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For the last six years, Paul Racey has been trying to find a female eastern sucker-footed bat. He has failed. The bats only live in Madagascar and since 2007, Racey’s team have tramped through the country’s eastern forests with nets, bags, and devices that detect the bats’ sonar. They’ve captured 298 individuals, some many times over. But every single one of them was male.
Where are the females? Why are they so ridiculously hard to find? And why do they segregate themselves from the males? No one knows. After so much fruitless searching, Racey doesn’t even have a good hypothesis.
All he knows is that the females must exist. For a start, a Smithsonian team once collected a female sucker-footed bat around 30 years ago, and it’s still housed in their collection. Also, Racey keeps on finding young males every year. “You can hold their wings up to the light and see bits of cartilage round their joints, which haven’t ossified fully,” he says. So, the bats must be reproducing. “There have to be females. It’s just that we can’t find them, and it’s very embarrassing.”
To put this in perspective, Racey has spent his entire career studying bats and has worked in Madagascar for 20 years. He’s vice-president of the UK-based Bat Conservation Trust, and has received a lifetime achievement award from them. He has published more than 200 papers on bats and edited textbooks about them. He even has a bat species–Racey’s pipistrelle–named after him. This is not a man who is accustomed to being unable to find a bat.
“I set out to do a study on the ecology and social organisation of [the eastern sucker-footed] bat and I’ve only done half of it,” he says. “I’m not used to that sort of failure.”
Read more here.
Where are the females? Why are they so ridiculously hard to find? And why do they segregate themselves from the males? No one knows. After so much fruitless searching, Racey doesn’t even have a good hypothesis.
All he knows is that the females must exist. For a start, a Smithsonian team once collected a female sucker-footed bat around 30 years ago, and it’s still housed in their collection. Also, Racey keeps on finding young males every year. “You can hold their wings up to the light and see bits of cartilage round their joints, which haven’t ossified fully,” he says. So, the bats must be reproducing. “There have to be females. It’s just that we can’t find them, and it’s very embarrassing.”
To put this in perspective, Racey has spent his entire career studying bats and has worked in Madagascar for 20 years. He’s vice-president of the UK-based Bat Conservation Trust, and has received a lifetime achievement award from them. He has published more than 200 papers on bats and edited textbooks about them. He even has a bat species–Racey’s pipistrelle–named after him. This is not a man who is accustomed to being unable to find a bat.
“I set out to do a study on the ecology and social organisation of [the eastern sucker-footed] bat and I’ve only done half of it,” he says. “I’m not used to that sort of failure.”
Read more here.
