Flying mammals devour harmful insects

Kara McClanahan with a bat buddy.

PULLMAN, Wash. – Being a bat crusader is lonely work. After all, why would people care about fanged creatures so creepy that folklore has them turning into Dracula?

Kara McClanahan, a lab technician at Washington State University’s School of Biological Sciences, cares. McClanahan, who earned her master’s degree in zoology at WSU, is not only a bat researcher but also a bat promoter.
 
For her research thesis in 2008, she subjected herself to three rabies vaccine shots so she could safely catch bats in secluded fields in pitch darkness. Today at age 35, she speaks to groups about the critical role the master aviators play on our planet.

“Because of myths and misinformation, they’re one of the least studied and understood of animals,” said McClanahan in her WSU office. “They’re so demonized. People think that they’re all man biters, that they’re all rabid. That’s like calling all birds vultures.”

 

Cradled in her palm is a dead silver-haired bat on loan from the research collection of WSU’s Conner Museum, located just a few steps down the hall.
 
“This little guy could eat up to a thousand insects in a night,” she said, stroking its backside of silver-tipped fur. “Isn’t he adorable?”
 
She places the bat in a display box and retrieves a tiny skull with fangs no larger than, say, a typed dash or the top of an exclamation point.
 
“Look at his teeth – to think that this is what people are afraid of!”

McClanahan’s fascination with bats began as a child while she rode her bicycle in the hot desert air of Arizona, she said. After supper, she‘d be pedaling with neighborhood kids when a group of bats would dart and dive around them.

“My friends would shriek and ride away,” she said. “I’d get off my bike and just watch them. All I could think of was, ‘How cool.’”
 
Early on, McClanahan learned that bats are the only mammals that fly and that most don’t carry rabies, contrary to what many people believe (one in 1,000 may be infected, according to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta).
 
“I also found out that vampire bats don’t suck blood like everyone seems to think,” she said. Rather, they make a small incision with their teeth and then take only a lap or two.

 

Bela Lugosi as Dracula.

By the time McClanahan finished high school in Nevada, she knew the difference between flying fox bats in South America and the big brown variety found here in Washington state. And when she finished undergraduate school at WSU, “I was determined to study bats,” she said.

 

With that, she applied for scholarships after entering graduate school and received funds from agencies such as Bat Conservation International and the Bureau of Land Management. Her mission: to find out what kinds of insects bats devour “to see if we could better understand their role in pest management,” she said.

During two summers, she spent 20 weeks in desolate lands near Wenatchee where large bat colonies roost in basalt cliffs. Each evening, she stood armed in a field with a net and waited for the feasting bats.

 

 Even though the chance of a rabid one biting her wasn’t high, the required shots she’d gotten turned out to be a good thing.

 

“You wouldn’t believe how many times I got bit,” she said, in a tone so casual that she could have been discussing how often she puts gasoline in her car. The bites – inflicted out of fear, not aggression – were justified, she stressed.

“There they were, thrashing about in a net, trying to get away,” she said. “You’d bite too.”

To figure out the diet of the captured-then-released bats, McClanahan extracted DNA from the fecal droppings she collected and then analyzed it in a lab.

 

What did she find?  Bats are like pesticide-free spray planes, consuming tens of thousands of insects that damage crops and pester people, including moths, crickets, flies and locusts.

 

“Basically, bats are a key form of pest control and save farmers money,” she said. “Unless more is done to conserve their numbers, farmers will end up using more pesticides.”

 

McClanahan’s findings are backed up by studies published in major publications such as the journal Science. In parts of the world, bug-eating bats are a boon to farmers, contributing to strong coffee bean and fruit tree yields, the data say.

 

 

On the other side of the WSU Pullman campus is the Department of Natural Resources, where Rod Sayler, associate professor of conservation biology, shares McClanahan’s view that bats are getting a bum rap.

 

Instead of being appreciated for how vital they are to plants and trees, they are unfairly maligned for “carrying rabies, having fangs, hanging upside down, coming out at night – you name it,” he said.

 

Now a mother of two young children, McClanahan has put bat field research on the back burner. And yet, whenever she speaks to audiences about bats at local schools, the Nature Conservancy or the Western Bat Working Group, she gets a natural high, she said.

“People think bats are scary, but what would really be scary is a world without bats.”

 

Find other WSU News Halloween related articles here.

 

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Source:
Kara McClanahan, School of Biological Sciences, 509-335-3516, karamac@wsu.edu

Media contact:
Linda Weiford, WSU News, 509-335-3581, linda.weiford@wsu.edu