Rob Mies wants to tackle the image problem bats have head-on. No, they're not going to land on your head and mess up your hair something fierce. No, they're not going to suck your blood and turn into Robert Pattinson (or Bela Lugosi). And yes, they do an awful lot of good.
For one thing, they make margaritas possible.
"I try to find things that I feel people will be wowed by, that if bats didn't exist, their life would actually change," says Mies, who will be talking about all things bat (and showing off a few of the critters) as part of this weekend's Backyard Science Days at the Maryland Science Center. "For adults, I ask them if they like tequila. We take tequila from the agave plant, and the agave is only pollinated by bats."
Leave it to a genuine bat man — Mies has been studying and working with the winged mammals for 18 years — to strike a blow for bat popularity.
"If they're kids, I'll usually say, 'Do you like mangos? Or bananas?' Mies says over the phone from his home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., "because bananas are pollinated by bats."
Still, Mies, who has appeared with his bats on TV shows hosted by Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Martha Stewart and others, understands he's got a tough job ahead of him. People just don't like bats, and their first impression of a guy who hangs out with them so much of the time usually isn't very positive.
"When I started telling people what I was doing, people were pretty freaked out about it, they're, like, 'Gross!' " he says. "They'd usually step back a few feet, like I had bats with me or something."
But people just don't understand, Mies says, that bats are truly marvelous creatures — and not just because they make many kinds of fruit possible. "Bats are the primary predators of nighttime insects," he says. "They eat more insects at night than any other predator does, any other bird, a spider or anything else. Without bats, insects would rule the world."
They're also fascinating animals, he says. "There are over 1,100 species, 1,100 different kinds of bats in the world. There are white ones, there are red ones. There are yellow ones, there are polka-dotted ones. It's pretty amazing."
Mies, who began studying bats as a student at Eastern Michigan University and started the Organization for Bat Conservation in 1994, will be bringing several bats with him to Baltimore for the weekend. Among his companions will be the admittedly intimidating-looking Malayan flying fox, the world's biggest bat, which weighs in around 6 pounds and has a 6-foot wingspan. He'll compare that beast to the world's smallest bat, Thailand's hog-nosed bat, which weighs about the same as a dime (but won't, unfortunately, be making the trip).
"I want people to go, 'Whoa, I had no idea,' " he says.
Also not making the trip will be any vampire bats, Mies says. For all their nasty reputation, it seems, the fabled bloodthirsty bats don't take to car travel very well. "They're a bit stressed on the road," he says.
That, and their diet presents something of a problem.
"For the bats that eat fruit, I can go to any grocery store," he says. "For the bats that eat mealworms, that eat insects, I can go to the pet store. But the blood thing just doesn't pan out on the road."
If you go
Rob Mies' "Bat Encounters" show will run through the weekend as part of the Maryland Science Center's fifth annual Backyard Science Days, set for noon-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Other featured activities include sidewalk chalk, a stomp-rocket launch, creepy crawler cooking demo, even a chance to "Meet the Beetles." The event is free with paid museum admission. Information: 410-685-5225 or marylandsciencecenter.org.