We are super excited that our new paper has been published in the Journal of Mammalogy. We have also made it open access, so everyone can access and read it via this link: https://academic.oup.com/jmammal/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jmammal/gyz081/5510503?searchresult=1 What did we do?We investigated bat wing tears. We all know that bats have large, thin wings that are particularly susceptible to tearing. For this reason, they have particular anatomical specializations, such as:
We described wing anatomy using histological techniques, imaging, and material testing. Tear information was also collected from bat carers across the UK (including tear type, position, time in rehabilitation, and possible causes). what did we find?The most tears were found on the section of the wing closest to the body, called the plagiopatagium. Our results suggest that the position of the plagiopatagium (the most proximal wing section to the body), rather than its anatomy, influenced the number, location, and orientation of wing tears. Indeed, the plagiopatagium was not significantly weaker than any other wing section. The position of the tears, close to the body and toward the trailing edge, suggests that they are caused by predator attacks, such as from a cat, rather than by collisions. Consistent with this, 38% of P. pipistrellus individuals had confirmed wing tears caused by cats, with an additional 38% identified by bat carers as suspected cat attacks. The plagiopatagium had the lowest number of blood vessels and highest amounts of elastin fibers suggesting that, unfortunately, healing may take longer in this section. What next? Further investigations into the causes of tears, and their effect on flight capabilities, will help to improve bat rehabilitation. Do keep watching here as we are getting these papers together right now, so will have more to say about this very soon! Rana handed in her PhD thesis last month and is due to viva in July, which is exciting – this is only the first paper from her PhD thesis, so do keep an eye out for more. Big thanks to you!Many thanks to all the bat rehabilitators that supplied photographs for the study. Special thanks to Hazel Ryan and Sally Humphreys, who supplied the majority of our samples, and Maggie Brown, who advertised our study in Bat Care News. We are also grateful to Joanne Horton for helping to develop the tear classification system we used in the paper, as part of her MSc project.
We will continue to let you know our progress on the data, and keep our publications open so you can all access them.
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As our bat data-collecting season is coming to an end this year, we all have bats and cats on our mind! Especially PI Dr Kirsty Shaw, who has carved these great pumpkins, which summarise our Bat Research Project perfectly!
We are proud to announce that we have received over 70 bat photographs and over 70 bats swabs too so far! So a huge thanks to everyone that has helped us so far this season. Without all you guys, this project really could not go ahead! A special thanks, especially, to Hazel Ryan and Sally Humphreys who have supplied us with so many of their samples. We are just collating all of our data, and Rana will be going in the lab next month to try and find traces of cat DNA on those bat wing swabs! Fingers crossed! Happy Halloween Everyone and we will be keeping you posted with what we find! It’s coming to the end of the season now and we have had lots of bats to film. My first experience of filming was with Rana (PhD student at MMU) and Ray Jackson of Lower Moss Wood Wildlife Hospital. With Ray's help and cooperation we have managed to film five bats so far. We have had bats with and without wing tear injuries, which is ideal for us to compare the differences. Rana and I are hoping to film a few more in the coming weeks. During September I ventured down to the south of England and worked with some well-established bat carers. My first stop was with Amanda Millar who runs a small bat hospital in Sussex in her own home. We filmed four bats all with injuries or scaring. This was my first experience of filming alone and I am happy to report that it went very well! Lastly I travelled to Kent to work with Hazel Ryan. Hazel works for the Wildwood Trust but also cares for injured bats at home in her own time. She was kind enough to bring the bats that she was caring for to Wildwood where we set up the equipment in their flight cage. Over all we filmed nine bats over two days of which most had injuries or scarring. The most interesting bat however was one that could fly very well even though it was missing half a finger! I would very much like to thank Ray, Amanda and Hazel and Wildwood for all their help with the project and I hope we can work together again in the future.
When I first started on my PhD at the beginning of 2016, lots of things had already been done over the previous year, by Abbie Case and Joanne Horton, both MSc students from MMU, and I was really excited to do more over the next few years. We started by advertising the project and collecting a lot of data from bat carers, who sent us many pictures of bat wings and swabs from injured bat wings. We will start analysing the swabs in the autumn to find whether traces of cat DNA can be found. We have also looked at the anatomy of the bat wing and have found that the fewest number of vessels and lowest vessel density were in the plagiopatagium section of the wing, which is closest to the body. We have also looked at all the photographs sent by bat carers and found that the most tears also occur in the plagiopatagium. Unfortunately, this part is the worst part to be injured, as its healing process will be slower than that of the other wing parts, due to its fewer blood vessels. We have also filmed seven bats so far at Lower Moss Wood Wildlife Hospital (three healthy bats, two bats with an injury on one wing, and two bats with an injury on both wings). Preliminary data has shown that there are some significant differences in bats with wing tears, for example the body orientation is affected in bats with two wing tears. We are really looking forward to go back this year with MSc student Charlotte Mead for more filming.
As well as getting together all these preliminary analyses, I have also presented my work at the National Bat Conference and the internal postgraduate research conference at Manchester Metropolitan University. You may have also seen us presenting our work, and recruiting bat carer helpers, at the Mammal Society Conference. I have thoroughly enjoyed this year, and can’t wait to receive more samples this summer to see if our predictions still hold true. If you would like to get involved please let us know on the website, or email: [email protected] We are really happy to welcome Charlotte (Charly) Mead to our Bat Research Group at MMU. Charlotte is an MSc student and will be studying the effect of wing tears on flight behaviour for her project. She had a great start to her project by presenting her ideas, and our first results, at the Mammal Society Conference this weekend. We had lots of interest and also managed to hand out about 50 bat packs to interested carers too.
