Trekking into the Comoros
Dr. Mandl, a postdoctoral fellow funded by Bat Conservation International (BCI) at the University of Vienna in Austria, spent two months earlier this year on Anjouan, one of the islands of the Comoros, located between Madagascar and the coast of eastern Africa. Dr. Mandl was in search of a Critically Endangered Livingstone’s fruit bat (Pteropus livingstonii), a large black bat that has a population of around 1,200.
Livingstone’s fruit bats are only found on Anjouan and Moheli, another island of the Comoros. The terrain of Anjouan, a tropical island with volcanic origins, is rugged and steep. “It’s very difficult to hike around, so you can’t really do behavioral observations on those bats,” Dr. Mandl says.
Dr. Mandl went to Anjouan to put GPS trackers on the bats to learn more about their mysterious habits. It is known where the bats roost, she says, but the rest of their behavior is unknown. “And that is a problem if you want to protect them,” she says, noting people can protect the roost sites, “but then you are lacking all the other things that the bats do, which is feeding and socializing. And we don’t know where they do that.”
The bats roost so far up the slope of the mountainous terrain because this is the only remaining area of natural rainforest left on the island due to extreme deforestation. Once you finally reach the bats and catch them, she says, they are “very calm in the hand” relative to other species she has studied. On a previous trip to Anjouan two years ago, Dr. Mandl had a relatively easy time catching Livingstone’s fruit bats.
This year, though, on the arduous, wet, muddy hikes into the forest, Dr. Mandl faced an issue she hadn’t encountered the last time she went looking for the bats: She had a really hard time catching them.
“I definitely underestimated it,” she says. “It worked so well two years ago that I just assumed it was going to go well this time.” The bats would just fly by her and other team members from the local NGO, Dahari, evading the nets they set up in the forest.
When they do catch bats, she says, they make sure they are strong enough to sustain the GPS collar. The team works as fast as possible to catch, collar, and release the animals in as little time as possible so as to not stress them out. By the end of the trip, they were able to fit 10 bats with GPS devices.
This fall, she will travel back into the field and join the Dahari team to learn more about this elusive species. The tracking information they gather will be used to help conserve the Critically Endangered bat. “We are going to integrate these data into a landscape conservation strategy with local partners, who will then implement the work,” says Dr. Mandl.