Arribada, Aerial Footage

Great aerial footage of an arribada in Mexico.

Meet a bat we didn’t know existed in Nicaragua, follow a tagged sea turtle, and help us name the next turtle we tag.

Conservation in Action
On the night of June 27 on Brasilon beach in southwestern Nicaragua, a green sea turtle hauled herself ashore, dragged herself up the beach to the treeline, dug her nest, laid her eggs, and went on a walkabout.

As she began winding down, Paso Pacifico’s turtle rangers covered the green turtle’s eyes (turtles are very sensitive to light) and held her in place long enough to attach a SPOT5 satellite transmitter to her shell. Named Saralisa after Paso Pacifico’s founders and directors Sarah Otterstrom and Liza Gonzalez, you can follow this green sea turtle — who has traveled all the way to Oaxaca, Mexico — on her tracking page at seaturtle.org.

Read more about Saralisa, her contributions to science, and more in our August newsletter.

Act Now!
Donate today and help us name the next turtle we tag.

In yesterday’s Arizona Daily Sun:

NAU School of Forestry wildlife ecology professor Carol Chambers, and Nicaraguan bat expert Arnulfo Ramon Medina Fitoria netted, measured, weighed and documented the only Phylloderma stenops bat ever captured and recorded in the Central American country. This particular bat weighs about as much as 20 Hershey’s kisses and usually is captured in mist nets above streams in evergreen forests.

Learn more about our research on bats by visiting our website or reading other bat posts on our blog.

Learn more about partner organization Bat Conservation International.

The California state Senate voted this week to make the endangered Pacific leatherback sea turtle the official marine reptile of California. Assuming Governor Jerry Brown signs the legislation into law, October 15th will officially be Leatherback Conservation Day in the state of California. Mark your calendars!

Paso Pacifico’s head turtle ranger, Salvador Sanchez, inspects a leatherback turtle on one of the beaches where we work to protect sea turtle nests.

Every year leatherbacks migrate from the warmer waters off the coast of Central America where they nest to colder waters off California’s coast where they feed on jellyfish. Considering our US headquarters are located in Ventura and the turtle nesting beaches we protect are in Nicaragua, the symbolism of the leatherbacks’ annual migration is especially meaningful to us. We’ll be looking to partner with other conservation organizations to observe the first ever Leatherback Conservation Day in California.

Please contact us if you’re interested in recognizing Leatherback Conservation Day: wendy (at) pasopacifico.org

Our friends at the Turtle Conservancy have launched The Tortoise, their new magazine dedicated to the appreciation and conservation of tortoises and turtles and their habitats worldwide.

“Turtles and tortoises have been on our earth for more than 200 million years, before the great dinosaurs roamed the planet, and today they face unprecedented challenges for their survival. No vertebrate Order has a greater percentage of species facing extinction. This publication is about the wonder of turtles and tortoises and about the conservation challenges they face,” says Eric Goode, one of the magazine editors and President of the Turtle Conservancy.

A team from Bats Conservation International, Paso Pacifico, and MARENA studies bats at Volcano Masaya National Park.

Bats are essential to ecosystem health and their populations are dwindling around the world, so it is important to understand individual bat species, bat populations, and, of course, the reasons for their decline. In Nicaragua, we study bat populations and their insect diets because we’re considered not just with ecological health, but also with the economic success of Nicaraguan farmers who rely on bats to perform ecosystem services ranging from pollination to pet control.

In the Paso del Istmo biological corridor where we work, there are at least 44 species of bat, which we identify using night photography and by collecting bat guano. By analyzing the DNA in bat excrement, we gather information about what bat species are present and what species of insect they’ve been consuming.

In Europe, scientists analyze bat calls to understand the various species and their migration patterns. As evolutionary biologist, Kate Jones, of the Zoological Society of London writes at the Independent, “bats leak information about themselves into their environment by emitting high frequency sound – echolocation calls – to navigate and find food. We can record this sound in standardised ways and identify the species from its call to track changes in bat populations over time.”

Jones runs iBats — the Indicator Bats Program, which helps citizen scientists contribute to biodiversity monitoring for the global conservation community. International monitoring efforts allowed scientists to track bats’ migration across borders, but difficulty differentiating among various bat calls meant dispersed data sets were hard to compare. Jones and her team are changing that, developing “an identification system that can be used by anybody.”

Their new iBatsID technology, presented today in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Technology, “is able to correctly identify most European bat species 80 per cent or more of the time,” making data sets more reliable and easier to compare. Better understanding leads to more effective conservation efforts, so iBatsID is good news for bat scientists, bats, and the people who rely on the ecosystem services bats provide.

To get a better idea of what bat calls sound like, listen this piece from this week’s Sunday Weekend Edition on NPR:

For the past five years, bats have been disappearing at an alarming rate, falling prey to a mysterious disease called white-nose syndrome. But they’re making an eerie comeback in a new audio exhibit at a national park in Vermont. The exhibit features manipulated recordings of bat calls that are funneled through glass vessels hanging from a studio ceiling.

Bats emit high-frequency sounds that create echoes to help them navigate and detect predators. Most of these sounds are inaudible to the human ear, but they can be recorded using special machines and software that lower the frequencies into the range humans can hear.

In Nicaragua, we’ve been monitoring bat calls ourselves. Working with our partners at Bat Conservation International, we’ve been placing AnaBat systems to record and monitor bat activity across the Paso del Istmo. Rangers at Masaya National Park (like the one pictured above) will share what we learn from our monitoring with visitors and encourage them to help us protect bats and their habitat.

With coverage like the pieces above, we’re optimistic about the future of bats. Understanding the economic and ecological importance of our flying mammalian friends, and recruiting citizen scientists, are important steps in bat conservation.

You can contribute to our bat conservation efforts by making a donation today.