Bat Calls

A team from Bats Conservation International, Paso Pacifico,
 and MARENA studies bats at Volcano Masaya National Park.

Bats are essential to ecosystem health and their populations are dwindling around the world, so it is important to understand individual bat species, bat populations, and, of course, the reasons for their decline. In Nicaragua, we study bat populations and their insect diets because we're considered not just with ecological health, but also with the economic success of Nicaraguan farmers who rely on bats to perform ecosystem services ranging from pollination to pet control.

In the Paso del Istmo biological corridor where we work, there are at least 44 species of bat, which we identify using night photography and by collecting bat guano. By analyzing the DNA in bat excrement, we gather information about what bat species are present and what species of insect they've been consuming.

In Europe, scientists analyze bat calls to understand the various species and their migration patterns. As evolutionary biologist, Kate Jones, of the Zoological Society of London writes at the Independent, "bats leak information about themselves into their environment by emitting high frequency sound – echolocation calls – to navigate and find food.  We can record this sound in standardised ways and identify the species from its call to track changes in bat populations over time."

Jones runs iBats -- the Indicator Bats Program, which helps citizen scientists contribute to biodiversity monitoring for the global conservation community. International monitoring efforts allowed scientists to track bats' migration across borders, but difficulty differentiating among various bat calls meant dispersed data sets were hard to compare. Jones and her team are changing that, developing "an identification system that can be used by anybody."

Their new iBatsID technology, presented today in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Technology, "is able to correctly identify most European bat species 80 per cent or more of the time," making data sets more reliable and easier to compare. Better understanding leads to more effective conservation efforts, so iBatsID is good news for bat scientists, bats, and the people who rely on the ecosystem services bats provide.

To get a better idea of what bat calls sound like, listen this piece from this week's Sunday Weekend Edition on NPR:

For the past five years, bats have been disappearing at an alarming rate, falling prey to a mysterious disease called white-nose syndrome. But they're making an eerie comeback in a new audio exhibit at a national park in Vermont. The exhibit features manipulated recordings of bat calls that are funneled through glass vessels hanging from a studio ceiling. 

Bats emit high-frequency sounds that create echoes to help them navigate and detect predators. Most of these sounds are inaudible to the human ear, but they can be recorded using special machines and software that lower the frequencies into the range humans can hear.

In Nicaragua, we've been monitoring bat calls ourselves. Working with our partners at Bat Conservation International, we've been placing AnaBat systems to record and monitor bat activity across the Paso del Istmo. Rangers at Masaya National Park (like the one pictured above) will share what we learn from our monitoring with visitors and encourage them to help us protect bats and their habitat.

With coverage like the pieces above, we're optimistic about the future of bats. Understanding the economic and ecological importance of our flying mammalian friends, and recruiting citizen scientists, are important steps in bat conservation.

You can contribute to our bat conservation efforts by making a donation today.

Tracking Saralisa

Saralisa, the green sea turtle we tagged in June, is off the coast of El Salvador. She has traveled a long way and is now in the waters where two of the turtles recently tagged by ICAPO have run into trouble. One was blown up by dynamite fishing, the other caught in a fishing net (illustrating the importance of sustainable fisheries).

We'll be watching Saralisa very closely over the next few days. You can track her progress with us at seaturtle.org.

The results are in

In ten days on Playa Colorado for the ISA World Masters Surfing Championship, we hauled out 21000 pounds of garbage and 3000 pounds of recycables.

Thanks again to partner organizations RENISA and Proyecto TESÓN who helped us keep the beaches clean.

From El Salvador: Hawksbills in the News

Sadly, today's batch of links includes news of the deaths of two critically endangered Hawksbills, both of whom were tagged by ICAPO earlier this summer.

This video from Media Center ElSalvador.com (in Spanish) features interviews with ICAPO staff, as well as mangrove conservationists, and provides a thorough overview of the significance of the lessons learned from these particular turtles, one of whom died as a result of fishing with explosives, the other after getting stuck in a fishing net.

This video from ContraPuntoTV (also in Spanish) features a community festival celebrating the Hawksbills who were tagged for science, illustrating the increasing awareness of the importance of local Hawksbill turtle populations for conservation science. It also shows just how the satellite transmitters are affixed to the turtle shells.

Before the fishing accidents, this July 22nd piece at ElSalvador.com (again in Spanish) brought attention to the importance of protecting critically endangered Hawksbills and their mangrove habitat.

There is much to be learned from ICAPO's studies of the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill, and the unfortunate loss of these Hawksbills reminds us of the importance of protecting our mangroves, and continuing our work establishing sustainable fisheries in Nicaragua.

Aloha!

On July 14th the International Surfing Association World Masters Surfing Championship opened on Playa Colorado, Nicaragua, bringing the world's best surfers, surfing fans, and international media to the region where we work.

Surfwire described Playa Colorado as "a place where the jungle met the sand and the Howler Monkeys offered early-morning wake-up calls" giving the international visitors "a first-hand opportunity to see and be a part of a surf culture on the rise."

Gold Medal Team Hawaii knows a thing or two about surf culture, having invented the sport and shared it with the world. "I'm really stoked for the Hawaiian team," said women's gold medalist Rochelle Ballard. "This whole event has been about that, sharing our Aloha and our passion...I love that spirit of sharing; it's really inspiring."

Hawaii deserves congratulations for their medals and for their work in protecting the Hawaiian subpopulation of the green sea turtle or honu, whose IUCN Red List status was updated this month to species of least concern.

The IUCN's (International Union for Conservation of Nature) new honu status is the result of decades of research and conservation in Hawaii that "allowed the population to recover, and gives hope to the recovery of depleted marine turtle populations in other parts of the world."

To everyone in the international surfing community, and especially to our friends in Hawaii, felicidades, congratulations, gracias, thank you, and mahalo!

Welcome to Playa Colorado!

This is our home all week for the International Surf Association's World Masters Surfing Championship.

Here, in part, thanks to the SIMA Environmental Fund, which supports our Surf Ambassadors program for ocean conservation, we're helping with event logistics and making sure the environmental impact is minimal. Working with our RENISA and our Proyecto TESON partners at Comunidad Connect and Cafe Las Flores, we're patrolling the beach all day for litter. Playa Colorado is an important nesting beach and it's turtle nesting season, so two of our star rangers are here to patrol the beach at night for turtles.

Working in the surfing community for a few years to help ensure the local surfing community upholds the international tradition of combining a love of the waves with a commitment to clean oceans, we're excited about what this event means for coastal Nicaragua.

As reported at ESPN, "surfing, like any sport, can be a powerful mechanism for change. The people of Nicaragua are hoping this is the case."

We're pleased to join ISA in working "for the conservation and improvement of coastal environments and the protecting of surfing resources worldwide."

The Underwater Enviropreneur

For the winter/spring edition of PERC Reports, Reed Watson talked to scuba diver and reef restoration entrepreneur, Brett Howell.  As the Walker Conservation Fellow at the Georgia Aquarium, Howell hopes to illustrate that Florida's coral reefs, a hotbed of biodiversity, present opportunity for cooperation and restoration, rather than a source of conflict.

Howell works with the Coral Restoration Foundation (CRF), which grows endangered species of coral in nurseries, to identify parties who benefit from (and are willing to pay for) healthy reefs. Given that reef-related eco-tourism generates $4 billion annually, Howell is well positioned to link the sellers of coral restoration (like the CRF) with potential buyers, such as the dive shops and fishing captains whose businesses depend on healthy reef ecosystems.

With our own commitment to conflict resolution and reef restoration, we are eager to watch Howell's experiment unfold.