Christopher Fill's Bat Research
Gregg Hutchison
Author
06/18/2019
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66
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Description
Christopher Fill discusses his bat research and its tie to resilience.
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- [00:00:00.240]I'm Christopher Fill, I'm a master's student
- [00:00:02.540]at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- [00:00:04.470]in the School of Natural Resources.
- [00:00:06.350]I'm also in the National Science Foundation's
- [00:00:09.300]Research Traineeship Program.
- [00:00:11.540]And I'm looking at the spacial distribution of bats
- [00:00:15.177]in the agricultural landscape,
- [00:00:17.390]in crop fields much like this one,
- [00:00:19.500]to better understand the foraging ecology of bats
- [00:00:22.930]and the ecosystem services they provide
- [00:00:25.700]in consuming harmful insects.
- [00:00:28.388]So to do this, I'm basically using acoustic detectors
- [00:00:32.540]to create heat maps of bat activity over space and time.
- [00:00:37.900]So this here is an acoustic detector,
- [00:00:42.130]and it has a microphone
- [00:00:43.370]that records the echolocation calls
- [00:00:46.100]that bats make as they navigate through the night.
- [00:00:50.370]Bats emit high-frequency calls,
- [00:00:52.690]and those sounds bounce off the environment around them
- [00:00:57.640]and it comes back to them,
- [00:00:59.070]and they can make mental images of their surroundings
- [00:01:02.410]as they're flying around through the night.
- [00:01:04.010]So that's primarily how they navigate,
- [00:01:06.190]and this detector taps into that.
- [00:01:11.740]So it stores the echolocation calls
- [00:01:13.960]that it records onto an SD card.
- [00:01:16.820]This unit will turn on around sunset
- [00:01:19.540]and turn off at sunrise, because bats are nocturnal
- [00:01:23.450]and most of their activity takes place during the night.
- [00:01:28.400]So I basically turn this on, and then corn,
- [00:01:31.000]this is pretty early in the season
- [00:01:32.910]but corn grows very tall, very fast.
- [00:01:36.230]So in order to get above the corn
- [00:01:40.660]to where the bats would be foraging,
- [00:01:42.160]because this is all very dense,
- [00:01:44.100]I am using this extendable painter's pole
- [00:01:48.730]to mount it to the top.
- [00:01:50.750]So I'll just extend it,
- [00:02:03.030]and then mount it to the top.
- [00:02:08.512](bolt buzzes)
- [00:02:23.984](clips click)
- [00:02:39.980]So the idea is, once I gain access
- [00:02:41.980]to all the information that this unit has stored,
- [00:02:45.460]each bat species has a unique call structure
- [00:02:49.280]to its echolocation calls,
- [00:02:50.930]and you can actually ID species based off those calls.
- [00:02:54.880]So that's the data that this unit collects.
- [00:02:58.740]One of the main focuses of the National Research
- [00:03:02.450]Traineeship here at Nebraska focuses on
- [00:03:06.270]the concept of resilience, which is essentially
- [00:03:09.020]how much disturbance a system can withstand
- [00:03:13.580]before it collapses.
- [00:03:15.850]So we're trying to see
- [00:03:19.160]how effective bats are
- [00:03:20.900]in consuming insect crop pests
- [00:03:24.660]and regulating, helping to control pest populations.
- [00:03:32.230]It's interesting, because actually
- [00:03:35.410]one of the primary founders of resilience theory
- [00:03:39.030]was actually an entomologist himself.
- [00:03:41.200]He based a lot of his theory on insect pests
- [00:03:44.630]and the damage they can cause to monocultures,
- [00:03:49.780]much like how farming is conducted here
- [00:03:52.990]in much of the central United States.
- [00:03:55.420]Historically, insect outbreaks, pest outbreaks
- [00:04:00.220]historically have caused ecosystem collapses in the past,
- [00:04:04.780]especially with agriculture.
- [00:04:07.830]So it kind of all ties it in here at Nebraska.
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