Sixth Night: Catching Bats!

July 2 - Evening
After a day of dolphins it was a hot, buggy evening with bats, but worth it! After dinner on the Ayapua, I put on my rubber boots again, doused myself with bug spray, and hiked through the rainforest at night to check mist nets where two scientists were catching bats. The biologist in charge, Gabriel, didn't speak much English, but I managed to speak enough Espanol to find out a few things from him. Most of the bats we caught were omnivores, they ate both insects and fruit, whatever they can find. In New England, our local bats are carnivores, they only eat insects..

We caught one tiny bat that eats only small fruit, an herbivore, it was mostly a bright yellow color...looked something like these bats living under a tree leaf (we are looking up at them hanging upside down). They have big ears to locate their prey by echolocation, using their voice to bounce off the insects so they can catch and eat them.

Some of our group ready for night exploring!

Roberto who knows most animals here by their call before even seeing them.

The full moon rises over the trees.

Of course we were taking data on these bats. Gabriel weighed them inside a little cloth bag to calm them down, then measured their wings, aged them by looking at their wing joints, sexed them, figured out their species, then let them flutter off. He is doing a study on the kinds of bats he finds in 5 different habitats in the Amazon. This means he is working every night in the buggy, steamy rainforest for 10 weeks catching bat after bat after bat, sometimes until 2:00 a.m! He had been working for 4 weeks so far and had caught over 430 bats! He clips a little bit of the hair on their back before letting them go so he will know if he has already caught a particular bat or not.