Elusive Florida bonneted bats have made the nine-hole golf course their home, drawing the attention of bat scientists and experts interested in studying their habits.
Elusive Florida bonneted bats have found an unlikely foraging ground at the nine-hole Coral Gables (Fla.) Granada Golf Course, the Miami Herald reported.
By day, the former orchard draws mostly duffers and retirees, or joggers. But at night, the bats come out to play, feasting on insects to a steady rhythm of trills and tweets, the Herald reported.
“When it gets dark, you hear them right next to you, but you can’t see them,” said Giselle Hosein, a research assistant to a Florida International University biologist and bat expert. “It’s like your mind is playing tricks on you.”
The bats, which have the smallest range of any bat species in the Western Hemisphere, are one of the world’s most vulnerable, found mostly around South Florida. In November, U.S. wildlife managers added them to the endangered species list, citing both habitat loss and annual mosquito-spraying as critical threats, the Herald reported.
The government and biologists are now trying to determine where the bats live and whether their habitat can be protected. But the bats aren’t cooperating, the Herald reported.
“We literally know nothing about them. We know they have a low reproduction rate, but we don’t know how fast … or what they’re eating, so we don’t know what to protect,” said Dr. Frank Ridgley, head of conservation and research at Zoo Miami. “Until we answer those questions, it’s hard to get a recovery plan.”
The bats—officially Eumops floridanus or Eumops for short—show up most frequently at the golf course and sometimes near Zoo Miami. Biologists think the fuzzy bats, with ears so round they form a brim-like bonnet, historically roosted in pine rocklands and wetlands that development shrunk over the years, the Herald reported.
A colony also roosts in several man-made bat houses in Punta Gorda and Fort Myers. While other bats form massive colonies, leaving roosts in noisy, thundering herds, the hamster-sized Eumops may live in small, restless harems that attach to a single male and frequently change roosts, the Herald reported.
Eumops are one of the few bats that can be heard, said Kirsten “Kisi” Bohn, the FIU biologist whose work on bat songs is featured in the current Science magazine. But it depends on your ears. Women tend to hear higher frequencies than men—an evolutionary quirk that makes women more attuned to a baby’s cries, she said.
Bohn, who was drawn to bats because she was interested in studying communication in mammals, is now trying to coordinate additional research on the golf course bats. FIU provided some start-up funds, allowing her to buy three additional song meters at $3,000 each. She and Hosein, who expects to graduate this summer, have so far put up two in trees on the course. And she’s working with a London biologist doing DNA analysis on what the bats eat, which will help determine their habitat, the Herald reported.
“We know they roost in groups of four to 10, maybe 20. But that’s a small group and you have to be in the right spot at the right time to see them coming out of their roosting. It’s elusive,” she said.
Bohn has toyed with the idea of holding a bat night, in which volunteers armed with iPhones or iPads using an app called SpectrumView could be posted around the golf course to help locate the bats at dusk to pinpoint their roosts. In the meantime, she’s asking for volunteers, the Herald reported.
“I don’t know what they’re doing yet, but they’re basically talking to each other. They’re not just echolocating, but they’re communicating to each other while they fly,” she said. “We would learn a ton more if we could find their roost sites.”
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