Art for Bats
We’re delighted to present this beautiful work by Ina Helmers of Art for Bats! Ina creates digital paintings of bats depicted from Merlin’s photographs and sells them for donations to Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation. She does the same for several other bat conservation entities as well. We invite you to follow Art for Bats on Facebook. If you’d like to […]
And the winner is…Batgirl!
Back on March 22nd I blogged about Alexis Valentine’s accolade of Grand Champion, Junior Division in the 2016 Sevier County Science Fair. And she told us she would soon compete at the Regional SASEF Science Fair in Knoxville on April 5. Alexis recently reported results from that competition. She took 1st Place in Environmental Science–Way to go, Batgirl! Hi Mr. […]
Countering Pandemic Disease Threat Claims, BAT FLASH! Mongabay.com, 5/8/2016
Objective Achieved–No need for further action. Thanks to Bat Fan participation, we are now collaborating with the editor of Mongabay on a positive story putting exaggerations about disease in perspective. May 24, 2016 We are calling you to action! We have emailed Merlin’s response and posted it as a comment to an April 27 story on Mongabay.com that perpetuates harmful misrepresentations of […]
Teresa’s first cave experience
MTBC’s Teresa Nichta’s final story in this series of her first field trip with Merlin. Enjoy! Merlin and the Trinibats team unloading equipment at the bottom of Tamana Hill. For me, a much anticipated highlight of my Trinidad adventure was my first trip into a major bat cave. Tamana Cave shelters tens of thousands of bats […]
Finding bat roosts in Trinidad
Our digital and social media coordinator, Teresa Nichta, is learning firsthand the challenges of bat photography, whether in the studio or in the wild. This is her experience in her words. I already knew I would love the rain forest; it was so massive yet I felt right at home. Documenting where bats live was […]
WNS Update
Over the past year we’ve received numerous inquiries about the devastating impact of white-nose syndrome (WNS) and potential cures. Merlin is now convinced that the most important help we can provide is to leave hibernating bats strictly alone, improving the odds of survival for the most genetically resistant individuals who appear already to have begun […]
UPDATE! Ebola virus researchers considering alternative reservoir hypotheses, bats unlikely
Following years of headline speculation reporting bats to be the reservoir for Ebola, a review of current knowledge points elsewhere. This often fatal disease is caused by the Ebolavirus genus, which includes five species (Sudan, Zaire, Bundibugyo, Tai Forest and Reston virus). The geographical distribution of these species along separate river basins is inconsistent with a highly mobile […]
Teresa’s continued adventures with Merlin
In our previous blog, Teresa told us what it was like to follow Merlin into a hollow tree in the rain forest. Now she tells us what it was like netting and radio-tracking bats, and what happened to the bats once we caught them. My next adventure with bats began when I accompanied Merlin and […]
My First Field Trip with Merlin
Have you ever squeezed into a hollow tree in the rain forest? Me neither. But MTBC’s digital/social media coordinator, Teresa Nichta, followed Merlin into just such a tree during our recent field work in Trinidad searching for… hey, let’s hear the story from Teresa and make sure you watch the video at the end! “Great, you’re […]
Trinidad Portraits
Thanks to Trinibat volunteers, 43 of Trinidad’s 68 bat species were captured, documented and released over the past two weeks. Little known species like Spectral (Vampirum spectrum) and Striped hairy-nosed (Mimon crenulatum) bats were tracked back to their unique roosts, providing new information essential to their conservation. Merlin photographing bats in the field. Radio tracking […]