Raising A New Generation Of Bat Conservationists In West Africa

Bats are understudied in West Africa. An ecologist couple is building a network of bat conservationists to boost research and conservation.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:45Ira Flatow?

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• 1:02Flora Lichtman?

  I'm Flora Lichtman, and you are listening to Science Friday.

• 1:08Flora Lichtman?

  Today in the show, a pair of married scientists are on a mission to save bats in their homeland, Nigeria.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  We are raising, basically just raising an army of bat conservationists.

• 1:24Flora Lichtman?

  Nigeria is home to 100 known species of bats. That's about a third of all of Africa's bat species. But when my next two guests met, before they were collaborators, before they were married, not so much was known about the flying furry mammals of the region. Dr. Iroarotanshi is an ecologist at the University of Washington, and Dr. Bennet Obitte is a conservation ecologist at Texas Tech University. Iroarot, Ben, welcome to Science Friday.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  Thanks, Flora. It's very nice to be here.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Thank you, Flora. Thank you for having us.

• 1:56Flora Lichtman?

  Iroarot, why bats? Are they a lifelong love for you?

• 2:01Speaker 04

  Absolutely. The question why bats has, you know, a few answers for me. Everything from... You know, the adventure that comes because being out in the field studying bats, because you gotta go to caves. Forest canopies, you know, and all of that. Um, but also it it was the point, I feel like bats kind of rescued my career. I was at the point where I started asking questions about whether I could really do biology in a really exciting way. And then I heard about someone climbing into the forest canopy and studying bats. I I I was like, yeah, this is it. That just dead drop. There is no question. This is what I'm gonna be doing for the rest of my life.

• 2:47Flora Lichtman?

  What do you mean there it rescued your career? You weren't sure if you could do biology in a fun, exciting way. Like, what were the other options?

• 2:53Speaker 04

  So I had studied at the university I've been in for my undergrad. And while there are a few professors who were doing cool stuff, they weren't doing research in ready breaks, you know. So the people who were doing cool stuff were either fans people or mollusk people. I wanted to do work with things that had, you know, a backbone. If you see what I mean. In any case, uh, so I I wasn't really thrilled by, you know, the research around me and I I was just really craving being in the field, observing animals and and be able to explore what you do, because that's kind of how my interest in animals started, was watching nature documentaries

• 3:35Speaker 04

  and hearing all these people talk about what's going on with the animals. And I was just puzzled, like, how do they know? I wanted to be that person who would ask those questions.

• 3:44Flora Lichtman?

  The mollusk people are gonna come for you, but.

• 3:47Speaker 04

  No, but that's that's the thing, though. The mollusk people, the palm people were doing cool research. It it just wasn't what I wanted, you know, so I.

• 3:55Flora Lichtman?

  Different strokes, of course.

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, there you go. And so if you want to do a sexy research, it's not something you do on and off. It's something you set up. And and so that was my dream. I wanted to see that it would become this thing where people not just come and go once in a while. You you you really set up an engine that keeps going for bats.

• 4:19Flora Lichtman?

  Ben, what about you? How did you get to bats?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Oh, I I fell in love.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  With a specific species and I met Ioromo, you know, twenty fourteen was when we met. She gave this talk. I was a hydrobiologist, you know. I spent all my time on brackish waters, collecting aquatic samples and aquatic insects.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  But she was working with bats and then she gave this talk about museum collections and stuff. And I was, ooh, quite interested. I mean, you have to know that nobody really studied bats in Nigeria. So this was new, right? So and she was going on one of her field, you know, collections and I volunteered to just go with her. And the second night, I caught a very cute bat. It's the Cyclops roundleaf bat. If you know this species, it's very cuddly. It looks like a small teddy bear when you hold it in your hand. I was like, I want to keep doing this.

• 5:31Flora Lichtman?

  Ben, when Ioromo started working on this, because you you heard her give a talk about this, right? How many Nigerian bat scientists existed?

• 5:39Speaker 03

  I would say none that I knew about. That was in an ecology program. It was weird to, you know, see someone who was passionately talking about bats that, you know, we all thought were, you know, bad omens. But it was, I was curious. I was fascinated.

• 5:59Flora Lichtman?

  What's the most interesting part about the bats that you study?

