The lab had a great time earlier this month at the 16th IBRC in Costa Rica. Tigga convened a symposium with Richard Stevens entitled “Frontiers in Bat Assemblage Ecology: Novel Perspectives from the Old and New World” and gave a paper in the session (“Spatial analysis of species interactions in diverse assemblages”) as did Maria (“Detection and Characterization of Bat Hotspots: a Fusion Test of Local Spatial Autocorrelation”). Tigga was also involved “Building a Global Network for Bat Conservation Symposium” organized by BCI, with a paper presented by Tammy Mildenstein on the SEABCRU (“The Southeast Asian Bat Conservation Research Unit: regional bat conservation exceeding the sum of its parts”)

Julie (“Beyond Size: morphological predictors of bite force in a diverse insectivorous bat assemblage from Malaysia”), Ain (“The interplay between weather and reproduction in three cave-dwelling insectivorous bats in a Malaysian tropical rainforest”) and Joe (“Is bat coffee a potential “wing-wing” tool for biodiversity conservation in Southwestern Sumatra?”) entered the student competition with their presentations and congratulations to Joe on winning the Avinet Award!!  Kendra (“Conserving bats in the Philippines: assessing the impact of cave disturbance on bat assemblages”) and Marina (“Mobile transects are more effective at detecting bat passes than stationary points in low bat density landscapes”) both presented in the Ecological Monitoring symposium, and Colleen had a poster entitled “Effectiveness of Operational Mitigation in Reducing Bat Fatalities at the Sheffield Wind Facility, Vermont”.  Nick got his first exposure to bat nerds en masse — this was the largest IBRC so far with 650 people.

Other presenters from Dept of Biological Sciences at Tech were: Liz Siles, Cibele Sotero-Caio, Caleb Philips from Dr Baker’s lab, and Dr Carl Phillips.

The lab is very grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Biological Sciences for financial assistance for the grad students’ travel.

From left to right – Colleen, Marina, Kendra, Joe, Julie, Nick, Tigga, Ain

Texas Tech at IBRC