Friday, July 7, 2017

The Best Part of Fieldwork? Cool Slow-motion Bat Videos!


When watching some of the videos I have collected so far this summer, it became obvious that identifying the specific species of the bats feeding on the agaves is no easy task. The videos are really cool to watch, but the resolution is not high enough to see the distinguishing features (e.g. tail membrane size/shape, length of nose, etc.) of the species well. (For a more complete description of how to identify the different species, see my previous blog post: “The Many Faces of Agave Visitors”). So, I figured out how to take zoomed, slow motion video clips while monitoring at night! I’m super excited about the results. The videos are a tad dark, since slow motion recording requires a lot more light than normal recording, but you can clearly see the bats and all their features! For example, you can see how the back legs look like a “V”, which means that the tail membrane is relatively small. This means the bat is not a Mexican long-tongued bat (Choeronycteris mexicana), which has a large tail membrane. These videos have allowed me to definitively confirm that they are Leptonycteris. Anecdotal evidence says that Mexican long-nosed bats (Leptonycteris nivalis) make a “whooshing” sound when flying, while Lesser long-nosed bats (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae) don’t. Since I did hear “whooshing” while the bats were flying around in the field, I’m pretty darn sure they’re Mexican long-nosed bats, the target species for my project. This is definitely an exciting finding! I hope you enjoy the videos below!

  
You can see in this video, and the one below, how the bat briefly holds 
onto the flowers as it quickly sticks its head in and laps up the nectar.
  
 
A very brief visit!
 
Notice the tongue sticking out as the bat flies away. The batis busy licking up that nectar!

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