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to get 50% off your first factor box and 20% off your next month of orders. Good morning, John.

So, let's start with a thing  that's pretty good about the world. There is a website called Snopes that got started   specifically because the internet is  bad at getting its stories straight. Welcome back to Bizarre

Beasts: Season Zero. Hank and I are trading off hosting duties on  our year-long journey to remaster the original   Bizarre Beasts episodes from vlogbrothers  with corrections, updates, and new facts. Hank was about to use the Snopes website to show   some artwork of fictional creatures  that people had mistaken as real. As much as we would like to show you  some of the artwork that was featured   in the original Vlogbrothers video,  here at Bizarre Beasts Headquarters,   we have to operate by slightly different rules.

Due to the way we copyright  our videos on this channel,   it’s important we get explicit permission  from artists to feature their work! While we weren’t able to get  permission from those artists,   we think you’ll want to stick around. Today’s Season Zero Beast might appear like a work of fiction, but they  are very real, and so are the pins! [♪INTRO♪] The more interesting thing is  when Snopes has a page for an   animal not because someone made it up,  but because no one believes it's real.

This is unsurprisingly the case for the  shoebill stork and the Malabar giant squirrel,   but in my humble opinion, the most bizarre of  these Snopes creatures that are actually real   is the hammer-headed bat, a mega-bat,  and yes, that is the technical term,   that isn't just real, it's downright  common in West and Central Africa. So I just said that “mega-bat” is the  technical term and that’s only kind of correct. Like, traditionally, bats were  split into mega-bats and micro-bats.

Mega-bats were the big fruit bats that  live in Africa, Oceania, and Eurasia,   and micro-bats were the small,  echolocating, insect-eating bats. But some micro-bats are  bigger than some mega-bats,   so the size thing doesn’t shake out perfectly. And some mega-bats also echolocate, though  they do it a little differently than micro-bats,   so that doesn’t work perfectly  as a way to split them up either.

And, recent studies of bat DNA  suggest that some micro-bats are   more closely related to the mega-bats  than they are to the other micro-bats. So when I say “mega-bat” in this video, we're using it in the traditional big-fruit-bat sense. Now, the term is mega-bat, but to be a bat, you  can't be that big, because you have to fly and you   don't have feathers, and feathers are much better  at the flying thing than thin membranes of skin.

And so generally when you  see a bat that is very big,   it's not as big as it looks. It's  usually a strange camera angle. Bats are good at being lightweight, so while  they can have wingspans of over a meter,   there is no bat on Earth heavier than 3.5lbs.

The hammer-headed bat tops out at around  1lb, which is even big for a mega-bat,   most of which are smaller than that,  but look, those are all big for bats! So, we couldn’t confirm what Hank  just said about the hammer-headed   bat’s size relative to all megabats,  but we can say that megabats range   in weight from 13 grams up to almost 1 kilogram. The most common bat in North America, for  example, weighs around a third of an ounce,   but none of this is the thing that astounds  you about the hammer-headed bat, right, like,   the thing that you're looking at is the head.

Like, it's lookin' kinda dumb. Now, this certainly isn't  the only weird looking bat. Their faces often look pretty silly, but usually  that is for better accuracy of their sonar.

Hammer-headed bats, like other mega-bats, mostly  eat fruit, which are notoriously sedentary.   They don't have to snag them out  of the air like bat-sensing bugs,   so mega-bats actually are usually pretty cute. Not so for this boy! This weird face exists as far as we can tell  for one reason and one reason only: the lek.

Lekking is a mating behavior where a bunch  of males gather in a central location   to display out to females, who then pick  the male that they are most interested in. That area is called the lek,  which yes, in my opinion,   would be a very good name for a  dating app, thank you for asking. And lekking is kind of unusual.

There are a lot of theories about why  it evolved and what benefits it has. It’s a pretty uncommon breeding  strategy for mammals in general. There are just over a dozen confirmed  species that do it and they’re mostly   antelopes and deer, though some seals  and sea lions have lek-like mating, too.

And it’s also rare in bats,   with just a few species other than  the hammer-headed bat that do it. It’s much more common in birds, like our  friend the kakapo, and some researchers   think that it might have to do with how much  females can and do move around the landscape. Species with females that  range more widely are more   likely to be lek breeders than species that don’t.

So it’s actually a little bit of a  mystery why more bats aren’t lek breeders. Hammer-headed bats display not through  visual traits, but through noise. That giant rostrum and the fleshy lips and  the split nose all help them make a big,   kind of awful noise that female  hammer-headed bats, which by the way,   don't look nearly as weird as the  males, apparently find really sexy.

And now, because we can, we're all  gonna listen to that noise together. [bat sounds] Oh. Great. As with so many bizarre things in nature,   this face that only a nocturnal species  could love comes down to sexual selection,   and so if I had a chance to re-write that  Snopes page, I would add one single sentence.

Yes, they do look terrible, but get this: That weird face only exists so  that they can sound terrible, too. If you missed this critter the first time  around, our Season Zero pin set is now available! This set includes all 12 of the animals  we began this Bizarre Beasts journey with   on Vlogbrothers, including the hammer-headed bat!

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Head to Factor75.com or click on the link below and use the code BIZARREBEASTS50 to get 50% off your first Factor box and 20% off your next month of orders. That's code BIZARREBEASTS50 at Factor75.com to get 50% off your first box, plus 20% off your next month of orders. [♪OUTRO♪]