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Kingston Lab at the University of Illinois

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After 19 wonderful years in the Department of Biological Sciences at Texas Tech University, I have moved to the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as the inaugural Shelford-Pitelka-Batzli Professor in Mammalian Ecology.

Leaving behind great friends and colleagues, and the sunsets and Red Raider spirit of West Texas has been hard, but I am comforted by the warm welcome I’ve received at the University of Illinois, and excited by this new chapter and possibilities.

BatID 2025 was sick!

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Tigga, Ben, and Abby all traveled to Chicago to present talks at BatID 2025. BatID (AKA The 4th Triennial International Symposium on the Infectious Diseases of Bats) focuses on interdisciplinary research on bats and diseases. Tigga gave a plenary on reconciling disease and conservation research in OneHealth action plans, Ben presented his talk “Targeting taste and leveraging leadership influence: a behavioral approach to reducing bat meat consumption and zoonotic disease risk”, and Abby presented on the reasons bat researchers choose to follow (or not!) IUCN guidelines on the best practices for bat fieldwork. We even had a colaborator meeting where the Nigerian project PIs and postdocs all found themselves squashed into a roost (booth) with Tracey Goldstein.

From research to action: the impact of Kingston lab at the Southeast Asian Bat Conference 2024

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Kingston Lab members Isham and Ashraf attended in the 5th International Southeast Asian Bat Conference in Vietnam (November 25–28, 2024). Both presented their PhD research, with Ashraf’s presentation earning him the second-best presenter award of the conference – congratulations, Ashraf!

  • Isham’s post-breakfast dive – unpacking how echolocation shapes the menu for insectivorous bats!
  • Ashraf’s talk on “Land-use change shapes bat assemblage structure in a highly degraded landscape” hit it out of the park—earning him the second-best presenter award!

Tigga led two impactful workshops during the conference:

  • Field Hygiene in Practice: Demonstrating the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to prevent the risk of potential microbe transmission between humans and wildlife.
  • Cave Bat Conservation: Reviewing conservation strategies, identifying critical cave systems, developing monitoring systems, and fostering cross-country collaboration for unexplored cave surveys.
Tigga in action – suiting up for science and safety (because every bat mission needs the right gear!) with a PPE demo!

The post-conference trip to Cat Tien National Park featured hands-on demonstrations by Tigga and lab alumna Dr. Kendra Phelps, where they guided participants through field hygiene protocols from the IUCN SSC Bat Specialist Group. These demonstrations emphasized the use of appropriate PPE for studying cave bats, the application of disinfectants, and safe fieldwork practices to minimize microbe transmission risks between bats and humans.

A Warm Welcome to Dr Moe Moe to the Kingston Lab!

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Moe Moe Aung joined the Department of Biological Sciences at Texas Tech University in April of this year (2024). She was a professor at the Zoology Department of Mandalay University, Myanmar. She worked on bat ecology and diversity in Myanmar with her colleagues and students, regional and international experts, and published findings in local and international research journals. She was awarded a visiting fellowship from the Institute of International Education-Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE-SRF) in 2022. However, some hard circumstances prevented her from traveling abroad. She arrived in April 2024 and has been working as a research fellow in the Kingston lab. She has been writing an updated review of Myanmar bats, as it has been nearly 25 years since Bates et al. 2000 reviewed the country’s bat fauna and reported 88 species. Since then, intensive surveys of bats have been conducted in Myanmar, resulting in some new species and many new records for the country, making a review timely.

Moe Moe steals the spotlight at the Carols of Light, shining brighter than the Texas Tech president!

She works on her research writing at the lab, the TTU library, or in comfortable places on the TTU campus. She has also been making the most of TTU’s professional development opportunities, taking online courses and attending on-campus symposia, trainings, and seminars. In her leisure time she likes to walk around the TTU campus and Lubbock neighborhoods.

