Episode 9 David Attenborough's Natural Curiosities

'The natural world is full of extraordinary animals

'with amazing life histories.

'Yet certain stories are more intriguing than most.'

The mysteries of a butterfly's life cycle.

Or the strange biology of the Emperor penguin.

Some of these creatures were surrounded by myth

and misunderstandings for a very long time.

And some have only recently revealed their secrets.

These are the animals that stand out from the crowd,

the curiosities I find most fascinating of all.

Some animals acquired frightening reputations

almost as soon as they were discovered.

In this episode,

we investigate the stories surrounding two such creatures...

GORILLA MOANS

..the gorilla and the vampire bat.

Why did they get such bad reputations?

And were they justified?

This statue in the London Zoo is of Guy the Gorilla.

He was perhaps the zoo's most well-known resident

and became one of the world's most famous gorillas.

In his prime, Guy weighed in at over 200 kilos.

His neck, as you can see, was thicker than a man's waist.

He stood five feet four inches tall, over a metre and a half.

That was with his knees bent.

When Guy arrived here in 1940, little was known about gorillas.

The reports from Africa hinted of

a creature that was shockingly brutal.

So it's hardly surprising that

people flocked to see this fearsome monster for themselves.

But Guy proved to be a gentle giant who won

the affection of the public.

So how and why did the gorilla gain

this reputation as a fearsome savage?

Today we know a lot about gorillas and their way of life.

There are, in fact, a number of different kinds,

some of which live in the lowlands and others in the mountains.

The stay in small family groups

and spend much of their days feeding on leaves and shoots.

Many people, including myself, have travelled a long way to meet

these close relatives of ours.

Remarkably, despite being the largest living ape,

the gorilla was one of the last to be described by science.

In 1847, an American missionary and naturalist, Thomas Savage,

was travelling back home from Africa

when he stopped off to stay with some friends in the Congo.

His friends' house was decorated with African curiosities

and one of them caught his eye, a skull.

But it was not like one he'd ever seen before in Africa.

It had two huge eye sockets, a crest like a Mohawk haircut running

from front to back and another transversely across here.

These are anchor points for huge muscles for the jaw and neck.

He knew immediately he was looking at a spectacular new species

but he had no time to go in search of it.

He frantically negotiated with some African hunters and managed to

acquire further skulls and bones of the same kind of animal.

When he got back to the States, Savage handed the specimens

to an anatomist friend who immediately

recognised that they belonged to some kind of ape.

He gave it the scientific name, Gorilla,

a Greek word meaning wild, hairy people.

He then sealed the reputation of the gorilla with

the convention of adding the surname of the person who discovered it.

In this case, Thomas Savage.

But many people misguidedly assumed that the scientific name,

Gorilla savagei, was a description of the nature

of this newly found ape.

Though gorillas had somehow remained unknown to science

until Victorian times, other great apes were already quite familiar.

They were all commonly called orangs after the most famous of them,

the orangutan, which the Dutch

had encountered in Indonesia in the 17th century.

Shortly afterwards, the Portuguese discovered chimpanzees in Africa

and by the time reports of the gorilla appeared, both chimps

and orangs had been appearing in circuses

and the courts of European royalty for over 200 years.

The first gorillas to arrive in Britain were dead specimens

and unlike these late arrivals, they will often badly preserved.

They went on display at the Crystal Palace and their grotesque

appearance was supported by horrific accounts of their nature.

One of the early collectors of gorillas was an American

anthropologist called Du Chaillu.

He made numerous expeditions to Africa and returned with

tales of terrifying encounters with gorillas.

In this, his bestseller, Exploration And Adventure In Equatorial Africa,

amongst sensational tales of cannibalism, charging buffalo

and tropical fevers, is the very first eyewitness

account of man meeting male gorillas in their jungle home.

"He was a sight, I think, I shall never forget.

"Nearly six feet high with immense body,

"huge chest and great, muscular arms,

"with fiercely glaring, large, deep grey eyes and a hellish

"expression of face that seemed, to me, like some nightmare vision.

"Thus stood before us this king of the African forest."

To be fair, Chaillu did dispel some of the more ridiculous stories

and myths about the gorilla, but his compelling

tales of their fierce nature was just what the public wanted to hear.

