Brilliant Bats and Baffling Birds

Bats are undeserving of their spooky reputation. Extraordinary species exist worldwide – providing benefits such as pollination and pest control. Their super immunity might help uncover solutions to longer health-spans. The countryside around Bath is home to horseshoe bats – the focus of our PhD research. We studied their habits during hibernation, genetic relationships, and GPS tracked them to help their conservation. In this talk we make the case for bats, recovering their image from blood-suckers to ecological super-heroes, providing insight into the latest research on their biology.

Parental care is costly to parents but beneficial to offspring. As parents typically produce multiple offspring throughout their life, parental care is often limited to periods of offspring development where parents can make substantial contributions to offspring survival. Short care is expected for precocial species (producing less “needy” young). We report that in 3 species of Malagasy plovers (Kittlitz’s, white-fronted and Madagascar plovers) the parents may attend their young for up to at least 71 days. Why would they provide double the length of parental care than other shorebird species?