Year of the bat

You may have heard of the year of the rat but have you heard of the year of the bat?

Aimed at increasing public awareness of the importance of bats United Nations Environmental Programe, Bat Conservation International, Conservation of Populations of Migratory Species of Wild Animals and Eurobats.org have named 2011 'the Year of the Bat!' Please go to http://www.yearofthebat.org/ if you would like to find out more!

Specifically find out what bat researchers near you are trying to do to help conserve bats by clicking here.

Next week in Mexico (March 26 and 27)

Bosques a Media Luna (click here)

In Australia (9th of April)

Bat box building workshop (click here)

Germany (1-3 April)

Bats between Nature and culture (click here)

Ticked at ticks and 'a day in the life of a tick'

Ok lets get this straight... I am a biologist and I love animals furry, scaly or otherwise. Because I prefer to study animals in the wild I am technically (in most regards a least) a field-biologist at heart. I have done most of my research in places that the average camping enthusiast would not immediately volunteer to venture- places like the Sonoran desert in July or August or the Chihuahan desert during monsoon season. So I am okay with many of the trials and tribulations of field-life: no electricity, sleeping on the ground often without a tent, no showers, avoiding cacti, snakes and flash floods. However... I have a confession. I hate ticks. No really I think they are horrible horrible little animals. Why? Let me just give you a visual depiction of how I view ticks:
I have been bit, stung and harassed by a variety of insects ranging from acacia ants, wasps, Velvet 'ants', to mosquitoes, even one time being bit by a mosquito literally ON my eyelid waking and being met with looks of terror from my fellow field-workers at my Quasimodo-esque appearance. However, I can count on one hand (or at least that was the case until my last trip to the field) the number of ticks I had had the dis-pleasure to encounter. I had convinced myself that my record: one Colorado tick and one Panama tick was due to a genetically coded body chemistry derived from my father's apparent mosquito-repelling composition. This idea was just fine for me- I have to admit that on both previous tick-encounters I had to be literally pinned down during the ridiculously belabored and meticulous process of tick removal...

How do you remove a tick and why should you care?
Carefully... very carefully with heat or something else to provide encouragement to back out of its position and pull its head (see above) out of your body. A warmed piece of metal like tweezers will do the trick. After it starts to wiggle and appeared annoyed you can carefully pull it out without getting its head stuck inside your skin. Can you start to see where my general dislike for ticks is ... embedded? What happens if the head is not removed? Infection. Infection and the perpetual knowledge that you have a nasty little tick head stuck in your skin! Yuck!

The facts:

• you cannot really feel the tick biting, and wouldn't notice it unless you saw or felt a bump where the tick was attached.
• ticks CAN carry diseases like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or Lyme's Disease but more often or not they are innocent creatures looking for a meal.
• many mammals are hosts to ticks including deer, cows and bats. Even some lizards and birds are infected by ticks
• click (HERE) for a video about ticks

So this last trip I discovered that I had a tick but unfortunately everyone was sound asleep. So I was left with two options: 1. Buck up and deal by removing it or 2. desperately wait for help while shuddering in my sleep picturing it munching away at my blood while I try to sleep... I bet I could feel its minuscule jaw wiggling as it ate! I chose (1) to try to remove it with no help to prevent my thrashing while I myself performed the nearly-ritualized removal. The suffering was not as bad as I expected although the process took an excessive 30 minuets! So all was well when the next day after walking to and from the cave for work I found I had no less than 12 more new friends to remove! I can now say I am at least proficient at most tick self-removal (we will not talk about the nearly dime sized 'friend; i had in the center of my back that I had to ask for help with!

So what if we try to picture life through a tick's eyes? What would we see? Would we feel less repulsed? I mean just knowing that the Spanish name for these guys 'garrapata' (leg grabbers) makes I will admit feel a little sorry for them for their unfortunately condition of being born ticks.

"I am so hungry ... I could just cry. The girls left weeks ago when they sensed a warmth below and they jumped terrified entangled in each others legs (all 16 legs 8 each). I did not hear a peep from below and I cannot convince myself that they made it safely. I will never know. I know of only 2 to 3 times when we ticks have been re-united with our loved ones. And now I sit. I wonder and I remember. I told them it was safer to wait until they sensed not just heat but also the CO2 that would let us know that finally an end to our weeks of starvation were at an end. I explained that the CO2 could ONLY be released by a host but heat could be tricky that they should be prudent and wait. But they were desperate. And now I am here. alone. ALONE. And so hungry. It would be fine with the memories of loves lost (my husband died months ago and now I hope that I will find food in time to lay my eggs so he will at least be remembered one day by his 2000 children). I did not ask for this life but it is mine to live and for my children I choose to hold on tightly to this blade of grass waiting... and waiting."

what is a bat wing anyway?

