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].
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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. |
AuthorBat Research Group at Manchester Metropolitan University Archives
October 2017
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