GORILLA CALLS

Du Chaillu's vivid description of the gorilla in the wild

reinforced its image as a fearsome beast and confirmed its reputation.

GORILLA CALLS

These displays may look fearsome, but in fact,

they're only rarely followed by physical violence.

Du Chaillu's description may have wowed readers,

but the scientific establishment were rather less easy to impress.

He was branded a braggart, a plagiarist and a charlatan.

Some suggested he never even visited Africa

and that his ferocious creatures were, in fact, gentle.

But he had his strongest support right at the top.

Professor Richard Owen, founder of the London Natural History Museum.

Owen was one of the most respected figures

of Victorian science, but also one of the most widely disliked.

He was vehemently opposed to Darwin's theory of evolution,

which suggested that apes and humans were closely related.

Du Chaillu's description of a ferocious gorilla suited Owen,

because it seemed to support his view that we could not

possibly be related to such dreadful monsters.

But he could hardly deny the anatomical

similarity between gorillas and humans.

This illustration from 1855, shows the skeleton of a man

and gorilla side-by-side.

It was published by Owen himself

and makes clear the likeness between the two species.

But Owen was still not willing to accept that man could have

ape-like ancestors.

In 1860, a great debate about evolution and man's place

in the natural world took place in this very room in Oxford.

Richard Owen presented compelling evidence for the presence of

three structures in the human brain that were absent in a gorilla's.

According to Owen, this made the descent of man from apes impossible.

As the only anatomist with access to gorilla specimens,

he was confident he was on firm ground,

but he hadn't counted on biologist Thomas Henry Huxley.

Huxley, known as Darwin's bulldog, was, in his own words,

waiting for this opportunity to nail that mendacious humbug, Owen,

like a kite to a barn door, and immediately challenged his

findings, vowing to prove him wrong.

In the years that followed, Huxley doggedly pursued Owen

and did indeed prove him wrong on all counts.

He found all three brain structures in the apes

and proved apes were closer to men than to monkeys.

Richard Owen had, according to Huxley, been guilty of wilful

and deliberate falsehood.

Owen and Du Chaillu's misleading descriptions of the gorilla

failed to disprove our relationship to apes.

On the contrary, they became a turning point

in our acceptance that they are our cousins.

But, sadly, the damage to the gorilla's reputation had

already been done.

When Guy arrived in London almost 100 years after the discovery

of gorillas, people still regarded him as a fearsome and savage beast.

It took the next 30 years of Guy's life for a more accurate

picture of the gorilla to emerge.

Although gorillas can, indeed, be dangerous when angry or threatened,

most of the time, they are mild and peaceful creatures

and nowhere is this shown more clearly than in a charming story

from Guy's time here at the zoo.

Guy's cage often attracted sparrows that then became trapped inside.

But rather than kill them, Guy would lift the tiny birds

carefully onto his hand, examine them and then release them.

He was, indeed, a gentle giant.

Over time, thanks to the determination of field researchers

like Dian Fossey, people have seen another side to gorillas.

By the time I met them, many of us were ready to see them

not as savages, but as animals that are equally

suited to their environment as we are to ours.

So, now, at last, the gorilla, which was once labelled a fearsome

beast, has managed to shake off its undeserved reputation.

Our second subject, the vampire bat, has also had an undeservedly

bad reputation and been the inspiration behind tales of evil.

Bats have had a bad reputation for a very long time.

As creatures of the night, they are connected with dark mysteries

and devilish goings-on.

But there was never any real evidence to support these

claims of their evil nature, that is

until the Conquistadors returned from South America with

tales of giant bats that dropped down on you as you slept

and sucked the very blood from your veins.

Tales of vampire bats.

Stories of giant, bloodsucking bats have long been

part of the culture of South American people.

Images of them with savage fangs are common

and a bat god was associated with death.

But it wasn't until the 18th century that a detailed description of a

vampire bat was published in Europe and it came from one of its victims.

An Englishman by the name of John Gabriel Stedman came

back from South America with reports of having been bitten by a vampire.

He described a bat of monstrous size that sucked the blood of men

and cattle when they're fast asleep.

And he proudly declared that he'd managed to catch the beast

and cut off its head.

Stedman's descriptions were detailed,

but nonetheless misleading.

