My review (from Quarterly Review of Biology; https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/727931):
If you ask a scientist what about their work excites them most, they are unlikely to recite a discovery they have already made. Instead, odds are they will tell you about some tantalizing question they have been struggling to answer or a line of inquiry that has been generating questions. In that spirit, bat biologists M. Brock Fenton and Jens Rydell have written a charming book about their beloved subjects. And with roughly 100 years of research between them, they have loads of great questions to ask.
There are already many good volumes about bats, but three things set A Miscellany of Bats apart. For one, the authors are outstanding photographers. The images in this book are second to none. Second, there is a lovely exploration of the roles bats play in human cultures, and much of what is covered here is not in those other volumes.
But what really makes it special is that while other books about bats might leave readers with the impression that the scientific facts have been mostly worked out, this volume highlights open questions: Why do Percival’s trident bats (Cloeotis percivali) and Egyptian slit-faced bats (Nycteris thebaica) keep showing up in photographs flying upside down, with their bellies toward the sky? Why do some leaf-nosed bats echolocate through their mouths, while others echolocate through their noses? What is the significance of the grooves on the inner surfaces of some bats’ ears? There are dozens of questions like these, and to read them feels like grabbing a quick coffee with the authors between talks at a conference.
Fenton began working on bats as an undergraduate in the 1960s. Rydell was already a high school teacher by the time he discovered a passion for them in the 1980s. Both worked for decades as bat researchers, Fenton in Canada and Rydell in Sweden. Once, in the 1990s, they collaborated in Costa Rica, where they encountered Spix’s disk-winged bat (Thyroptera tricolor), a bat that clings head-up to the surfaces of leaves by means of haftorgane (“sticking organs”) on its wrists and ankles. Having caught one, the authors placed it in an overturned drinking glass to photograph the disks. The photographs revealed an empty volume of air between the center of the disk and the surface of the glass. That left them wondering whether the disks work as suction cups or if they use some other sticking mechanism. When I joined Fenton’s laboratory a year later as a graduate student, that question became my thesis project. My MSc degree and, ultimately, my own career as a bat biologist, were launched by a couple of photographs and a good question. This book is a trove of gems like that one, which will inspire any avid reader.
Tragically, Rydell died suddenly and unexpectedly as this volume was coming to completion. As a result, A Miscellany of Bats sits a little heavier in one’s hands than it might have otherwise—a reminder that none of us will ever answer all of our scientific questions, and a celebration of the joy we get from chasing them.
