FLORA LICHTMAN: Wildlife photography always
seems like such a glorious job.
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: You feel the winds of these thousands
of wings in your hair.
It changes the quality of lights because the sun
doesn't shine the same way through winged bodies.
If you stand up they will hit you.
It smells.
You get peed on.
FLORA LICHTMAN: Hmm.
I guess no job is perfect.
That's bat biologist--
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: My name is Nickolay Hristov.
FLORA LICHTMAN: --and he describes himself as--
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: The naturalist of the 21st century.
FLORA LICHTMAN: No, but seriously, you'll soon see why.
Hristov studies bats, often by filming them in new ways.
This is high speed video of Brazilian Free-tailed bats
coming out of a cave in South Central Texas.
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: We had the camera
placed in the middle of what looks
like a stream of emerging bats.
Several thousand bats per minute just pouring out of this cave.
FLORA LICHTMAN: And that's just a fraction of the colony.
Between 200 and 500,000 individuals live in that cave,
Hristov says.
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: And that's on the small side
for a typical Free-tailed colony.
FLORA LICHTMAN: The free tote bats that Hristov studies--
and by the way, this is one in a flight lab--
winter in South America and Mexico,
and then from March to October move to caves in the Southwest.
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: They come out every night
generally around sunset.
FLORA LICHTMAN: They're heading out for dinner.
And when you watch them spread out over the horizon--
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: You can completely
forget that it's made of individual bats.
It looks like a super organism that kind of
snakes through the air above the landscape.
FLORA LICHTMAN: But if you slow down the footage
and you're recording of 1,000 frames per second,
you can study them as individuals.
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: We used to assume that bats don't really
bump into each other.
And through high speed video we know that that is actually
not the case.
FLORA LICHTMAN: But what about life in the roost?
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: Very little, actually,
has been done to understand what exactly goes on
once the lights in the cave get turned off.
FLORA LICHTMAN: How do you film with the lights off?
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: We took the portable thermal cameras
inside Carlsbad Cavern.
FLORA LICHTMAN: That orange swath of lava is actually--
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: A carpet of bats draped from the ceiling.
FLORA LICHTMAN: And if you thought
bats slept during the day--
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: They certainly must rest,
but there's always something happening.
Bats are moving.
There are territorial disputes.
It's a very social and active species.
And going into the cave is yet another experience.
One that I often refer to as one of the most
disgusting and at the time fascinating
experiences in my life.
FLORA LICHTMAN: Disgusting because?
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: You're walking on a 10 meter
carpet of bat poop.
FLORA LICHTMAN: Fascinating because?
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: It is like a cathedral of nature.
FLORA LICHTMAN: What about the architecture of that cathedral?
Hristov has a tool for that, too.
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: What you see is our most recent attempt
to capture the morphological complexity of the cave.
FLORA LICHTMAN: This is a 3-D reconstruction
of the interior of Carlsbad Caverns, made with a laser
scanner that the researchers take inside the cave.
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: And it basically beams
millions and millions of laser beams
and therefore distance reading events.
So the cumulative result of that is literally a point cloud.
FLORA LICHTMAN: Which is compiled into a reconstruction
you can fly through.
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: Pretty much along the trajectory
of what a returning bat were to do in the morning
before it gets back to the roost.
FLORA LICHTMAN: This is naturalism 2.0, Hristov says.
Think of Darwin and the other naturalists
of the 19th and 20th centuries.
NICKOLAY HRISTOV: The image that we have of them
is that it just kind of walked round and took meticulous notes
and did amazing things.
And I think 100 years later there is still
a lot of room for this very basic approach
to the natural science, specifically, and nature.
And I like to go at it with the help of technology.
FLORA LICHTMAN: And the classic naturalist notebook?
Here it is, translated for 2012.
For Science Friday I'm Flora Lichtman.