Acoustic bat monitoring

 

The Discovery Center, in cooperation with a DNR project, is working to monitor local bat populations.  As the disease white-nose syndrome (more in a later post) threatens bat species, the DNR hopes to gain baseline data to help conserve all eight bat species in the state of Wisconsin.  

The local species:  Little brown myotis (the most common here), northern long-eared myotis, eastern pipistrelle, big brown  bat, eastern red bat, silver-haired bat, and Indiana bat.

Bats represent 12% of all mammals found in the state and 20% of all mammals in the world.  Although they are small and not often seen, they play a major role in the balance of nature.  Bats are important plant pollinators, as well as dispersing various seeds into the environment.   

But, we probably value bats most highly for the volume of insects they consume---up to 100% of their body mass each night.   In the training John and I had at the Discovery Center this spring, we learned that bats save $658 million each year in Wisconsin, by replacing pesticides and insecticides.   (Our training didn't cover how that figure was measured.)  

Bats travel at night by echo-location---ultrasonic signals that locate and intercept insects in flight.  More later, too, about the GPS equipment and personal data assistant (PDA) that we are able to borrow from the Discovery Center to monitor bat life at Carlin Lake.  

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[Salmon Fishing Alaska]

This project trains volunteers like you to conduct acoustic bat surveys of your local area using an AnaBat detector attached to a PDA with GPS. The detector picks up the echolocation calls emitted by bats and translates it to a frequency the human ear can hear. Each detection system records information about penology and species presence. Data is entered into the Wisconsin Bat Monitoring Program database, with the long-term scope of this project to compile information about penology, species presence, migration timing vs. residence, and trends of the bat species in Wisconsin.