Dark Banquet Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures

by Schutt, Bill

• ISBN13: 9780307381132
• ISBN10: 0307381137
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-10-06
• Publisher: Crown

Summary

For centuries, blood feeders have inhabited our nightmares and horror stories, as well as the shadowy realms of scientific knowledge. In Dark Banquet, zoologist Bill Schutt takes readers on an entertaining voyage into the world of some of nature's strangest creaturesthe sanguivores. Using a sharp eye and mordant wit, Schutt makes a remarkably persuasive case that vampire bats, leeches, ticks, bed bugs, and other vampires are as deserving of our curiosity as warmer and fuzzier species areand that many of them are even worthy of conservation. Schutt takes us from rural Trinidad to the jungles of Brazil to learn about some of the most reviled, misunderstood, and marvelously evolved animals on our planet: vampire bats. Only recently has fact begun to disentangle itself from fiction concerning these remarkable animals, and Schutt delves into the myths and misconceptions surrounding them. Examining the substance that sustains nature's vampires, Schutt reveals just how little we actually knew about blood until well into the twentieth century. We revisit George Washington on his deathbed to learn how ideas about blood and the supposedly therapeutic value of bloodletting, first devised by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, survived into relatively modern times. Schutt also tracks the history of medicinal leech use. Once employed by the tens of millions to drain perceived excesses of blood, today the market for these ancient creatures is booming once againbut for very different reasons. Among the other blood feeders we meet in these pages are bed bugs, or "ninja insects," which are making a creepy resurgence in posh hotels and well-kept homes near you. In addition, Dark Banquet details our dangerous and sometimes deadly encounters with ticks, chiggers, and mites (the latter implicated in Colony Collapse Disordercurrently devastating honey bees worldwide). Then there are the truly weirdvampire finches. And if you thought piranha were scary, some people believe that the candiru (or willy fish) is the best reason to avoid swimming in the Amazon. Enlightening, alarming, and appealing to our delight in the bizarre, Dark Banquet peers into a part of the natural world to which we are, through our blood, inextricably linked. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

BILL SCHUTT is an associate professor of biology at C.W. Post College in Long Island and a research associate in mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.


From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

Prologue	p. 1
No Country for Old Chickens
Wallerfield	p. 13
Children of the Night	p. 33
Snapple, Anyone?	p. 61
Let It Bleed
Eighty Ources	p. 101
The Red Stuff	p. 121
A Beautiful Friendship	p. 149
Bed Bug and Beyond
Sleeping with the Enemy	p. 187
Of Mites and Men	p. 229
Candiru: with a Capital C and That Rhymes with	p. 269
A Tough Way to Make a Living	p. 285
Notes	p. 295
Selected Bibliography	p. 307
Acknowledgments	p. 311
Index	p. 315
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

1. WALLERFIELD
( Nine years earlier )

The ceiling tiles in the abandoned icehouse had fallen long ago, transforming the floor of the cavernous building into a debris-strewn obstacle course.

“Hey, it’s squishy,” I said, stepping gingerly onto a slime-coated chunk just inside the doorway. “Some sort of foam.”

“It’s probably just asbestos.”

My wife, Janet, was a terrific field assistant, but I could tell that this place was already giving her a serious case of the creeps.

“Yes, but with a protective coating of bat shit,” I added, trying to cheer her up. “Let’s check it out.”

Wallerfield, in north-central Trinidad, had been a center for American military operations in the southern Atlantic during World War II. The land on which it had been built became part of the same Lend-Lease program that had brought Churchill’s shell-shocked government fifty outdated American destroyers. Once it had been the largest and busiest air base in the world, but the English were long gone, as were the Yanks (most of them anyway), and now Wallerfield was an overgrown ruin. Row upon row of prefab buildings had either been carted off in pieces by the locals or reclaimed by the scrubby forests of Trinidad’s Central Plain, but because of its cement construction the icehouse was one of the few buildings still standing. Stark white below a mantle of tangled green, the icehouse belonged to the bats—tens of thousands of them.

With help from the Trinidad’s Ministry of Agriculture we’d been collecting vampire bats around the island for nearly two weeks—and things had gone incredibly well. So well, in fact, that when our friend Farouk suggested that we visit the cavernous and somewhat notorious ruins of Wallerfield, Janet and I jumped at the chance to accompany him.

The icehouse wasn’t completely dark yet. Daylight streamed through a window frame that in all likelihood hadn’t held glass in fifty years. The light fell obliquely onto the floor, illuminating the base of a cement pillar that rose a dozen feet to the ceiling. The only movement was from the dust that swirled into and out of  the sunlight. We passed single file through a shaft of motes before continuing on into deepening shadow. The room we were crossing was huge, perhaps two hundred feet long and half as wide, and it took us a good five minutes to pick our way across the slippery rubble.

We stopped at what looked to be a high doorway leading into a smaller room, around fifteen feet square. But instead of entering, our companion put his arm out, stopping us before we could go farther.

“Youdon’twant to walk in there, boy.” The Indo-Trini accent belonged to Farouk Muradali, head of his government’s Anti-Rabies Unit. Farouk would also become my mentor for all things related to Trinidadian bats and a collaborator on a project to study quadrupedal locomotion in vampire bats.

“Why’s that, Farouk?” I asked, as Janet and I flicked on our headlamps.

“That is not a room,” he said.

As I trained my beam inside the chamber I couldn’t help noticing that the floor had a weird shine to it. “What the—?”

“It’s an elevator shaft.”

“A what?” Janet said, pulling up beside me.

I kicked in a small piece of debris past the threshold and it hit the dark surface with a plop. “Jesus, it’s completely filled with water!”

Janet edged closer, the light from her headlamp focused at a point just beyond the doorway. “That is not water,” she said.

The “floor” of the shaft was a debris-strewn swamp. There was indeed some type of filthy, tar black liquid filling the shaft, but Janet was right—it certainly wasn’t water

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Excerpted from Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures by Bill Schutt
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.