Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part 1 No Country for Old Chickens

  1. Wallerfield

  2. Children of the Night

  3. Snapple, Anyone?

  Part 2 Let It Bleed

  4. Eighty Ounces

  5. The Red Stuff

  6. A Beautiful Friendship

  Part 3 Bed Bug & Beyond

  7. Sleeping with the Enemy

  8. Of Mites and Men

  9. Candiru: with a Capital C and That Rhymes with P

  10. A Tough Way to Make a Living

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  For Marie Grace Schutt and William A. Schutt Sr.

  …and all my Aunt Roses

  I know that our late King, though not apt to believe more than his neighbours, had no doubt of the existence of vampires and their banquets on the dead.

  —Horace Walpole, commenting in a letter on the beliefs of King George II

  The blood is the life.

  —Deuteronomy 12:23

  PROLOGUE

  ( 2002 )

  A pair of chickens scratched nervously at the dusty ground beneath the grapefruit tree, careful to avoid the small puddles of coagulated blood.

  “This happened last night.” The voice from behind me belonged to Amos “Jumbo” Johnson, my guide and field assistant. Jumbo worked for Trinidad’s Ministry of Agriculture in the Anti-Rabies Unit. I’d figured out several years earlier that Jumbo had gotten his nickname from the fact that the only thing he liked more than eating food was talking about it. But now he had gotten sidetracked—sort of.

  “Tonight when the blood is fresh, it will glisten.”

  I nodded, trying to determine if either of these sad-looking birds had been bled the night before. Was that a dark stain along one of their legs?

  It was my third trip to Trinidad and I’d come for the same reason each time: to study vampire bats, arguably the most highly specialized of all living mammals. Feeding solely on blood, vampires make up a tiny fraction of the order Chiroptera (only three out of the eleven hundred bat species). But even among this exclusive group, Diaemus youngi, the white-winged vampire bat is special. Far more rare than Desmodus rotundus, the aptly named common vampire bat, Diaemus is an arboreal hunter—feeding primarily on birds and currently subsisting almost exclusively on the blood of domestic poultry. This in itself wasn’t all that strange. It was, after all, the arrival of man and his cattle that had exploded the common vampire bat populations. But it was how the white-winged vampires hunted that fascinated me.

  While observing my captive colony at Cornell University, I’d seen something remarkable. Crawling across the floor of their feeding enclosure like a pair of spiders, the vampires made what I thought was a bold approach to a rather large hen. The bird cocked her head to one side, eyeing the bats. Her beak could have severely injured or even killed them—and I got ready to intervene. One of the vampires stopped a couple of inches beyond pecking distance but the other crept even closer. Then, amazingly, the bat nuzzled against the hen’s feathery breast. Instead of becoming alarmed, the bird seemed to relax a bit. The vampire responded by pushing itself deeper into what I would later learn was a sensitive section of feather-free skin called the brood patch. This was a region densely packed with surface blood vessels, where body heat could be efficiently transferred from the hen to her eggs. Later, the brood patch was where chicks snuggled up to warm themselves. As I watched, the hen reacted to the bat by fluffing her feathers, hunkering down, and finally—closing her eyes.

  My God, I thought, these bats have learned to mimic chicks!

  What was most remarkable to me was that in all likelihood chick mimicry wasn’t innate behavior written into the vampire’s DNA over millions of years. It must have been learned since the arrival of the Europeans and their domesticated fowl. Were vampire bat mothers teaching this behavior to their young?

  So enthralled was I at this wonderfully diabolical maneuver (and its implications) that I never noticed that the second vampire had disappeared under the hoodwinked hen’s tail feathers—never noticed until several minutes later when a thin trickle appeared on the floor behind the bird. Through the gloom of the darkened enclosure I could see a small puddle forming and I remember that it glistened like red tinsel.

  “We should get these poles up,” Jumbo said, nudging me into the present with the business end of a ten-foot stretch of bamboo.

  We were setting up shop (thirty-foot lengths of monofilament netting, actually) in one of central Trinidad’s least populated regions, Guaico Tamana. Earlier we’d passed through several sleepy towns before Jumbo slammed the jeep into a lower gear and turned off the main road.

  Basawan Trace was more of a trail than a road, narrow, twisting, and strewn with potholes. We had bumped along, top down, with Jumbo’s soca music cutting through the humid August air. The jeep slowed down only once—to avoid squashing a trio of oilbirds sitting in the road. I’d read that these bizarre creatures employed a form of echolocation to navigate the dark caves where they lived and that the early settlers of Trinidad had named them for their rich reserves of oily fat—which burned quite well in lamps. Now they were mainly a tourist attraction, another checkmark on the Life Lists of the thousands of birders who visited Trinidad each year.

  I saw little sign of human habitation in the scrubby forest, but eventually Jumbo pulled up beside a pair of simple clapboard houses. Several garden plots had been carved out of the underbrush, and the yards were strewn with an assortment of old tires, tools, and rusted farm implements. I was soon introduced to the owners, Leno Lara and Mala Boris, as well as their wives, kids, and a friendly assortment of family members totaling about ten people. There was a television playing in the Lara house, but Jumbo informed me later that they had neither running water nor electricity and that the TV was running off a generator.

  Everyone seemed to know why we were there and the kids gathered round to watch us set up our poles and mist nets around a fruit-laden grapefruit tree. Jumbo knew from experience that chickens and guinea fowl scrambled up into this particular tree each night, roosting in the branches to escape feral cats and other ground predators. But now the birds were getting progressively weaker with each passing night—bled through the same wounds by the same creatures that had inflicted them—until eventually they dropped from the trees, pale and lifeless. Although vampire bats consume only about half their weight in blood each night (roughly a tablespoon), the anticoagulants in their saliva keep the blood of their prey from clotting, long after the bat has flown off. This charnel house ambience tends to put off most people, especially those unfortunate enough to awaken in a pool of their own blood.