Kingston Lab publications in 2024 – a wonderfully collaborative year focusing on One Health, trade in bats and human dimensions of bat conservation

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We had a diverse range of publications come out this year, many of which illustrate the power of integrative and large team efforts. In March, a great team of disease ecologists, bat biologists, and policy experts, led by the inimitable Professor Raina Plowright, detailed a context-dependent tiered approach to minimize spillover of pathogens from bat to human populations through protection and restoration of places where bats feed, rest and aggregate. These ecological countermeasures are laid out as a model approach for diverse taxa. Tigga and former lab member Dr Iroro Tanshi contributed.

Plowright, R.K., Ahmed, A.N., Coulson, T. et al. Ecological countermeasures to prevent pathogen spillover and subsequent pandemics. Nat Commun 15, 2577 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46151-9

Bat field research frequently involves direct or close contact with bats, an interface that could potentially lead to spillover either from bats to humans or humans to bats. To empower the global bat research community to better protect themselves and bats, the  IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC) Bat Specialist Group (BSG) One Health Working Group (OHWG) issued comprehensive guidelines for Field Hygiene in June of this year: 

Shapiro, J.T., Phelps, K., Racey, P., Vincent a., Viquez-R, L., Walsh, A., Weiberg, M and Kingston, T. (2204) IUCN SSC BSG Guidelines for Field Hygiene. https://zenodo.org/records/12169643

The OHWG has been promoting the Guidelines through webinars, talks and demonstrations around the world, including the European Bat Research Symposium, National Bat Conference UK, 5th International Southeast Asian Bat Conference. Related, several members of the IUCN SSC BSG’s OHWG (Tigga, Wanda Markotter, Paul Racey, Lisa Worledge) contributed to a review, and something of a Public Service Announcement, of the need for bat handlers to be vaccinated against rabies.

M. Brock Fenton, Paul A. Faure, Enrico Bernard, Daniel J. Becker, Alan C. Jackson, Tigga Kingston, Peter H.C. Lina, Wanda Markotter, Susan M. Moore, Samira Mubareka, Paul A. Racey, Charles E. Rupprecht, and Lisa Worledge. 2024. Bat handlers, bat bites, and rabies: vaccination and serological testing of humans at risk. FACETS. 9(): 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1139/facets-2024-0056

The IUCN SSC BSG Bat Trade Working Group (BTWG) also produced a significant publication this year, with contributions from Tigga, Abby, and former lab member Dr Joe Chun-Chia Huang. The paper quantified the online trade in the US in the distinctive Kerivoula picta and received a lot of national and international attention, including coverage in the New York Times. Ultimately, it led to eBay removing all bat listings from their sites around the world (big THANK YOU eBay!).

Coleman, J.L., Randhawa, N., Huang, J.CC. et al. Dying for décor: quantifying the online, ornamental trade in a distinctive bat species, Kerivoula picta. Eur J Wildl Res 70, 75 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10344-024-01829-9

Lab members also contributed to other IUCN BSG efforts, with Abby developing code to calculate EOO (extent of occurrence) and AOO (area of occurrence) used in Red List Assessments:

Monadjem, A., Montauban, C., Webala, P.W. et al. African bat database: curated data of occurrences, distributions and conservation metrics for sub-Saharan bats. Sci Data 11, 1309 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-04170-7

and Touseef leading the Red List Assessment for Pteropus medius:         

Ahmed, T., Murugavel, B., Sharma, B., Ul-Husan, A. & Salim, M. 2024. Pteropus medius. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2024: e.T18725A230958344. https://www.iucnredlist.org/ja/species/18725/230958344

Related, Ben and Iroro contributed to a huge dataset of intactness estimates across Africa: 

Clements, H.S., Do Linh San, E., Hempson, G. et al. The bii4africa dataset of faunal and floral population intactness estimates across Africa’s major land uses. Sci Data 11, 191 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02832-6

