Wildlife Conservation Insights | Paso Pacifico Blog

Wildlife without Borders

From our January newsletter: The endangered Black-handed Spider Monkey is locally extinct across most of western Nicaragua. Through a grant provided by the US Fish and Wildlife Service International Affairs' Wildlife without Borders program, we have begun a monitoring program to document primate populations and to provide employment to local farmers to protect Spider Monkeys at key private reserves across the Paso del Istmo Biological Corridor. Paso Pacífico will also be able to...

Protectors, Not Poachers

From our friend Greg Reitman at The Environmentalist: One of the world’s greatest treasures, sea turtles, is threatened by extinction. With the continued rise of poverty and lack of food resources, egg poaching has become a mainstream commodity and a means for survival. This man-made epidemic has been on the rise for decades, and is most prominent along the beaches of Nicaragua’s Pacific Slope. Poachers, viewed like pirates, roam the...

Bats Lesson Three: Vampire Bats

From Kim Williams-Guillén, our director of conservation science: There are other smaller caves in Masaya. Park rangers know where they are. I have been to only one, which was a cave with a large colony of vampire bats. In the video (also from April 2009) if you look carefully you can see some females with babies hanging on their chests. Many tropical bat species are capable of reproducing throughout the...

Bats Lesson Two: Nectar Bats

From Kim Williams-Guillén, our director of conservation science: This is a video I filmed of nectar bats feeding on a jicaro tree in Montibelli private reserve, which is about 30 minutes from Masaya. This video was filmed in April 2009. It's easiest to watch nectar bats in the dry season (January through April) since that is when many of the tree species in the dry forest flower.

Bats Lesson One: Volcano Masaya

From Kim Williams-Guillén, our director of conservation science: There are two main lava tube caves, and several smaller caves. The largest cave has a colony of what I believe may be thousands of bats, but we have not done any counts. We have captured five species leaving this cave, Pteronotus parnelli, P. personatus, P. gymnonotus, and P. davyi. On one occasion I caught 3 Mormoops megalophylla which was the first time...

Vote ELLAS

We are finalists in NatGeo's Geotourism Challenge on Ashoka's Changemakers website. If we win this challenge, we will receive funding for our watershed and coastal restoration work from the National Geographic foundation, the Multilateral Investment Fund, and the Inter-American Development Bank. The ELLAS Initiative up for a vote is centered around empowering female enviropreneurs to harness market forces and employ voluntary solutions to environmental programs in their local communities. Please take a few...

Surfers Clean Up Their Ocean Playground

In December, we worked with our surf ambassadors to organize an environmental education workshop and coastal clean-up. We're really proud that Nicaragua's growing surf community has embraced a culture of conservation. This project is made possible through funding from the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association's SIMA Environmental Fund.

Photos from the Field: Leatherback Nesting

Last night our turtle rangers spotted a Leatherback sea turtle nesting on Playa Brasilon. They watched over her while she deposited 78 eggs in a nest which they will guard. Because the Pacific Leatherback is very close to extinction, we are happy to start the new with this, our very first leatherback nest on Brasilon Beach.

Cloud Feedback

From this weekend's Science Roundup: One of the major uncertainties about global climate change is the effect of clouds, which cool the climate by reflecting incoming solar radiation back to space, but also warm the climate by trapping heat that might otherwise escape. So as the planet warms, will clouds change in ways that counter warming by greenhouse gases (a negative cloud feedback), or further amplify it (a positive cloud...

Species of the Day: Wrinkle-faced Bat

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species of the Day is the Wrinkle-faced bat. The Wrinkle-faced Bat, Centurio senex, is listed as ‘Least Concern’ on the IUCN Red List of Threatened SpeciesTM. This striking-looking bat inhabits moist and dry tropical forests of Latin America, from Mexico to Colombia and Venezuela. It is considered to be an uncommon species throughout its range, although occasionally it can be locally abundant under certain conditions. Wrinkle-faced...

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