  Jumbo and I finished up and were invited back to the Boris residence for some refreshment: warm glasses of the local rum. Twilight is fleeting in the tropics and now, twenty minutes after setting up our mist nets in bright sunshine, it was dark enough that we could no longer see our tree from where we sat under a sheet metal awning.

  I asked Mr. Boris if vampires had ever bitten their pigs or their milk cow, but he shook his head. “Just lucky, I guess,” he said, and I nodded in agreement.

  Unlike chickens, most vampire bat prey does not perish from blood loss. A half-ton cow can stand to lose a lot of tablespoons of blood before finally tipping over. But an open wound in the tropics is a dinner bell, a beacon on a foggy night. To the hordes of aesthetically challenged fli
es, beetles, and worms (not to mention a virtual encyclopedia of microscopic organisms), a divot-shaped vampire bite is dining room, bedroom, and toilet—all rolled into one. This generally does not bode well for the animal bearing the wound (or its owner). Infection, disease, and death are the likely outcomes.

  Far more serious than disease-promoting wounds, however, is the potential transmission of rabies by infected vampire bats. Rabies is a viral disease that systematically destroys the nervous system of its mammalian victims.*1 Among the dozens of diseases transmitted by blood feeders like mosquitoes, fleas, ticks, and tsetse flies, rabies, which can only be contracted from another mammal, is perhaps the most feared. It is not the most deadly in terms of numbers of victims, nor is it the most grotesque with respect to outcome, but once the infamous symptoms of rabies appear—hydrophobia, loss of muscle function, and dementia—the disease is nearly 100 percent fatal. Historically, vampire-bat-transmitted rabies had been a terrible problem in Trinidad, killing eighty-nine people and thousands of cattle between 1925 and 1935. In 1934 Trinidad’s Medical Department instituted its Anti-Rabies Unit. Part of their job was to respond immediately to any report of vampire bat attacks, and as a result thousands of vampire bats had been netted and destroyed. Others were painted with a poisonous paste that would be groomed off later by roost mates, fueling a chain reaction of death within the colony.

  Some of the more conservation-minded workers like Jumbo did their best to calm a frightened public that was already bat phobic. Local superstition told of the existence of human-sized blood feeders called soucouyants. These were supposedly old crones that could shed their skin at night and assume the shape of a fiery ball. To protect oneself from attack, homeowners would sprinkle a bag of rice outside their door. For some reason, the soucouyant couldn’t enter until she had counted every rice grain.

  Rabies control personnel like Jumbo’s supervisor, Farouk Muradali, ignored the myths (and I could never envision Jumbo wasting all that rice). Instead, they stressed that only two of the fifty-eight bat species on their island were vampires, and generally speaking, only one of those (the common vampire bat) was a significant rabies threat.

  After chatting with the homeowners for about an hour and a half, we checked the mist nets. In one net we had captured a fruit bat (Carollia), and a tiny nectar feeder (Glossophaga). Moving to the second net my flashlight beam illuminated three dark figures. I could see that they were far more muscular than the bats we’d just released and they twisted in the nets, biting and screeching as we approached.

  “Diaemus youngi,” I exclaimed, donning a pair of thick leather gloves.

  “Dey look hungry,” Jumbo replied. “And speaking of food…”

  The vampire bats were carefully extracted from the nets and placed into small cotton bags where they calmed down immediately. A week later they would be among eight specimens of Diaemus exported to New Mexico, where they quickly acclimated to the blood of American chickens. The bats’ arrival there would spark a minor media frenzy (“Rare Vampires Dodge Death in Desert Town,” “Vampire Bats Form Colony in New Mexico”) that would resurface several months later (“Birth of a Vampire!”) when one of the captives delivered a female pup. After a contest publicized by the Long Island paper Newsday, the baby vampire bat would be christened Amelia (after another famous female flier).

  Jumbo and I stayed out for another hour that humid night in Trinidad, but when the full moon rose we knew there would be no more captures. Vampire bats are notoriously lunar phobic, as are many other bat species.

  Two hours later we were eating chicken dinners at an all-night KFC knockoff in downtown Arima.

  It seemed like the right thing to do.

  As you might have guessed by now, this is a book about blood-feeding creatures and, by association, the substance that they feed upon.*2 Some of the creatures you’ll be reading about, like leeches, bed bugs, and white-winged vampire bats, are mere nuisances. Others—fleas, chiggers, and yes, even the common vampire bat—can be killers. They carry and transmit some of the world’s deadliest diseases, including bubonic plague, scrub typhus, and rabies. Still others spread debilitating diseases like Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. And even when they don’t transmit disease, fear of these creatures can lead to delusional parasitosis, a condition in which the victim believes that tiny biting or bloodsucking creatures are crawling over his or her body. This is an all-too-common occurrence for those who have experienced a bed bug infestation—or who live in fear of one.

  Then there are the truly bizarre sanguivores—blood-feeding finches and vampire moths. And, of course, there’s the candiru—a tiny Amazonian catfish whose reported habit of swimming up the human urethra makes it far more feared by locals and tourists alike than its notorious river-mate, the piranha.

  Here are the blood feeders—their stories, their strange feeding habits, and the often-devastating effects they can have on the humans they count as food.

  This might get a little rough, so grab a glass of red wine and let’s get started….

  We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked liked huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going around a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

  —Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

  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.*3

  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.

  “You don’t want 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.*4

  Scattered across the surface of this scuzzy brew were tattered blocks of dark-stained ceiling material as well as unidentifiable rubbish that had been chucked in over the past fifty years. The scariest thing to me was that all of it looked remarkably like the rubble-littered cement floor we were currently standing on.