Finally, two papers focused on human sentiments towards bats. The first was led by Amir Batrice, a former undergraduate researcher in the lab who worked with Abby to explore how people in Asia respond to posts of bat exploitation on social media:

Batrice, A. A., Kingston, T., & Rutrough, A. L. (2024). Measuring Asian Social Media Sentiments Toward Bat Exploitation. Anthrozoös, 37(4), 619–635. https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2024.2345474

The second took a deeper dive into the role of emotions towards bats, focusing on how emotions towards bats changed through COVID-19 and influence intent to perform bat-conservation actions. Four of the contributors (Tanja Straka, Joanna Coleman, Ewan MacDonald and Tigga) are members of the IUCN BSG Human Dimensions Working Group.

Straka, T.M., Coleman, J.L., Macdonald, E.A. et al. Beyond biophobia: positive appraisal of bats among German residents during the COVID-19 pandemic - with consequences for conservation intentions. Biodivers Conserv 33, 2549–2565 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-024-02872-3

Helping build the next generation of collaborative international bat researchers!

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GBatNet’s student and early career scholars from around the world, including Ashraf and Abby, gathered in Tempe, Arizona, for our first-ever in-person student-only workshop on developing multidisciplinary, international research collaborations. Part of PI Tigga Kingston’s broader Global Union of Bat Diversity Networks, these students and recent grads were mentored in grant writing and project development by co-PIs Nancy Simmons and Susan Tsang, and former lab member Iroro Tanshi. Three very full days and a fantastic field trip to catch bats at a Macrotis californicus roost later (thank you Arizona Department of Fish and Game!), everyone walked away having written four collaborative grant proposals.

We look forward to seeing where these projects go!

Bats and Taquilla in Guadalajara, NASBR 2024 was a blast!

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Lots of familiar faces of past and present lab members at NASBR 2024! Despite some technical difficulties, Ben presented his talk “Taste, Influence, and Availability: the Key Factors driving Bat Meat Consumption”. Ben’s talk showed that bat meat consumption is driven by an interplay of multiple socio-cultural factors rather than just economics.  These findings underscore the importance of structuring conservation and public health interventions to more integratively target all drivers of behavior concern. Abby won the Luis F. Bacardi Bat Conservation Award for her talk “Bat Hunting in Sub-Saharan Africa: Mapping the Distribution of a Conservation-Relevant Human Behavior Using Hypothesis-Driven Models”, which was full of stats, bats, and maps (three of her favorite things!). Former lab post doc Maria Sagot encouraged her fellow bat scientists to join EchoMap, a collaborative global effort to increase capacity-building for bat acoustic monitoring resources. Learn more about EchoMap here. And of course, everyone had a great time at the banquet!

From the Bat Cave – Integrative Disease Ecology Research for Undergraduates

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Do you have an interest in bats, ecology, and viromes?
Are you looking for an opportunity to conduct field research?
Are you ready to sink your teeth into cutting-edge research?

We are seeking self-motivated, curious, and collaborative students for an exciting 7-week paid National Science Foundation (NSF) research experience investigating environment-host-virome dynamics within wild Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus). This interactive learning and research opportunity introduces undergraduates to integrative disease research, including fieldwork in Puerto Rico! Students will receive guided mentorship, attend daily group meetings, and get hands-on training in fieldwork, data analysis, coding, and science communication!

Eligible participants must be US citizens, US nationals, or US permanent residents and current students or recent college graduates. Selected undergraduates will devote five weeks to online training and group activities and 10 days to in-person field ecology training in Puerto Rico. All travel and accommodation expenses to Puerto Rico will be covered. Undergraduates will also receive a stipend of $5,000 for the 7 weeks. We particularly encourage students from underrepresented minorities to apply. Don’t let this NSF funded opportunity fly by! Apply now to join this Bat Cave for Summer 2025!

Application deadline is October 31, 2024. For more information and application instructions, please visit the link: https://lmdavalos.github.io/post/24-09-18-batcave/