• 6:02Speaker 04

  As far as Nigeria goes, I want to say it's the hottest hotspot for bats in Africa. So if you really want to do bat research in Africa, Nigeria is the place to be. Because we're in a transition zone between what you would consider West African species versus Central African species. And that means a lot for many things, from the ecology to disease ecology. But it's just a really interesting landscape to to to to study bats.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  And then I like to say this. We have some of the prettiest bats. Around the world, I mean, you look at the Latvia front, the yellow winged bat, it has yellow wings and very cool. You look at all the fruit bats we have, some of them poppy face, so cute. You know, there are so some that are very unique, like the short tailed roundleaf bat, you know, which is endangered. And one of my favorites, which is a meonycterys bat, it likes, it likes to be rubbed. You hold it in your hands and then when you try

• 7:16Speaker 03

  to touch it, scratch it, it gently just raises the neck upwards and it wants, it wants you

• 7:23Flora Lichtman?

  Like a dog.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  Exactly. This is so, this is so adorable, so cute. I mean, yeah, we, we have very nice looking cute species and they are also very important ecologically. They do all kinds of work across the landscape, helping communities sustain their livelihoods.

• 7:46Flora Lichtman?

  Ben, you mentioned the short tailed roundleaf bat. Aurora, you have a story about this, right? About an encounter with, with this bat?

• 7:55Speaker 04

  I do. And I love to tell it because it helps me relieve that experience. All right. So the story is about how we found the first individual in Nigeria. So when I went to the field, I had a list of things you would expect that hadn't been recorded in Nigeria. So I was, I wasn't really looking for that one. And so this evening, we were out trapping bats. And what you do when you trap bats is you go out to the traps and you put them in individual bags. And so you, you bring them all to your recording station and then you take them out one by one. And so I was doing that, you know, going through each of those bags.

• 8:34Flora Lichtman?

  It's like Christmas morning.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  This one species. I know, I pull, I pull one species out and I was like, wait, that is something different. What I was seeing was a species with really big ears. I was like, I have not seen that before. And it's got this flatish stubby round nose.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Button.

• 8:52Speaker 04

  Button. It's a round button, really. So I, you know, picked up a few guy, I was flipping through and I got to the species that I suspected it was. And I, I, I was, I was struggling to speak because I was so excited. And that's where we confirmed that it was the shorter only bad, but um I could not sleep that night. Cause it hadn't been seen in the wild like forty five years before. When you start getting to forty five, fifty years of not finding something, people start to worry if it's going extinct. Or if it's gonna extinct. Um, but in our case, no one been looking with the right equipment. And so when we found it, we were just, you know, completely taken away. And um, and I, yeah, I couldn't sleep that night.

• 9:36Speaker 04

  Uh, anyway, yeah, sorry, I, I'm kind of going back there now.

• 9:42Flora Lichtman?

  Enjoy it.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  The excitement.

• 9:44Flora Lichtman?

  Enjoy it.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:47Flora Lichtman?

  Ben, what are the biggest threats to bats in Nigeria?

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm just kind of segueing from the experience here was reliving. Um, a few nights after that, after we found this species. There was a wildfire, you know, like, and then we were like, this is not, you know, really going to come here. So we, we continued walking. Two hours later, um, the fire was literally in our camp. So we were running, you know, trying to just pick a few equipment, the most expensive equipment to just to run down the mountain.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  You know, this is when it downed on us. I, I keep telling people this was probably the saddest experience we've ever had in the forest. Cause this was.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Perhaps the greatest find we've we've made in the last few years and cave bats are very sensitive to smoke and forest fire could just completely roast them in the caves. So this was how we actually formed our conservation organization to first of all, protect the forests from wildfires, because these were not just the normal wildfires. These fires come from farms.

• 11:21Flora Lichtman?

  Wait, so is that one of the big threats?

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:25Flora Lichtman?

  Wildfires.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Wildfire is one of the major threats. Beautiful mountains or forests are surrounded by farms, mostly cocoa farms. So annually, farmers use fire to burn brush or maintain these farms.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  They do this annually through generations, but because of, you know, changing climate, they are no longer able to predict the best times to do this farm maintenance. So they end up every year, these fires escalating from one farm to the other, sometimes devastating hundreds of farms before even getting to the mountain. And once it gets into the mountain, it's uncontrollable. You then have to wait. Sometimes it burns for weeks until there's a rain.

• 12:19Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  Because there's no way to manage it.

• 12:21Flora Lichtman?

  Hmm.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Um, actually, the major threat, most important one is habitat loss or habitat degradation. And this is coming from encroachment, from smallholder farms, logging from timber dealers. And then we have hunting. People actually hunt bats. In fact, the Egyptian fruit bats, the record was four hundred and four thousand three hundred individuals captured from a single cave in one hunting effort.

• 12:54Flora Lichtman?

  For food.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  For food.

• 12:55Flora Lichtman?

  For food.

• 13:00Flora Lichtman?

