Bat Chats! Sharing the Role of an Important Native Pollinator
Published October 24, 2024
During the day, these mysterious mammals seek refuge in gloomy caves, the dark crevices of rocks and in shadows on the underside of bridges. They emerge at dusk, erratically flapping their leathery and nearly translucent wings in pursuit of their next insect meal. Their paper imitations decorate front porches and classrooms for Halloween, and they have long been associated with vampire lore. But did you know that bats are also one of North America’s most important native pollinators and one of our cheapest forms of pest control? The United States is home to around 45 species of bats and these sometimes underappreciated animals provide critical contributions to our ecosystems, agricultural sector and public health. From eating disease-carrying insects to pollinating plants and dispersing seeds, bats provide immense contributions to human health and the environment. Some studies estimate that across all agricultural production, consumption of insect pests by bats results in a savings of at least $3.7 billion per year.
Through EPA’s Bat Chats speaker series, EPA National Student Services Contractor A.J. Blackburn helps educate students in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, about the valuable role native bats play in our ecosystem. We sat down to talk to A.J. about bat chats, adaptation, and getting kids engaged in science. Read our conversation below.
Can you tell us a little about yourself and what brought you to EPA?
I’m the K-12 STEM Outreach Program Coordinator for the EPA-RTP Campus, and I’ve been here since 2021. I studied biology for my undergraduate degree at Wingate University, right outside of Charlotte. Then I went to Western Carolina University for my master’s degree in biology. I had done outreach in college as president of the Wilderness Club at Wingate sharing our biology lab at events and teaching people about venomous and non-venomous snakes of North Carolina, so this job seemed like a good fit.
How did you get started doing Bat Chats?
During undergrad, I did a research project on assessing the efficacy of handheld bat monitors. They plug into your smartphone, and you can hold them up with the app open and it will identify bat calls for you. At the time, this was a new technology, so I was trying to see if it worked well and was accurate. I was also working on assessing the proper placement and installation of bat houses, so trying to figure out what height they should be; whether they should be on a tree or the side of a house; and whether they should be painted or not. This project, Smartphones as a Non-Invasive Surveying Tool to Monitor Bats, was published in the Journal of Young Investigators in 2019 and selected for the "Best of 2019" Special Issue. When I started my master’s program, I became more interested in studying bats as pollinators.
At EPA, I was asked to do a Halloween-themed outreach event in October. I was going through all our materials, and I realized we just didn't have anything that really fit this theme. As I thought about an educational activity related to EPA that could also be spooky, I realized talking about bats as pollinators would be perfect and I came up with the name, Bat Chat. It started as a tabling activity where I taught kids about bats and showed them how to make bat hats out of construction paper and it evolved into an educational classroom activity.
What do Bat Chats look like now?
Part of the North Carolina science standards in elementary grades is teaching kids about the effects of environmental changes, adaptations and behaviors that enable animals to survive in changing habitats. Bats are a perfect example of animals that have adapted to their environment with their use of flight and echolocation.
When I go to a school for an outreach event, it’s often for after school activities and at that point, kids are tired of sitting at their desks and they're ready to run around so I try to keep it interactive.
For bat chats, I start by showing students a model bat skeleton, who I named Bath, and I have the students describe what they notice. For example, Bath has big ears which help him hear better and distinguish the ultrahigh pitch echolocation calls. We talk about his wings and how bats are the only mammals who have adapted to fly. We also talk about where bats live, what types of things they eat including mosquitoes, and how they help lower the risk of spreading vector borne disease. And then we play a game that models echolocation.
How does the game work?
It’s sort of like Marco Polo. We start by standing in a big circle and the students on the outside of the circle are the cave walls. The inside of the circle is the cave and it’s the job of the students making up the cave walls to be quiet, which is the hardest part of the whole game.
Then I randomly choose two students and one plays a bat and the other plays a mosquito. The bat closes their eyes and spins around three times and then with their eyes closed, they have to find the mosquito and stop it before it can bite a human.
This is where modeling echolocation comes in. Bats navigate and find prey by emitting sounds and listening for the returning echoes as they bounce off trees, walls, and even flying insects. So the student who is playing the bat wanders around the inside of the cave and says “echo.” And then every time the student who is playing the mosquito hears “echo,” they have to respond “location.” I eventually have more students join as mosquitoes and it’s pretty fun.
What is something you wish everyone knew about bats?
All the ecosystem services they provide. They control pests by eating them which helps prevent the spread of disease and also saves farmers money because they don’t have to use as many pesticides on their crops. They are pollinators but they also disperse seeds by eating fruit. There are certain seeds that need their shell broken down by an outside organism's digestive system before it can grow so bats take care of that.
Bats are also really endangered. There’s a fungus that creates “white nose syndrome” in bats. The fungus grows on their nose, their mouth, tips of their ears, their wings. It can make them lose their ability to fly and breathe. When one bat in the colony gets it, there’s a high fatality rate for the rest of the colony.
It’s really important that we protect bats because they do so much for our environment, especially here in North Carolina.
Learn More:
EPA Bat Chats (note this activity is limited to 50 miles within the RTP, North Carolina, area)