Trinidad bats

Hello from Trinidad where the bats are flying and the rain (today) is falling!  Here are a few photos to enjoy including my first observation of a bat-lizard interaction!

Ok so the bat and lizard are NOT actually 'interacting' but rather the bat is flying past the lizard.  The bat and lizard were living in the same roost. 

Trinidad and Tobago bats

I am back home from a recent trip to Trinidad where the bats were abundant and from what I could see roosting in almost any and every abandoned house/garage/store on the island.  That may be a bit of an exaggeration but there are certainly many amazing bats in Trinidad.  Trinidad itself is beautiful, while the people are fun, kind and diverse.  The island country just off the coast of Venezuela is home to amazing animals, plants as well as food!  Just a word or two about the bats follow but I would suggest you read more about this interesting country if you find time.

Together with researchers from several different institutions we captured many species of bats but here are some of the more photogenic:

The greater spear-nosed bat (Phylostomus hastatus)

This very large bat makes very interesting vocalizations, roosts in groups and is known by bat biologists to have a forceful bite.  That said these are fairly sweet bats and amazingly beautiful.  Phylostomus eats fruits.

The ghost-faced bat (Mormoops megalophylla)

This is the 'oh my gosh what happened to it's face!' bat.  Mormoops is an insect eater and comes in beautiful shades of orange- in case you can peel your eyes away from its strange face long enough to appreciate its fur color.  Why the weird face?  well that's a story for another time but may have something to do with it's use of echolocation to find insect prey.

The short-tailed fruit bat (Carollia perspicillata)

This tough looking little nose-leafed bat is the main bat studied on the island and lives in a variety of habitats.  These little fruit-eating bats are quite small but are also famously good mothers and will take great care of a baby despite possible risks to the mother.

The Disk-winged bat (Thyroptera tricolor)

Another insect-eater, these tiny little bats roost head-up (which is unusual for bats who usually hang upside down) inside of leaves as they unroll.  Read more about how other sucker footed bats don't suck here. 

I hope to post more about T&T in the future but meanwhile I refer you to Trinibats.com which has amazing photos and information about a suite of other bats.

Belize bats

Over the next few days I will be finalizing my preparations to head off for a quick (5 day) trip to the field.  Specifically, I will be going to the bat species-rich country of Belize with a group of other bat biologists for a collaborative batting effort!  I hope to sample a few bats others are working with as well as get some great photos of less common species.  I'll admit that I am excited to catch my old friend from my dissertation: the Jamaican fruit bat (Artibeus jamaicensis).  Strange how a species you work with extensively can become like a dear-friend you miss when you don't see it for awhile and that you look forward to catching up with.

My mad dash to pick up essentials included:
Bug spray (DEET included unfortunately a must for the mosquito-prone in the tropics),
batteries for headlamps (*a important item for hours of bat work- I also have 3 headlamps packed 'just in case'),

black velvet for photography of tissues/bats etc.,
duct tape (just case you don't recall why see this post).

I also had to grab a suite of lab supplies as well.  Of course these you cannot just pick up at Target!  A favorite that will surely last the duration of my Postdoc tenure?  Parafilm!  Parafilm is a fun tape-like wax that you can use to seal tubes and other containers and is extremely useful and fun to use!  Really I would suggest that Parafilm is the scientific version of duct tape.  It is incredibly useful.

I leave Monday and look forward to sharing information about the bats we catch!   With any luck I will have many an update during my trip (we should have internet access making this possible)!  Meanwhile tomorrow will consist of packing the rest of my lab supplies: calipers, pesolas (a spring-based scale used to weigh bats), leather gloves (for handling bats) among other things.

Meanwhile- as I sit and write this- a song (Tropical Iceland by the Fiery Furnaces to be exact) came to mind.  Really this song is a little silly but I've always loved how catchy it is and well as you might suspect leaving the North East for the tropics made it come to mind again.  Give it a listen!  If nothing else the cartoons are both strange and cute.  Yes and 'strange and cute' makes me think of some of the bats I hope to catch (see? full circle)!   Now feel free to weigh in on the image below is it strange and cute or just strange?

'Don't hate me because I am beautiful!l' an image of Centurio senex the Wrinkle-Faced bat (image by Laval from the American Society of Mammalogists image library). 

types of field-biologists OR duct tape and imported plastic rings

Interesting fact; field gear tends to quickly define what kind of biologist you are. There are about 3-4 categories of field-biologists with occasional hybrids in-between.

