Puereora

A week of bats at Pureora Forest Park! I joined my sabbatical host Stuart Parsons, and two of his fantastic grad students, Zenon and Kat, for a week of bat catching, radio tracking, brainstorming, and experimental design. I loved it!

We spent the week working with these amazing guys: Mystacina tuberculata. One of New Zealand's two species of bats, the only land mammals endemic to NZ. Mystacina is a very unusual bat. For centuries NZ had no mammals at all except for bats. Bats took the role that terrestrial mammals take in other places - Mystacina spends 30% of its time foraging on the ground (!). Unlike the super-specialized bat species I'm used to in Panama, Mystacina is very much a jack-of-all-trades, filling a huge number of niches, from pollinating flowers to feeding on insects. And it has these cool elongated nostrils, presumably for stereo smelling -- using its nose to sniff out hidden prey on the ground.

The males do an interesting behavior to attract females. They pick a small crevice in a tree and sing from it. Loud and low! In frequencies that humans can hear. When you walk through the forest at night you can hear one singing male and then another, as you move from tree to tree. What's really cool is that some males actually work together (so to speak) to attract females. They 'time share' their singing roosts. One male will sing for a while, sometimes attracting a female and sometimes getting a mating, then another male will show up, and without any fighting or contest, the first male will leave and the second male will start singing! It's a really cool and interesting form of lek breeding, very unusual in mammals. Cory Toth, a grad student of Stuart Parsons, figured this all out (and later joined our lab in Panama for a postdoc!). A very cool little bat.

We spent the week using harp traps to capture the bats, attaching tiny transmitters to them, and then climbing any all tall structures we could find to try to pick up their radio signals.

 

wonderful and amazing!