His drawing shows, in fact, the bat that feeds on nectar

and is only a few centimetres long.

He had been bitten by a vampire, but he had blamed the wrong bat.

Clouded by their own ideas of what a vampire should look like,

early naturalists jumped to all sorts of conclusions and assumed

that it was the biggest and the most ugly that were the bloodsuckers.

In fact, the name "vampire" was sometimes given to bats that

looked the part, but had never so much as sniffed blood.

These bats, for example, drawn by the 19th-century German

naturalist Ernst Haeckel, belonged to a group called

the leaf nosed bats, because of these strange protrusions

around the end of the nose.

This gives them a particularly menacing appearance and some early

naturalists thought the nose leaf was, in fact, the mark of a vampire.

The leaflike object on its nose was thought to be so sharp,

the bat could use it to puncture a victim's skin,

and since many bats have such nose leaves,

over 100 species were mistakenly described as vampires.

In fact, the nose leaf is made of nothing more than soft flesh

and couldn't possibly draw blood.

It's used for echolocation.

Echolocation works like sonar.

The bats produce high-frequency calls and use the returning

echoes to build up a mental map of their surroundings,

so they are able to find their way in the pitch dark and hunt for prey.

Most bats produce these calls in their throats,

but leaf nosed bats project them out through their nose in a beam.

By doing so, they can feed and echolocate at the same time.

So many leaf nosed bats had been discovered that the arrival

in Europe of a specimen of another, smaller species

in 1810 attracted very little attention.

It was simply named Desmodus rotundus,

on account of it being a little portly.

Some 30 years later, when Charles Darwin was travelling

around the world aboard the Beagle,

he observed Desmodus feeding in the wild for the first time.

He saw it drinking the blood of sleeping horses and cattle.

He had, at last, identified the true vampire.

We know that there are only three species of vampire bats

and they all live in South America.

They're totally unique in being the only mammals to feed exclusively

on blood, but feeding on blood is not as easy as you might think.

It's actually a pretty challenging diet.

Blood is made up of water and protein and has virtually no fat,

so, vampires find it hard to get enough energy.

They must consume 50% of their own body weight in blood each night,

or they'll die within a few days.

Under the cover of darkness, the vampire sets out to hunt.

The nose leaf and echolocation help it to home in on its prey.

The bat approaches carefully.

Unlike most other bats, it can use its wings as legs

and it walks on its elbows.

Once near its victim, it uses its nose leaf in another way.

It acts as a heat-seeking device,

guiding the bat to the warmth of its prey.

Today, livestock have largely replaced wild jungle animals,

but even livestock can be dangerous to a small bat.

Patiently, the vampire stalks its prey.

And, at last, it's close enough.

The teeth are so sharp that a nick is all that's needed.

Blood from the wound doesn't clot, but continues to flow, and within

a quarter of an hour, the bat can drink 40% of its body weight.

That is the equivalent to one of us drinking over 20 litres.

Having had its fill, it's back to the roost.

Finding a meal every night is not easy,

but vampires have come up with a solution to that problem.

Those which have been successful share the blood they've drunk

with those who had failed to collect any.

Vampires are most likely to share with those

they know well from roosting and grooming together.

It's an act of apparent kindness,

but the colony, as a whole, benefits.

So, it seems that there is another, gentler side to these bats

than anyone could have imagined.

Unfortunately, just as light was being shed on the true

nature of the vampire, an Irish novelist published the book

that would seal their reputation for the foreseeable future.

Bram Stoker's classic, Dracula, leaves little doubt as to

where his inspiration came from.

His story combined European myths of vampires that come to haunt

the living, with stories of bloodsucking bats

from South America, and it's an association that the real

vampire bats have struggled to shed.

More recently, vampire bats have made headlines once again.

It's been discovered that their saliva contains the remarkable

blood-thinning agent that's been named Draculin.

And it's proving to be the most successful treatment

for stroke victims.

How ironic that a creature we once believed to be a deadly threat

may turn out to save human lives in the future.

Maybe it's time we re-evaluated the reputation of the much

maligned vampire bat.

Vampire bats and gorillas were long pursued by unfair reputations,

but while our fear of gorillas has turned into respect and admiration,

the vampire bat, for many of us, continues to evoke mixed emotions.