Imagine an animal that weighs about as much as a table tennis ball. Imagine it can fly silently, and that it only comes out at night. And then imagine that you’ve got to catch it. That was the task faced by Joaquín Arroyo-Cabrales when he decided to track down the elusive flat-headed myotis bat – a species that had only been seen three times in recorded history, and only one bat each time at that.
The bat-trackers of Mexico
Joaquín, an archeozoologist from Mexico, made his quest even more difficult by starting in 1998 – two years after the bat was declared officially extinct. Joaquín himself can only say that he was driven by a biologist’s urge to discover, an urge that drove him for six long years.
He first heard about the bat in 1990, while he was doing his PhD dissertation research in Nuevo Leon, in northern Mexico. He was working in a cave near where the last flat-headed myotis had been seen in 1970, and he became curious about this mythical night-flying neighbour of his. Along with Jesus Maldonado, a researcher at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., he put together a grant proposal and began collecting everything anyone had ever written about this bat.
With only some past notes and reports for a guide, they set out in 2000 to scour the sites where the bat had been seen. But where there were once lush grasslands, there were now potato crops – the bats’ habitat had disappeared. The pair clung to the hope that the Flat-headed myotis had managed to move to another home in time, but the closest bat-friendly land was about five miles away. Even if the bats had made it there, they might well have moved even further since, making them that much harder to find.
It took four years of detective work and repeated trips to Northern Mexico for Joaquín and Jesus to track down a likely spot – an artificial pond in a valley in Los Pinos, Coahuila in northwest Mexico, surrounded by low hills and sprinkled with yuccas, piñon pines and rock outcrops. Every night they saw bats flying back and forth over the pond in a ballistic feeding frenzy, and they felt a tiny glimmer of hope that their long lost tiny bat might be darting amongst the swarms.
How to catch a bat
Ingredients:
- 1 dinghy
- 1 net
- Lots of coffee
The team set up camp on June 14, 2004, stretching a net across the pond to catch the bats swooping across. Their target was so minute they had to ask for a net with extra small mesh to make sure that their bat didn’t just merrily soar right through it!
It was a cold night, but at around 9:20 in the evening they saw something that looked like their bat fly straight into the net. In fact, right into the middle of the net, over the deepest part of the pond. The bat sure wasn’t going to make it easy for them.
Three of the team members, Claudia, Bernal and Diego jumped into their blow-up dinghy out of excitement and pushed into the middle of the pond to extract the bat. Claudia reached the bat and, balancing precariously in the pitch dark, carefully untangled it from the net. While it was too dark to tell for sure, what she was holding in her hand was definitely small enough to be a flat-headed myotis! Once back on dry land, they took the delicate find inside their airtight van to make sure it couldn’t fly away if one of them accidentally freed it (that would be hard to explain to the funders!).
Now, they were in a bit of an unusual situation – none of them had actually seen this bat before, and so they couldn’t really tell if it was a flat-headed myotis or not. Even their resident bat expert, Richard LaVal, found it difficult, but after much scrutiny he was able to confirm that they had finally found what they had been looking for. They were indeed holding a rare flat-headed myotis!
The future of the flat-headed myotis bat
Before the night was over, they had caught five more flat-headed myotis, and the next year they found an entire colony inside a jackfruit tree, holding about 100 mother bats! These findings support hope for a healthy number of flat-headed myotis, but there are still many obstacles in the way to learning more about this rare species. For one thing, it can’t be radio tracked – there simply doesn’t exist a radio small enough to be carried by one of these bats. Even the battery is too heavy! It is therefore still a mystery where they go in the winter, and we can’t even follow their flight very far on foot – their movements into the nearby hills take them right past drug traffickers, making pursuing them unsafe.
But that fateful night in 2004, Joaquín and his team learnt more about the bat than anybody could have dared to hope. They learnt the bat’s specific echolocation calls, which will help in their continued search. They also found out that it lives in an area of about 385 square miles, nearly the size of Hong Kong, which will help them to further conservation efforts.
This tiny bat, so small that if it fell down the back of your couch you probably wouldn’t notice, broke free of the extinct list in 2004. Hopefully it will soon be declared out of danger too.
References
- IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2016. Myotis planiceps http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/14191/0
- Arroyo-Cabrales et la. 2006. The Flat-Headed Myotis is Alive & Well http://www.batcon.org/resources/media-education/bats-magazine/bat_article/156
- Arkive.org. 2016. Flat-headed myotis (Myotis planiceps) http://www.arkive.org/flat-headed-myotis/myotis-planiceps/
- Arroyo-Cabrales et al. 2005. Rediscovery of the Mexican flat-headed bat Myotis planiceps (Vespertilionidae). Acta Chiropterologica. 7 (2): 309-314.
About the author
After graduating from the MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at the University of Oxford, Anna Feeney went on to work in communications for the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. When at Oxford she also wrote for the Oxford Times and was Print Editor for Bang! Science magazine.
