in sounds within the range of human hearing. These sound like bat noises, while the echolocation sounds like wings flapping rapidly. We heard this because we had a frequency transducer that dividing sound wave frequency by 10, meaning the frequency became audible to us. We also had a UV light, so we searched for scorpions with this. There were a bunch on the walls that look neon green in UV light.
So to sum up, it was an awesome weekend and a well-needed break from the city. The only other thing to add is that the Cuban countryside also has the best stars I’ve ever seen in my life, including on mountains in the middle of rural Vermont.