At $25 (plus shipping) you receive:

 

Lubee offers two shirt designs, both featuring our prominant fruit bat logo in the center of the chest.

For $15 (plus shipping) you can opt for a stylish brown shirt with copper rings.  A big hit with men (sizes S-XXL).

 

To please the Gator fans in your home, opt for this Blue shirt featuring Lubee's logo in orange.  All this Gators pride for only $10 !(plus shipping)(sizes YS-XXL)

 

To place orders, email us:

Our new web site shop is underconstruction currently.

Lubee's 3rd Annual Bat Fest was held on Saturday, October 27th 2007 and was a huge success.  Over 1,000 guests came from the greater North Central Florida region, and we even attracted visitors from neighboring states and as far away as Massachusetts and Maine!

 

The day was literally jam packed with animal viewing, activites, and educational talks, including one on Bats in the Miltary. Guests had the unique opportunity to observe Lubee's collection of nearly 250 fruit bats up close and personal. 

 

This year's festival also introduced the world to Lubee's personal bat superheroes, MegaBat and Micro - developed by our Festival Coordinator, Brock Eastman. With the help of these winged characters, Lubee's guests learned that all bats are superheroes for our environment, not just the ones with masks and capes.

 

If you missed the fun this year, don't make the same mistake twice! Mark your calendar for next year's festival.  The 4th Annual Florida Bat Festival will be held on Saturday, October 25th 2008.

 

Bats are the only mammals on Earth that can truly fly, and the only other animals capable of this are insects and birds. However, the flight mechanincs of bats are largely unknown.  A team of researchers from Brown University are set on understanding how these animals fly.

 

The team's efforts were rewarded this year by winning a First place prize in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Science and Technology 2007 Visualization Challenge.  The data and images created by the team helped them defeat over 200 other entries from 23 countries.

 

The team used motion-capture technology on bats (loaned to them from Lubee's collection) in wind tunnels to monitor wing movement and air flow over the wings.  In July 2007, the team came to Lubee to study the movements of larger species in a flight lab at our center in Gainesville, Florida.

The status of the Large Flying Fox (Pteropus vampyrus), one of the species at Lubee, is unknown over much of its range. In those areas where data are available, severe declines have been noted. This species is listed on CITES Appendix II - species which may become threatened if trade is not controlled.

Thanks to support from Lubee in partnership with others, a small pilot project had led to the first description of hunting techniques and intensity of Pteropus vampyrus natunae in Indonesian Borneo.

Global warming is a hot topic lately, with predictions that increasing temperatures will not only cause the ice caps to mely, but also allow tropical species, like fruit bats, to expand their distribution ranges.  However, a new study from the University of Cambridge shows that climate change may prove to be a double edged sword for bats.

 

While an increasing temperature reduces the number of bat-deterring cold nights, it also creates extreme temperatures during the day. In January 2002, temperatures peaked at over 42 degrees Celsius in New South Wales, Australia.  he bats tried to beat the heat by fanning themselves with their wings and panting, but the extremes proved too much. Bats began falling to the ground, dying within 20 minutes.

 

The heat wave killed 3,500 flying foxes in 9 different roosts. Among the dead were Grey-headed Flying Foxes and Black Flying Foxes. It is estimated that close to 30,000 animals have died in similar events since 1994.  There is little evidence that such die offs have happened prior to 1994. These findings have important conservation implications for flying foxes and indeed Australia's ecosystems. A co-author of the study, Stefan Klose, was quoted by The Telegraph saying:

"These animals are simply not able to cope with higher temperatures and so they die. They are the seed dispersers for Australia's rainforest so the ecosystem effects could be very considerable."

For our first "Focus Species" segment, we would like to introduce the world to this newly discovered species of fruit bat discovered on the Mindoro Islands, the Mindoro Stripe-faced Fruit Bat (Styloctenium mindorensis)

 

This species was officially described in the August 2007 Journal of Mammology. During a field venture in Feburary 2006, a research group caught this bat in the nets used to census local wildlife. The genus Styloctenium previously only contained one species until this bat with its distinct facial patterning and dental structure was found.

 

This bat's existence had been rumored by local people who had claimed to eat them, but no sightings were confirmed until this animal was caught. It is believed that this newly discovered animal is already under the threat of extinction from deforestation and hunting.  his is often the case in the Phillippines where new species are discovered almost as quickly as their habitat is being destroyed.