Study looks at bat health, and the impact on humans

By Rachel Fioret, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Woolwich Observer

A new study launched this summer into a fungal pathogen killing bats also has implications for human health, says a University of Guelph researcher.

“Bats are a unique and interesting species group,” said Dr. Quinn Webber, a behavioural ecologist.

Webber leads an innovative study with research students on Manitoulin Island, focusing on bats and the environment.

The research recognizes the interconnectedness of animal, human and environmental health.

White-nose syndrome is a disease that is currently devastating bat populations. The disease wakes bats during hibernation, causing them to waste valuable winter energy and starve to death before spring.

A recent study conducted in the U.S. suggests the loss of bats to white-nose syndrome could be linked to the deaths of more than 1,000 human infants. The study attributes the deaths to higher pesticide use by farmers due to bat population loss, since bats are excellent at pest control.

Webber’s research is looking into the health of bat populations.

“Our study is pretty novel in the sense that we’re focused on bats and insects, and we have this extremely robust insect collection protocol where we’re focused on the bats, but we also have a really strong focus on the insects,” Webber said.

“The students have identified 200 families of insects, which probably means there’s something like 1,000 species.”

Researchers tag the bats and monitor them long-term to study how individual bats interact.

“Bats are extremely intelligent,” Webber said, “they have very complex social structures.”

Webber said the researchers are “equally focused and interested on the insects as we are the bats,” strengthening the study.

The students working in Manitoulin Island are focused on studying bat foraging behaviour. “They’re catching bats at their roost and collecting fecal samples to try to figure out what they’re eating,” Webber said.

“We’re also collecting a lot of mosquitoes and insects to figure out what is in the environment and the possible food sources for the bats. Then we essentially use these acoustic monitors to monitor bat activity in different areas.”

The interest of the study is to find in what type of habitat bats are most common – forested, agricultural or wetlands – then connect that to what food is available to them in those places.

Webber said the biggest challenge so far has been locating the bats. “It’s hard to find bats in good places to study them.”

They have been fortunate in finding colonies near Guelph and on Manitoulin Island to focus their study.

“We have to balance out two things,” he said, “the need to find a colony that works for our purposes while also making sure that colony is in a  place we can study.” Most often, that will be private property.

“A lot of the landowners, whose property we work on, are very supportive of our work,” Webber shared.

He hopes to continue studying bats where they have already established research.

“The longer you can continue working in one place, the more robust your data are, the more robust your inferences are.”

In an interview with The Observer, Webber shared that his interest in bats stemmed from previous research with them, and what he finds particularly interesting is that bats are the only mammal that’s capable of flight.

He added that bats can also live for a really long time, noting the oldest bats in captivity lived up to 40 years.

“If you have a bat colony in your home, the same individual bats will likely come back year after year after year, potentially for decades,” he said.

Webber takes a One-Health approach to leading this research, focusing on bats’ environmental, social and health effects. He notes that this study can be connected to a better understanding of  human health.

“Bats are the close neighbours we don’t necessarily know are there,” he said. “It’s very common for bats to live in our  homes, our cottages, our sheds.”

He said that the link to human health is directly related to the fact that bats live in the same spaces as us and that “bats are hosts to parasites and pathogens that could spread to humans.”

Webber says that if you come near a bat, the key is to leave it alone, avoid contact and don’t touch it.

With at least four more years of this study on Manitoulin Island, interesting data will be collected, potentially providing more information on bats’ interaction with the environment and humans.

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