If you would like to help Charly with her project, we would love to hear from you. We would love to film healthy bats and those recovering from tears. All we need is a room larger than 2.5 metres long. Please do email us if you would like to help, and then the bat team with Charly, can come along to film, and also share our videos with you. We have a high-tech, high-speed filming set-up (see post below) and we can measure wing angles, speeds, symmetry and body orientation. We have the first results from our filming at Lower Moss Wood and it seems that the body orientation of bats with tears is clearly altered, and they also move their wings less, and less often. However, these are just our preliminary findings. With some more samples from Charly's study, we hope to really understand the effect of wing tears on flight. Please do let us know if you would like more details, or would like to get involved: [email protected] Congratulations to Rana Osama S Khayat who successfully upgraded from MPhil to a fully-fledged PhD student today. This is great news for our Bat Research at MMU, which Rana leads, as she will definitely be here for another two summers collecting data with us at MMU.
Watch out for us, and Rana, at the Mammal Society Easter Conference, where we will have a stand and will be looking for even more wing tear photos and swabs from bat carers, to keep us busy for the next two years. In our project, we are also investigating the effect of bat wing tears on flight behaviour. As part of our campaign, we have been asking if any bat carers have rehabilitated bats for us to film. We are interested in healthy bats and also those with recovered or recovering wing tear. On Thursday, the 6th of October 2016, we got a great opportunity to film bats at Lower Moss Wood Educational Nature Reserve, near Knutsford in Cheshire. Therefore, both Rana and Robyn headed off for the day. Ray Jackson runs the nature reserve and animal hospital, and kindly volunteered his bats for our filming. In the wildlife hospital, Ray has a state-of-the-art bat flight cage, with a CCTV behavioural monitoring system. We filmed a few of the bats in this cage; however, the majority of the animals we filmed flying individually down the long corridors of the wildlife hospital. We filmed nine pipistrelles altogether in this way: four with healthy wings, and five with recovering wing tears. We used a high-speed video camera so we could really see and track all the tiny movements of the wings, and measure the angle, amplitude, frequency and curvature of the wings during flight. We are so pleased with the footage and have already started to track it, so we can extract these fine-scale measurements. We are really looking forward to seeing the results. In our pilot test last summer, we observed that recovered bats moved their wings slightly asymmetrically, even after wing tear healing. We want to say a big thank you to Ray, who helped us to film the bats and start this part of the project. Lower Moss Wood is a great facility; the wildlife hospital is really new and the nature reserve is a fantastic place to come with educational groups. Indeed, many sessions are run there for schools, disabled visitors and environmental groups to come and enjoy the countryside and learn about the environment. We are also still looking for swabs of bat wing tears, photos of wing tears and also filming of bat flight. If you are interested in being involved in our project, please do have a look through our website and contact us by email at [email protected]. The National Bat Conference took place at the University of York from 2nd-4th September 2016. I was lucky enough to attend this year, and present my first conference poster showing the initial results from our Bat Research Project. The poster was entitled: The Effect of Wing Tear Placement on Healing in Bats. Using all the beautiful pictures of Common Pipistrelle wings and their tears submitted by bat carers, we have managed to map where the blood vessels are on the wings of Pipistrelles, and where tears are most likely to occur. Having a good blood supply promotes fast healing; but unfortunately, we have found that the most common wing tear injuries coincide with where there are the least dense blood vessels, in the plagiopatagium (the section of the wing that is closest to the body). Despite the most common wing tear area taking longer to heal, we do still see a lot of recoveries from wing tears, and the next section of our study is to film and measure the flight behaviours of some recovered bats to see how they are doing.
The conference was a great chance to meet many like-minded people who have an interest in bat research. People seemed happy to chat about my findings. I also managed to hand out a few more bat packs to carers, and I cannot wait to receive some more samples in the post! The talks and the workshops were both wonderful and useful, and I cannot recommend this conference enough. We are still keen to increase our samples for this study, to test how robust our initial findings are. If you are still keen to be involved in our project, we are always looking for bat carers to send pictures of bat wings with fresh and healed tears. We can also send out bat packs to bat carers, to swab the wing tears so we can investigate their causes using forensic analyses. Please email [email protected] if you would like to be a part of our study. We have distributed around 150 bat packs, most of them during the Mammal Society Conference 2016 at the Yarnfield Conference Centre, and the rest through requests on our website. So far, we have got 10 swab samples back to us with the questionnaires, which is great! I can’t wait to start work on them and to identify if any cat DNA is present or not. Also, I am looking forward to getting more samples in from bat carers.
We have also received lots of different pictures of tears on bat wings from bat carers and are hoping to receive many more over the Summer. I have collected all of these pictures to compare them visually and to describe the tears and evaluate any similarities and differences between them. We have had a great weekend at the Mammal Society Conference 2016 at Yarnfield Conference Centre. We had a stall, with a steady stream of visitors, and have managed to hand out about 50 packs so far. We are so grateful for everyone's enthusiasm and support for our study, and can't wait for the packs to start coming in. It has also been really great meeting some of the bat carers who were involved in our pilot last year, and even better that they are keen to be involved this year too. Thanks so much to them!
As well as MMU Bat research, there were some amazing talks and posters on bats too. I especially recommend checking out ecobat.org.uk and also some of the amazing Mammal Atlases being built. Derbyshire have done a particularly sterling job of surveying 99.99% of their county! We are looking forward to see what happens next! |
AuthorBat Research Group at Manchester Metropolitan University Archives
October 2017
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