(gentle music)
- [Austin] It's always interesting to me
that I get the question a lot like:
What do bats do?
But, then when I work with other animals,
you never really get, like,
what do bears do, or what do wolfs do,
or, you know, what do butterflies do?
- We often do this when we go down on the scale
of body size for wildlife.
We typically,
they have to have a purpose or a function
that benefits humans.
But, here in a National Park,
these bats, they have a right to exist,
they're a wildlife resource that belong to the people,
and they're a very unique and diverse resource.
So, I got involved in doing bat work, I think, in 2010.
I was talking to a friend of mine
who was a bat researcher in the east,
and he told me about this strange disease, a fungal disease,
that was killing off bats in the east.
It was called White Nose Syndrome.
It's a disease that is, just decimated bat populations
in the eastern United States and Canada.
- It's slowly been marching its way across the States,
and has been detected now
as close as South Dakota and Wyoming.
We know that in the eastern States,
because, to some extent,
bats hibernate there in very large, close clusters,
they can move this fungus,
or transmit it between each other pretty easily.
The fungus operates in such a way
that it tends to wake the bats up
during the hibernation period
because it's an irritant,
and as they try to groom that off of themselves,
they're burning a lot of calories and fat stores
that they had to get them through the entire winter.
What we know about bats in the western States
is pretty limited.
So, with a disease like White Nose Syndrome
that has killed seven million bats in the eastern States,
we kinda wanna know what we had pre-disease.
You get that information
by looking for animals in the winter,
monitoring maternity colonies,
and just putting dots on a map
as to where we have populations.
- [John] For Yellowstone's Wildlife Health Program,
we had essentially no information on bats in Yellowstone.
Our first objective was finding hibernacula in the park,
and to do this, we started capturing bats,
and putting radio transmitters on those bats,
and then tracking them.
We did that across summer months,
but the focus was if we could get transmitters on bats
late in the season, like October,
that would tell us
whether they might be going to hibernation sites,
and then we could identify these hibernacula, and monitor.
(water burbling)
- [Lauri] There's a couple different ways
that you can catch bats.
The most common one that's used is a mist net.
So, it's just like a bird mist net,
which is, again, a very fine mesh net
set up between two poles,
and if they don't echolocate their way around it,
they fly into it and they get all entangled,
and then we can untangle them,
and take the measurements we need.
(peaceful music)
- [John] Well, we did get several animals
in September and October,
and they were not leaving the park
despite really cold temperatures,
and very little insect prey.
Once those transmitters fail,
then we found the roosts of these bats.
We started putting out acoustic detectors,
and then we were recording species.
And, we've been recording them in every month of the year
across the winter,
even on nights where the temperatures are below zero.
(hammer banging)
- So, the acoustic recorders are set up
so that they are triggered
by the echolocation calls of the bats
in the frequency range that bats use.
Once the bat makes a pass,
the recording vice will record the bat,
then we can use that information
to identify the bat to a particular species.
(soft music)
(monitor screen crackling)
- We have identified 13 bat species in the park
between either mist net surveys,
or getting high-quality echolocation calls
that can be identified to a particular species.
I think an important thing that people don't know about bats
is how social they are.
They form these large aggregations,
and they come back year after year,
and they're in these building attics.
These are all females, there's no males in these attics
when we capture these bats.
And, they come back year after year,
and they're very long-lived.
And, they have a single offspring
that they put a lot of investment and care into.
- They have really interesting, kind of, roost dynamics,
and a lotta times they'll flock together.
And so, with this project,
we basically have PIT tags inside the bats,
and then antennas throughout the entire attic.
And so, every time a bat flies by one of these antennas,
we get the date, we get the time,
we get the unique identification number of that bat,
and then we also get what antenna it was detected on.
And so, we get these detections, we get up to 100 bats
four times each second.
So, we get just millions, and millions, and millions
of detections,
and you actually see bats hanging out
around the same antennas to each other,
and you can actually see these kinda relationships forming.
So, it's kinda like a fun thing
that nobody's really talked about.
It's like, do bats have friends?
And, you can actually kinda see these relationships,
and it's like, yeah,
these bats do like hanging out with each others.
- And, with that information,
we can identify whether the same individuals
are coming back to the park.
So, are they showing fidelity?
We can identify when bats in general
are coming back to that roost,
and when they are departing.
So, we get some sense of productivity,
and this will be important
if White Nose Syndrome hits these bats hard.
We will just see this data start to change.
(ominous music)
- [Lauri] The misconceptions of bats are varied and many.
- [John] That bats are blind, or blind as a bat.
Bats can see pretty well.
- Some people say bats fly into people's hair,
definitely not a thing.
They don't wanna be in your hair,
or really anywhere near you.
- Certainly one of them
is that we have vampire bats everywhere,
and they suck your blood, which is not true.
Vampire bats are found only in South America.
Another really common myth
is that all bats you see have rabies.
- The numbers of bats that actually have rabies
are a lot lower than people think.
- And, I think people often think of bats
as flying mice or rats with wings,
and they are fundamentally different.
Their whole life history, it's the long game,
versus rodents that don't live very long,
have a lot of offspring, cause a lot of damage,
and they get into your stuff.
- State agencies are trying really hard
to educate the public on bats,
and to make sure that that message
that bats really ecologically and economically important
is out there,
and to kinda tone that bats are scary sort of mentality.
They actually serve a really important ecological purpose
across the range.
In the western States and in much of the United States,
they're just really important
to reducing insects or pest species.
So, a bat, even a little teenie one,
can eat 4,000 mosquitoes over the course of an evening.
So, they're voracious little insectivores,
and not only do they eat mosquitoes,
which none of us really like,
they also eat a lot of forest pests.
(gentle music)
It's really difficult to predict
exactly what the disappearance of any species
might have in terms of our livelihoods,
or, you know, what we're used to.
Sometimes we don't really notice
the disappearance of that species until they're gone.
(peaceful music)