Batty Theory on Evolutionary Link Creates Minor Flap

Holy Batroots! Is it really true, as some scientists suggest, that human beings and bats might be distant cousins who share the same primeval ancestors? Is there a Batman or Count Dracula lurking in each of us?

In the heat of this summer’s batmania, with American moviegoers breaking box-office records to see “Batman,” anything seems possible.

The National Zoo’s bat expert, John Seidensticker, says it is an intriguing theory, one you could sink your teeth into, but he’s not sure that he believes it. Other scientists at the Smithsonian Institution scoff at the idea.

Seidensticker says brain studies have yielded evidence that certain kinds of large bats found in Africa and the South Pacific may be descendants of prehistoric primates akin to lemurs or mouse-like shrews.

“The theory is that these bats are really flying primates,” he says, and connected somehow in the evolutionary chain to the early primate ancestors of monkeys, apes, gorillas--and humans.

But Charles Handley, a leading authority on bats and other mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, says this theory is a “hot potato” of scientific controversy that has won few adherents.

“We don’t know what the ancestors of bats really were,” Handley said.

The 160 fluttering bats in the National Zoo’s new Bat Cave aren’t talking.

In fact, they do not display the slightest familial interest in their supposed two-legged cousins who stare intently through a glass wall into their dimly lighted hideaway of damp rocks and hollow tree trunks.

Keeper Carol Prima, who wears a Batman baseball cap, says the bats have never bothered her. “They’re not aggressive,” she said. “If anything, they’re just curious.”

They hover watchfully while she scrubs the cave walls or delivers their meals. The bats, three species of fruit eaters, consume 30 pounds of grapes, melons, bananas and a gruel of peach nectar and vitamins every day.

The rest of the time they fly back and forth, socialize in their “harems” and just hang out. Or, more precisely, hang down. They also have active sex lives.

“They’re continuously producing babies,” Seidensticker says.

Prima says she has never felt threatened working in the Bat Cave.