WASHINGTON — From red light cameras to store surveillance, we’re used to being watched. Now, bats are being observed as well.
Researchers have installed microphones in a meadow at the Audubon Naturalist Society’s Woodend Sanctuary. Shannon Pederson, a phD student and teaching assistant at the University of Maryland, is leading the research.
She’s taking a look at a recently restored meadow at Woodend and comparing it to an older established spot on the same property: “I would like to evaluate if the restored meadow has an influence on the bat activity and the species composition.”
Among the questions Pederson hopes to answer: Will the restored meadow attract different insects? Will that, in turn, attract more or different types of bats?
If you’re wondering why that matters, Pederson is quick to explain the value of bats.
“They’re a huge consumer of insects,” Pederson says. “From stink bugs to mosquitos, insects that are in a bat’s flight path are going to end up as a bat’s dinner.”
So as Pederson sees it, bats make being outside more pleasant for the rest of us. To illustrate how effective they can be as mosquito control, Pederson says she has bats roosting in trees at her home.
“On my property, I can walk outside, and I hardly get bitten by mosquitoes,” she continues.
But if she crosses the street to her neighbor’s yard? Pederson says she gets eaten alive by the biting bugs. “So I can feel the difference just that close.”
Pederson says the insect control that bats provide is a help to farmers and consumers. Because bats consume so many insects, it’s estimated agribusiness saves $3 billion on insecticides per year. That means less insecticides used on the foods you eat.
The research on the bats will focus on what the microphones in the field pick up. Pederson explains the bats use echolocation to detect and identify their insect meals.
In a sense, she says, bats are great mathematicians.
“Using the sound waves leaving from their mouth and returning to their ears, they’re making this three dimensional model of space,” Pederson says. “They’re doing these mathematical calculations hundreds of times a second.”
Pederson says her young son jokes that bats are such good calculators that he wishes they could take his math tests for him.
Early Sunday morning, Pederson brought several graduate students to Woodend to set up “acoustic detectors” to monitor the bat activity. She explains the sounds bats make tell us what they’re up to.
“So far, we’ve learned how to identify commuting calls, social calls, and feeding buzzes,” she says.
Yes, she says, bats really do commute, travelling back and forth to their favorite feeding spots. So next time you see bats flying around above you, you might want to thank them.
Every stink bug they snag is one less coming into your home, and every mosquito they munch on is one less bug bite for you.
WTOP’s Kate Ryan contributed to this report.
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