  Don't go away, because when we come back, how do you make bats lovable?

• 13:05Speaker 04

  We sort of said, we're trying to save this forest for the bats and for you. And they're like, oh, really? Oh, OK. I guess we're we bats now. We're on team bat, like you said.

• 13:22Speaker 00

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• 14:07Speaker 00

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• 15:48Flora Lichtman?

  Eroo, you know, getting people to care about conservation of any species, obviously, this is a big, global challenge. In your work and the work that you two do, trying to get people on Team Bat, what have you learned about the strategies that are effective and the things that don't work?

• 16:09Speaker 04

  So what hasn't worked? So, uh, to be honest, I think just talking about bats is not enough. You have to show people. Because the thing with bats is because people don't see them, they just write them off as evil or whatever. But the question is always, well, so you're spending your time doing this research. How does it benefit the common man, as they say in Nigeria? Because if you tell them, oh, in the US, bats save 22 billions of dollars every year to avoid the costs of agricultural pest removal, it doesn't make a difference to the cocoa farmer

• 16:51Speaker 04

  in Wancha or in Bukilan in Nigeria, you know? So that person wants to see how XYZ trees that we harvest or we use their seeds or we use their fruits or whatever is polluted by bats. And we've got many examples. And so when people start to see that, oh, this, because a lot of the things that threaten biodiversity also threaten people. And that's where we've gotten the local communities too, is we sort of said, we're trying to save this forest for the bats and for you. And because we're preventing fires from getting to forests, what it then means is that fires are not getting to other people's farms.

• 17:36Flora Lichtman?

  Uh huh.

• 17:38Speaker 04

  You start to let people know that, oh, we're solving this problem that you also have because of the bats. And they're like, oh, really? Oh, okay. I guess we're with bats now. We're on team bat, like you said.

• 17:49Flora Lichtman?

  Do you all feel responsible for the bats in Nigeria? Do you feel like it's on your shoulders to conserve them?

• 18:00Speaker 04

  There's a big sense of responsibility. I mean, there's a big

• 18:08Speaker 04

  sense of duty, that's the word, you know? It's not just about we made noise about these bats. It's it's more like if we don't act, then we're not being responsible.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  It was heavier when we started, and this is why we have devoted a huge amount of resources in raising more bat scientists and conservationists, not just in Nigeria, across um, West Africa. We have a program where we have students across the West African region coming into Nigeria. So, and we have experts from across the world who we invite to train these students. And then we go beyond that. We maintain mentorship until they graduate from um, their programs. And so

• 19:05Speaker 03

  we are raising, basically just raising an army of bat conservationists. Probably in the next ten years, we will not be feeling this much um, responsibility. There will be probably hundreds of other people doing what we're doing right now.

• 19:23Flora Lichtman?

  Is the goal to to sort of help people who a- avoid the challenges that you faced?

• 19:30Speaker 03

  That, yes, absolutely. Exactly. Sometimes you get traumatized by some of these experiences. And this is how sometimes people get into charity, you know? You survive cancer, you want to help others, you know, so this

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  This was like that for us.

• 19:49Speaker 04

  Let me quickly describe what that means by trouble.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  So my PhD required a lot of trapping gear. And when you load up your field truck, the height of the gear, it really towers over the truck. And that that was because, you know, we didn't have anywhere to uh any anywhere to hold our gear. But it also reflects how the fact that there's very little scientific infrastructure for this sort of long term, you know, deep in the mountains, deep in the forest research. Because, you know, we'll spend three to six months at a time in the forest. Uh, now, in terms of physical infrastructure,

• 20:34Speaker 04

  we're building field stations to make sure that we don't we no longer have field trucks that are towers high when we go to the field. You know, it's been my lifelong dream to be able to just sit in the forest in the field station and work. And so we now have two field stations that are getting constructed. Um, I couldn't really get support when this all started in Nigeria. And so we we wanted people to find joy in doing the research. But uh, we really want people to not experience the same struggles that we had, both in terms of access to mentors and access to facilities.

• 21:16Flora Lichtman?

  That's awesome. Ben, Aurora, thank you so much for joining me today.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Thanks for having us. Uh, once again, this was such a pleasure. Thank you so much, Flora. Thank you for having us.

• 21:28Flora Lichtman?

  Dr. Aurora Tanshi is an ecologist at the University of Washington. And Dr. Bennett Obite is a conservation ecologist at Texas Tech University.

• 21:42Flora Lichtman?

  Thanks for listening. Don't forget to rate and review us. And you can always leave us a comment on this segment on Spotify. We'd love to hear from you. Today's episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.