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Hi everyone, and welcome back to the US Fish and Wildlife
Services Conservation Connect.
Today we're going to connect you with bats
and the careers of people who study and try to help bats.
Bats are extraordinary creatures,
and they play such an important role in our ecosystem.
Did you know that bats help farmers every year
by eating so many insects the farmers are actually
able to use less chemical pesticides on our crops?
In fact, a little brown bat mother
can eat more than her own body weight every single night.
Now, that is a lot of insects.
Imagine if you had to your own body weight every day
and still be able to fly through the night sky.
Some bats have evolved a highly complex sense of hearing.
They actually send off sounds that
bounce off objects in their path,
sending echoes back to themselves.
Now, from these echoes, the bats can
determine the size of objects, how far away they
are, how fast they're traveling, and even their texture.
This is all in just a split second.
But bats are also in need of our help.
Several species have become critically endangered,
in many populations and caves have been entirely wiped out.
Today, to tell us more about this,
we have with us Ann Froschauer and Leslie Sturges.
Ann, can you tell us what you do?
Sure, I'm a science communicator and a bat specialist
with the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
And Leslie?
I am a wildlife rehabilitator who
specializes in bats and the president of the Save Lucy
Campaign.
Great, now, because bats are very
susceptible to an absolutely horrible disease, which
actually Leslie and Ann will talk to us about in just
a moment, we're going to show you live bats.
But we're actually going to show you
these live bats back at our studio at the National
Conservation Training Center.
We are back in the studio, back from the cave.
And I have Leslie here with the bat.
Leslie, can you tell us what you have in your hand?
This is an adult male big brown bat.
He is one of our residents.
This is our largest summer bat in the area.
And right now, he is trying to hibernate.
Very cool.
What I'm feeding him is called Nutri-Cal.
It's actually a very gummy substance
that's made of sugar and fat and a little malt flavoring.
And Ann, what do we have over here?
This is a hoary bat, a female hoary bat.
This is a migratory bat species.
They are found in this area normally during the summertime.
This time of year she would be going south for the winter
to find insects to eat.
Very nice, can we try?
And we can give her a mealworm, yep.
Look at, guys, all these live mealy worms.
Let's see.
Can you take that?
There, she's--
All right.
--she's got it.
So this is Tiny Bat.
He's a eastern tri-colored bat, formerly known
as an eastern pipistrelle.
This is one of our smallest species.
He's fully grown.
And he's actually a little small even for his species.
He weighs about 4 and 1/2 grams.
So we think he might be a little thirsty.
I'm going to go ahead and give him a little water.
OK.
Let's see if he's thirsty.
And Leslie, I'm going to grab a piece of equipment
that I see that I'm curious about while you're doing that.
Oh, here we go.
And Leslie, can you tell me what this device is?
Yeah, this is called a bat detector.
And it allows us to hear bats' ultrasonic calls, which,
as you know, are too high for humans to hear.
But that machine brings them down into our range of hearing.
Very cool, can we give it a try?
Sure, you can go ahead and turn that on.
OK.
And then you want to turn it so that's-- there you go.
And then we're going to try and hand Tiny Bat a mealworm
and see what he does.
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So the clicking you heard was actually his ultrasonic calls.
So we're going to have Ann come in here and offer him,
this is a preferred treat.
And they know they get it when they do education programs.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, that's the good stuff.
And Ann, can you talk to me about why
these devices are important to have?
Sure, actually one way that we use bat detectors
is in monitoring hibernating bat populations and bat populations
in the spring, summer, and fall when they're mating
and in their maternity colonies.
We use the bat detectors so that we
don't have to disturb the bats as much.
We're able to monitor them using sound rather than having
to capture and handle them or go into the hibernacula where
they're hibernating, which causes
an additional disturbance, which can be problematic for bats
that are trying to get through the winter on a limited amount
of fat.
Sure.
Well, we're coming back from the studio back to the cave.
And as you can see, we're right in front of one now.
Ann, can you tell us, I'm seeing these bars kind
of blocking the cave.
What's going on with that?
Well, we oftentimes gate caves that
have bat populations in them or other sensitive cave
ecosystems because human disturbance can cause
a lot of problems for hibernating bats
or for bats that have maternity colonies in caves.
So this prevents humans from going
in when they shouldn't be in the cave disturbing bats
or destroying sensitive cave features.
Leslie, can you talk to us a little bit
about why bats are so vital to the ecosystem?
Well, bats are incredibly necessary to the ecosystem
because they just eat huge numbers of insects.
So if you can imagine that every plant around us,
every leaf on every tree, every vegetable
has an insect predator that eats it,
bats are eating those insects.
And so they're protecting our forests.
They're protecting our fruits, our vegetables.
They're just giving us so much just because they eat bugs.
Great, yeah, that is amazing.
Now, our viewers are watching, and I wanted to ask you both
what can they do to help bats and help protect them?
Well, I think one of the most important things
that anyone can do to protect bats
is to help protect the habitat, to help pull invasive plants,
to pick up litter, and also to spread
the good word about bats.
Bats really need people to speak up for them.
Great, and Ann?
Well, you might notice that we all have on rubber boots today
as we are standing here outside of the cave.
And one of the things that's important about this disease,
white-nose syndrome, is that we do
believe that humans can potentially
track the fungus that causes the disease back and forth.
So for cave explorers and for researchers also,
it's really important before you go to visit a cave or a mine
that you check and make sure that that place is open
and you're allowed to visit, but also that you decontaminate
your clothing, and footwear, and gear both before
and after you visit the cave.
So we're not going inside the cave
today, so we just have these rubber
boots on as a precaution.
We'll take them back and decontaminate them and make
sure that we're not accidentally tracking any fungus that
might be here at this cave to any other areas.
Now, Leslie, you mentioned that you
were the head and founder of the Save Lucy Campaign.
What exactly is that?
Well, we do a lot of education of the public about bats,
and we work hard on bat conservation.
And Lucy is actually a mascot.
She represents little brown bats because that's the species
that we're so concerned about right now
in the face of white-nose syndrome.
Now, if you're interested in helping bats,
another thing you can do is help build a bat house.
All you have to do is go to the National Wildlife Federation
website.
It'll show you on your screen right now,
www.nwf.org, and simply type in how
to build a bat house in the search engine.
Enjoy, and help spread the word.
We'll see you next time on Conservation Connect.
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