The scientific name for bats CHIROPTERA provides an answer to this question of 'what is a bat wing'?

Bats have very long finger bones and webbing between each finger except the thumb! (Note a Jamaican fruit bat thumb compared to my own to the left). Other mammals that glide (bats are the only true fliers among mammals) have webbing but just attached to different body parts like from the elbow to knees of some 'flying' squirrels (flying is in quotes because they are technically just gliding i.e. falling gracefully!)

Together webbing and log fingers is what comprises a bat wing. I have tried to demonstrate this in the form of a drawing (below).

Off to Puebla and Artibeus jamaicensis galore

Tomorrow at 7:30 I am meeting one of two Mexican undergraduate students who are accompanying me to my field site in the Mexican state of Puebla. After renting a car, navigating Mexico City we will pick up the second student, load all our materials and drive for about 6 hours through various habitats. The drive starts in the polluted and traffic-heavy streets of Mexico City, transitions to the very densly populated area known as 'Mexico State' and interestingly will pass near to the famous mexican pyramids. Then we drive up in elevation to a coniferous forested area and drop down to a dry desert area that is also the birth-place of corn as we know it! Gradually we will increase in elevation again entering warmer tropical dry forests and eventually cloud forests. Finally we arrive in the area my bats are located that is also home to bannana and coffee farmers!

Because the drive is long we will first secure where we are staying, and ask to use the centrifuge housed at a ranch near (~ 45 mins. away) to the cave and walk to the cave (~half an hour walk across cow pastures) by this time in the dark to put cloths under the bat colonies to collect the food they drop while they eat in the roost!

More news pending our return!

Meanwhile- bats or bust!

Lovely Leptos

I just got back from helping a student at the Mexican university UNAM with his thesis research on these gorgeous bats: Leptonycteris or Mexican Long-tounged bats. Leptonycteris or 'Leptos' for short, eat nectar and as you can see they get pollen stuck to their fur (the fuzzy white stuff on his head) which they take from flower to flower pollenating the plants they visit similar to bees. To understand how much energy these little bats need to obtain from their food and how much energy they use nightly we used something called 'the doubly labeled water method' which I will explain in another post so stay tuned. Meanwhile- recall bats are nocturnal so after working all night with a small break and again at 4am-6am I am going to say 'good-night' for now!

World War II's Other Secret Weapon- BAT BOMB

Believe it or not but during World War II plans were made and nearly successfully executed to attach tiny bombs onto bats. These bats would do what bats do- find nice areas to roost inside homes, with a catch, they had a bomb with them wherever they decided to call home. Because homes in Japan were made of wood and paper the idea was that bombs would destroy houses that were common throughout Japan.

Plans for what became called Project X-Ray was hatched by Donald Griffin, a Harvard scientist and famous bat researcher and a very young Jack Couffer among others.

An excellent and often funny book on the topic titled Bat Bomb by Jack Couffer tells the whole story. A famous bat named 'Flamethrower' is also discussed in the book. Flamethrower was a Mastiff bat (Eumops perotis) which is the largest bat that occurs in the US, weighing around 60 grams (~2 oz). Because the bombs that were designed for bats to carry needed to be small and light-weight Flamethrower who was tame was used as a model for various prototypes. The problem however was that Flamethrower as a Mastiff bat was much larger than the bats that were going to be used for Project X-Ray! Needless to say the project had so many problems (including unplanned bat-initiated explosions!) that it never went into action.

White nose syndrome- what is it?

White nose syndrome is a disease that infects bats and was first discovered in 2006. This disease kills bats while they are hibernating and was named for the unusual fuzzy white fungus that is evident on the nose of the some infected bats (click here to see photos).

This disease has killed bats in numerous states in the eastern US:

• Connecticut
• Delaware
• Maryland
• Massachusetts
• New Jersey
• New York
• New Hampshire
• Pennsylvania
• Tennessee
• Vermont
• Virginia
• West Virginia

And in Canada

• Ontario
• Quebec

It is estimated that over 1 million bats have died from this disease. The causes of white nose syndrome are still somewhat unclear however what is known is that a fungus previously undescribed (Geomyces destructans) infects the skin of bats infected by white nose syndrome. Bats that usually hibernate during the winter are having difficulties maintaining the fat deposits that they metabolize (break down) for energy during the winter. Without the fat stores required for hibernation, bats are staying active during cold winter temperatures which is energetically expensive particularly because food (insects) is limited during winter months.

Researchers are very concerned that the disease is moving west. Unfortunately the fungus associated with White Nose Syndrome has already been found in Oklahoma and Missouri.

Learn more about this disease by clicking HERE.