Merlin Tuttle

Meet a Real “Batman”: Merlin Tuttle

Merlin Tuttle offering some banana to a fruit bat

Merlin Tuttle lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, when he was a teenager. He and his friends enjoyed visiting nearby caves. In one cave, he saw thousands of gray bats. But he only saw them briefly in the spring and the fall. The books all said that gray bats don’t migrate. Were the books wrong? He thought so, and set out to prove it!

As you read the rest of Merlin’s story, you can click on unfamiliar words that are underlined to find out what they mean.

Merlin says, “I arranged to meet with biologists at the Smithsonian. They encouraged me to band some of the bats to see if I could learn where they were going. When the bats returned in early October, I banded 300. I was hoping someone farther south would find them in winter. By a stroke of luck, my father and I found them ourselves only a month later. They were hibernating in a cave with more than 100,000 others. This cave was over 100 miles north of where we had banded them.”

“This was one of the first discoveries of a major gray bat hibernating site. It was also the first real evidence that they migrated. The cave where I had first observed them was a regular stopover on their way to a hibernation cave.”

By 1982, Merlin had graduated from high school, attended college, and become a world specialist on bats. In that year, he founded Bat Conservation International. This organization tries to teach people to understand and value bats. They also try to safeguard the future of bats and their habitats.

“Bats are among the few true hibernators. The breathing of a hibernating bat is imperceptible, and its body cold to touch. Its heartbeat drops from roughly 400 beats per minute when awake to about 25 in hibernation. Its body temperature drops to within a few tenths of one degree of the surrounding cave.”

“As the winter wears on", he warns, "the fat a bat has stored during the fall is slowly burned as fuel. Each human disturbance of a hibernation site causes many bats to wake up. Each time a bat wakes up, it uses a little stored fat, so repeated human disturbance could cost the bat its life.”

Last updated on October 24, 2005