LIVE FAST, DIE LAST
IN THE TALL CHURCH TOWERS OF BRITTANY in northwest France, the fountain of youth stirs to life each night. In scenes that might be cut from a Gothic novel, colonies of small Myotis myotis (greater mouse-eared bats) awaken from their roosts, flying out in waves into the Atlantic darkness.
Awaiting them each July for the past seven years has been an international team of scientists and volunteers, who catch them, take a tiny sample of blood and a wing punch of tissue, then release them again into their extraordinary lives. Almost unfailingly, the same individual bats will be seen again in 12 months, and likely for many years to come, because these animals have naturally mastered one of the coveted mysteries of existence: living very long and remarkably healthy lives.
Of the 19 species of mammals that live longer than humans relative to their body size, 18 are bats, including M. myotis. The other is a naked mole rat.
“There’s a rule in nature: small things live fast and die young, and big things live slow and live long,” says Emma Teeling, the University College Dublin professor and zoologist who heads the Brittany study. “Bats are some of the smallest of all mammals, yet they can live way longer than expected given their body size.”
typically weighs around 25 grams, which is about the same weight as a laboratory mouse. But while a lab mouse will live for no more than four years, these incredible bats can live up to 37 years. In Siberia, a (Brandt’s bat) weighing just seven grams was caught and banded in 1964. It