1. You could be the nifty REI-type biologist with various field gear made with the newest and fanciest wizz-bang technology including new GPS units with colored screens and probably some form of blue-tooth, SPF and bug-repellent infused clothing, fancy tents, camp chairs that make have foot-rests, thermo-imaging technology, solar panels and of course a solar powered espresso maker. I think anyone who uses those fancy tree-canopy cranes for their research would automatically be in this group.

2. There are the old school biologists with field gear resembling a turn of the century expedition to deepest Africa. These biologists can be recognized by pre 1980 technology in well kept containers, binoculars and a classic field notebook in tow, and inevitably a coffee-peculator that they know exactly how to use, old well-worn coolers from the 1960s or 1970s. Perhaps we could consider these guys 'steam punk' biologists.

I think Jane Goodall (above) would fit into this category.

3. 'Old school' biologists can be easily confused with a similar type that I would call the Woodie-Guthrie /cowboy biologists. These are easily distinguished by (yes ok obvious) a cowboy hat or well worn cap but may also be noted by well worn boots, flannel shirts, field work conducted comfortably while wearing some old blue-jeans, a compass and topo map, and of course a green Stanley thermos. The coffee in a Woodie-Guthrie biologist's thermos incidentally is made one of two ways: the peculator method (above) or cowboy style by throwing some grounds into boiling coffee and then adding cold water prior to drinking to make the grounds drop to the bottom *cool trick right? Indeed, these last two kinds of biologists are full of cool tricks like how to cook a meal in a tin can using the sun, or how to noose a lizard with dental-floss and a stick. Ok and yes... many of my ways of defining these groups are their modes of coffee preparation and for that I apologize but it does hold true to a decent extent.

4. But there remains a final group and a group to which I admit I belong and I call this the duct-tape biologist. These are the biologists that have rigged nearly the entirely of their gear from odds and ends. They could make you a centrifuge from a drill or tube and piece of string. Their tents do not sit on pre-made foot prints but cut pieces of tarps. They do their field work sitting on the ground or on a nice rock or log. A decent portion of their gear is second-hand, hand-made or corner-store purchased and they make their coffee by pouring hot water through a canvass sock (trust me a topic that I will expand on at another time). Their field attire is hodge podge and can cover the range of looks above but only mixed-and matched leading to an overall-effect of Pippi Longstockings or McGyver. Come to think of it McGyver, which I have recently learned is a Spanish verb, would have made an excellent field-biologist.

So why are there these differences in types of biologists? For one it depends on what the person is studying or doing. If you are studying flight or biomechanics of animals you are likely an REI biologist because frankly you cannot Jerry-rig a high-speed video camera. If you do something considered 'classic biology' like behavioral observations of animals you may or may not find yourself more like the 2nd type of biologist in the field with just your eyes, binoculars and a notebook. If your work involves tracking (radio tracking etc.) animals you may be more of a Woodie-Guthrie type transversing the landscape as hobo-esque scientist.

Indeed in light of 'what you do dictates which of these types you may be categorized as' I have found that there are some things that you simply cannot buy... for example a bat traps in general cannot be purchased by typing 'bat trap' into an Amazon search engine. So some McGyver action must be used. I also cannot just search 'bat feces collection pans' and consequently I have become a duct-tape addict. In fact thanks to modern times I have decided to embrace my dependence by purchasing various colors under the valid excuse that hot-pink or yellow duct tape is easier to track down in a dark cave than the classic silver variety. Several people have suggested Duct tape may be a good sponsor for my research and I couldn't agree more (in the photo to the left you can see my bat nets with orange duct tape and my feces collection traps that while you cannot see from the photo are also held together by duct tape).

However there are some surprising things you cannot easily rig no-matter how much duct tape. I could not for the life of me 'make' a syringe or a pesola for that matter (a little scale for weighing things). For me the quintessential example of something unexpected that one must buy is that of little plastic bands with numbers to mark individual bats. I have found myself not only ordering fancy little plastic rings with special numbers for each bat but dependant on ordering them from a company in the United Kingdom! So I guess when you need something special it quickly becomes a narrow market. Are we really surprised that there is only one company known for making little rings with numbers to mark birds and bats? Probably not.

A Mexican Jamaican fruit bat unaware (I assume) that it is wearing a necklace a numbered bead imported from England via the United States.

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."