What its like to be a Bat Biologist | SciAll.org

[Sharlene] Whenever we set our nets at night we really never know exactly what species we’re going to catch so every night when we are collecting bats, it’s really full of surprises it almost feels like christmas. One fun fact that I wish people knew about bats is that they are incredibly diverse. There are over 1400 species of bats, that means one in every four mammals is a bat and they live almost everywhere in the world. [Rossana] They are very good at learning the space where they fly around. When we use mist nets to catch them, we have to change the location of the nets every night to be able to continuously catch them.

[Kelly] The thing I love about bats is that they’re just endlessly 01:09 - fascinating. When you look at the totality of research being done on bats it’s really reflective of how amazingly diverse and wonderful and interesting bats themselves are. [Sharlene] So the research that we do in my lab tries to understand how bats or groups within bats became so diverse. and the way we approach this question is specifically looking at how bats evolve different anatomies or behaviors that allow them to consume different types of foods and that is because we know that throughout the evolution of bats and the evolution of other mammal groups the evolution of different diets played a big role in diversification. So we do a lot of field work where we collect bats to look at their diet and their feeding behavior and in the lab we do studies of their anatomy, we do some biomechanical modeling, and also studies that put all these pieces together into this evolutionary puzzle to understand what might have been the major factors that drove the diversification of bats or groups within bats.

02:24 - [Rossana] During the years I studied bats I looked at the diet of nectar bats to know which plants they were pollinating in different environments in the neotropics and I did that in Peru and Ecuador. In addition, I looked at the effect of the presence of artificial feeders for hummingbirds in the nectar bat and plant interactions and I also studied if the length of the flowers match the length of the bat’s tongue to see if the flowers are evolving together with their nectar bat pollinators. That is something that we call co-evolution. [Kelly] I study the interaction between bats and their parasites. Parasites can sometimes transmit diseases to their hosts and so I’m interested in the ways that environmental change impacts the ability of bat parasites to transmit diseases to their bat hosts.

03:23 - I think there’s a lot of things about being a bat biologist that are both challenging and exciting. For example, we have to work at night and that can be hard to get used to, but at the same time you are one of the only people that gets to see this incredible range of diversity of animals that hardly anyone else gets to see, simply because they are only around at night. [Rossana] I like setting up the cameras in the forest next to the flowers I was studying to catch those moments when the bats are feeding on those flowers because that is… that is something we don’t get to see a lot in nature. I’m glad that doing my research i was able to catch a lot of those moments and then I showed those videos to many people so they can see those very special events in nature.

Sadly people are 04:21 - always scared of bats, so I try to talk to people about the benefits bats provide us. Telling them that bats are pollinators, they are seed dispersers, they feed on insects, not only on blood, and I hope people can change their minds after talking to me. I know little by little we will get there. [Kelly] Hey thanks for watching our video! If you liked it and you like what we do, don’t forget to like and subscribe. And if you want to help us out further, you can go ahead and become a patron and contribute to our Patreon page, where we have lots of exclusive content, including a behind the scenes video for the planning of this video where Rossana and I talk all about different research excursions, um challenges faced by bat biologists, so if that’s something that you’re interested in seeing go ahead and become a patron. It will really help us out. We’re all volunteer scientists here, so every single dollar that you contribute goes directly back to our efforts at increasing diversity in STEM and getting the word out that science is for everybody.

Um, so from Maizie (dog) and I, thanks again we really appreciate it. .