Our Malaysian bat project team (Isham, Hendra and Rahul) represented the Kingston lab at the 109^th annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Long Beach, California from August 4 to 8, 2024. Isham’s brilliant presentation showed how the expected environmental filtering and niche packing for insectivorous bats were significant in continuous forests but not in the fragmented patches, highlighting the role of stochastic processes in fragmented landscapes. Hendra gave a data-rich yet engrossing talk on optimizing methods for metabarcoding insects from bulk samples captured using light traps. He demonstrated that four subsamples of 100μL each recovered 90% Operational Taxonomic Units (OTU; equivalent to species) from these homogenized samples of potential bat prey. Rahul’s presentation carried Hendra’s research forward by identifying forest characteristics that influenced insect alpha diversity. Additionally, his work showed that dietary diversity of insectivorous bats was not linked to prey diversity and there was limited overlap between OTUs recovered from light traps and those from bat feces.   

In addition to the super-insightful plenary sessions, our team had a great time dashing from room to room catching up on much cool science being presented simultaneously! With over 3500 attendees, plenty of exhibitions and dedicated career counselling sessions, they benefitted immensely in terms of networking opportunities.