COVID-19 delays...

Hello everyone,

I apologize for the delay in updating you all, but unfortunately the lab doing the DNA sequencing of our extracted fecal DNA is shutdown until further notice because of the current pandemic. I will keep you all posted but for now, the diet study is on hold.

That being said, I have still been working, mostly writing up the results of a roost-tracking survey I conducted on the same two bat species, the Ryukyu tube-nosed bat and Yanbaru whiskered bat.

I'll be presenting the results in the 1st World Bat Twitter Conference at 17:00 UTC on May 28th for those of you interested. The conference itself is free, completely on twitter, and should be a fun way to interact with scientists and new research in the bat world. My Twitter handle is @jason_hideki and the conference is at #WBTC1. Here's a sample of artwork my girlfriend and I made for the conference.

 

Also, some of you may have thought a bit about bats given news coverage concerning COVID-19. It can be hard to sift through all the pandemic stories out there, but here's an article by one of America's leading bat scientists, Merlin Tuttle, on bats, disease, and public perceptions: https://issues.org/a-viral-witch-hunt-bats/. Mr. Tuttle also takes great bat photos if you want to look him up.

The article does a good job of providing context concerning bats and disease, and a line I thought was especially important to note was, "For anyone who simply avoids handling bats, the odds of contracting any disease from one are incalculably small. All diseases attributed to bats are easily avoided, even when bats live in one’s yard."