A taste for blood

Bill Schutt is not afraid of bats. He’s not the least bit squeamish about bugs or leeches either. He has a special fondness for blood and the creatures that drink it. And while Halloween might not necessarily be his favorite holiday, he sure knows a heck of a lot about vampires.

Mr. Schutt, a Hampton Bays resident, is the author of a new book, “Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures,” which would certainly seem to be a timely topic for Halloween. Mr. Schutt writes about his adventures searching for and, usually, finding the animals and insects around the world that feed on the ickiest of meals: other animals’ blood.

He has written many scientific papers, but this is Mr. Schutt’s first book, and the writing of it “was an absolute delight the entire way,” he said. “I got to tell a lot of neat stories about vampire bats that I actually experienced, especially involving blood. It is educational, but I wanted to make it as entertaining as possible. Give the audience a smile, then I can inform them of why we bled George Washington to death.

“And the people I met—you couldn’t make up a character like Rudy Rosenberg, the leechmeister of the U.S. I never felt like the book was a chore.” (His editor at Harmony Books is John Glusman, author of the excellent nonfiction World War II book, “Conduct Under Fire.”)

Just perusing the chapter titles, it’s easy to see that Mr. Schutt has a lively sense of humor: “No Country For Old Chickens,” “Let It Bleed,” “Sleeping With the Enemy,” and “Of Mites and Men.” What he explores is a side of nature many people don’t see, or notice. And he introduces readers to creatures that most people don’t even know exist, such as the vampire finch, which lives on the blood and eggs of other birds on the Galapagos Islands, and the candiru in the Amazon, a tiny catfish that is more feared than the piranha.

Dr. Schutt’s fascination with unusual creatures began on Long Island. He grew up in Lindenhurst and simply found himself attracted to them.

“I’ve always been into the weird stuff,” he said. “I was the kid who had the monkey and snakes and lizards. My parents were always very patient with me. They always thought I was a little bit weird but they did lavish a lot of time and attention on me. I never thought of myself as being particularly smart, but some people have a knack for something, and my knack was for understanding and admiring unusual creatures.”

There wasn’t any doubt that he would go into a scientific field. But after he earned a Ph.D. in zoology at Cornell University, he went for the easy money ... and he wasn’t pleased with his choice.

“I had a great job as a researcher in the drug industry and I was making very decent money,” Mr. Schutt recalled. “But I said to family and friends, ‘I’m not really happy doing this.’ I expected someone to grab me by the lapels and say, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ This was back when the drug industry used to just throw money at people. Nobody said that. Instead, I was told, ‘Go do it because we don’t want to hear you crabbing about it anymore.’”

He secured a research fellowship at the Museum of Natural History with the bat expert Nancy Simmons, and began journeys that took him to some of the most remote places in the world. These travels confirmed his belief that vampire bats, ticks, leeches, bedbugs, and other blood-sucking creatures are deserving of curiosity and play crucial roles in their environments—in addition, obviously, to the roles some of these creatures play in our culture.

“Vampirism is not that big a deal as far as science is concerned, but we’re bombarded by it in our culture,” the author said. “You turn on HBO and see there is a whole new series about it. There is a constant stream of movies and books, especially around Halloween. So it is our culture that makes us afraid of these creatures. Out of 1,100 different kinds of bats, only three of them are vampires, and you’re never going to run into one in this country.”

“Vampires really aren’t freaking people out today as much as bedbugs,” he added. “I did an interview with a couple of DJs in Baltimore, and by the time I finished talking about bedbugs they were itching and twitching. I had a ball with those guys.”

Mr. Schutt seems to have a ball wherever he goes. When interviewed, he had just given a presentation in Scranton, Pennsylvania, at the North American Bat Conference. “A lot of the people who were there nurturing me are here, and I’m signing books for them,” he said. “I feel very lucky. Earlier in the week in an article The New York Times called me ‘waggish and bearded,’ so everyone here is calling me Wags.”

Yet there is some serious urgency to Dr. Schutt’s work. “The blood-sucking creatures closest to going extinct are two of the three vampire bats and the medicinal leech,” he pointed out. “The bats are a wide catalog of things to study and it would be a terrible shame if we lost them forever. They play their part in the cycle of life on this planet and they cause very little economic damage.

“The leech is being over-harvested because they are being used in after-reattachment surgeries. There are commercial ponds where these creatures are being grown, but out in the wild they are becoming scarce. These are creatures that need to be studied more. There are all sorts of aspects about blood feeding that we still don’t understand.”

He admitted that he has a bit of a PR problem when it comes to championing blood suckers. “It’s hard to argue with someone who has had malaria or Lyme Disease from mosquitoes and ticks who says they should be wiped off the planet, but they play important roles too, mostly as food for many other creatures,” Dr. Schutt said. “They are part of a chain in nature. From an ecological perspective, you might not want to see what happens if they were to suddenly disappear.”

Mr. Schutt taught at Southampton College until that campus closed a few years ago, and he is now an associate professor of biology at C.W. Post College. Can it be a problem that students expect tales of adventures with vampires when he returns from one of his exotic trips minus a fedora and a whip?

“I never really thought that Indy had a negative effect on us professors,” he said. “It’s better than being thought of as a nerd.”