Leviathan - The Bats

"Well, don't worry," Alek said, clapping a hand on Dylan's shoulder. "The Stormwalker can carry all the food your airbeast needs. Though I can't see how one creature could eat all this."

"Don't be daft. The Leviathan isn't one creature," Dylan said. "It's a whole tangle of beasties - what they call an ecosystem."

Alek nodded slowly. "Did I hear Dr. Barlow say something about bats?"

"Aye, the flechette bats. You should see those wee beasties at work."

"Flechette? Like 'dart' in French?"

"That sounds right," Dylan said. "The bats gobble up these metal spikes, then release them over the enemy."

"They eat spikes," Alek said slowly. "And then ... release them?"

Dylan stifled a laugh. "Aye, in the usual way."

Alek blinked. The boy couldn't possibly be saying what Alek thought he was. Perhaps it was another of his peculiar jokes.

"Well, I'm glad we're at peace, so your bats won't be, um ... releasing their flechettes on us." (Westerfield, 328)

To help save the Leviathan, Alek offers Dylan/Deryn caches of food and supplies back at his family’s castle. They discuss how to transport the food back to the Leviathan, as well as the Leviathan’s diet and the bats used for warfare that the Leviathan has.

If bats developed the ability to eat spikes and then used them as projectile weaponry, I think bats would go on to be potentially one of the most dangerous, if not the dangerous, animal on the planet. It is a bit worrisome if some animals developed some dangerous self-protection habits. In the future, we could have worms spitting out corrosive acid and burning through our skin, or cats with the ability to extend their claws, or birds learning how to spit out seeds at predators. More people would probably be afraid of animals at this point, and probably more pet laws will be put into place. The future of pets would probably be dark and grim if they learned to use these abilities against humans…

The passage itself makes a clear point not to underestimate animals at all; they can be cunning and dangerous beings (even if they aren’t genetically altered like they are here). Westerfield ironically makes this point through comedic effect; in this scene, there is clearly an awkward, yet humorous, moment between Alek and Dylan concerning the flechette bats. The use of awkward pauses done by ellipses, as well as the awkward phrasing of Alek’s words, contributes to this sense of both fear and light-heartedness. It’s not exactly funny about the possibility of getting hit with metal spikes coming out of a bat’s mouth, but Alek’s uneasiness about the whole development dispels part of the fear with humor. Besides making the readers chuckle a bit, the passage itself does astonish us, making us wonder what sort of other animals introduced in the novel will have weird yet powerful abilities.

Developing bats with the ability to eat spikes seems to indicate that our society has a strange knack for developing weird yet potentially useful objects. Having this sort of innovation isn’t bad; if we as society lived within the lines, barely any inventions would get created. Though… the practicality of developing bats out of all animals to be the ones to shoot out spikes remains to be questioned. At least the Leviathan is practical; it has the size and power to both fly a fast rate and shoot out projectiles to defend itself against enemies.