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Saving Bats.
Conserving Ecosystems.
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With the symbolic adoption of a fruit bat, you join Lubee's efforts to save bats.
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Each adoption is fully tax deductible. Adoption kits include a photo and certificate depicting your chosen bat AND a plush bat
Visit our web site Adopt-a-bat
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2010 Special Thanks
To all of our interns and volunteers for caring for our bats.
To Daniel Hargreaves for posting news to Lubee's Facebook page.
To Mary Smith for her generous support of the 2010 bat festival.
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Dear Friends,
As 2010 draws to a close, we would like to express our thanks for the vital role you played this year in raising awareness about the plight of flying foxes. Lubee Bat Conservancy has ongoing conservation science programs, training, and education courses that you can learn about on our website, along with our accomplishments that are made possible because of your help. We hope that you will continue to support us in 2011. A donation to Lubee Bat Conservancy will help develop conservation projects in countries where flying foxes are most vulnerabe. You could also help by educating a friend about our organization, mission, and everything we stand for. Word travels fast, and one of the easiest ways to be proactive is to talk about flying foxes. From all of us here at Lubee we wish you peace, joy and laughter in 2011! |
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6th Florida Annual Bat Festival 2010
 Lubee opened its doors to the local community on Saturday, November 13th and welcomed over 2,300 visitors from across Florida. Our bat festival is an event designed to promote environmental conservation to a diverse family audience. The festival is packed with opportunities to buy bat merchandise, meet local environmental groups, listen to live folk music, make bat crafts and play games, all while learning about the countries and cultures our bats hail from. This year, we added an evening "Wild Night Out " event, and nearly 100 people visited our grounds in the evening to see native bats caught by experts from Pandion and LPG Environmental. A Tiki torch BBQ helped our night time adventurers enjoy their evening with bats even more! The majority of visitors were from surrounding counties, but visitors also traveled from other parts of Florida such as: Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Daytona Beach, Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville. Out of state visitors came from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Maryland, and Ohio. We even had visitors from as far away as France, England, and China! Keep checking our web site for details about next years festival. We hope to see you there! Lubee expertise at work in zoo exchange program
 Keeper Jordan Borstelmann of Lubee Bat Conservancy was supported by a Florida Zoos and Aquariums scholarship to shadow keepers at Miami Metro Zoo. During his visit, Jordan worked with mammal staff at the new Amazon and Beyond Exhibit and learned how they take care of a variety of South American mammals. Unlike the bats at Lubee, animals residing in zoos often have to move from a night enclosure to a day exhibit for public viewing, and Jordan learned how the well trained Giant river otters were especially keen to move, while the Giant anteater was somewhat reluctant. In return, Jordan imparted valuable information about the care and husbandry of bats to staff at Miami maintaining Spear-nosed and Short-tailed fruit bats.
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Effect of body size on wing movements of pteropodid bats.
Since 2003, Lubee has regularly hosted research teams from Brown University (led by Dr Sharon Swartz) to explore the flight dynamics of bats. In a culmination of work conducted at Lubee and at Harvard, Dan Riskin and colleagues recently published their findings on the influence of body size on wing kinematics in bats. Which as it turns out, is surprisingly little for medium to large sized bats.The flights of six pteropodid bat species were compared in this study. Five of the speces were flown in a flight corridor at Lubee, while the smallest species flew in a flight tunnel. At Lubee, staff launched bats into flight and retrieved them once slow motion film footage was obtained for the study. The team's results demonstrate that larger bats open their wings more fully than small bats do in flight, and that for bats, body measurements alone cannot be used to predict the conformation of the wings in flight. Several kinematic variables, including downstroke ratio, wing stroke amplitude, stroke plane angle, wing camber and Strouhal number, did not change significantly with body size, demonstrating that many aspects of wing kinematics are similar across this range of body sizes.
Newly Published
Daniel K. Riskin, José Iriarte-Díaz, Kevin M. Middleton, Kenneth S. Breuer and Sharon M. Swartz. 2010. The effect of body size on the wing movements of pteropodid bats, with insights into thrust and lift production..The Journal of Experimental Biology 213, 4110-4122.
Thomas B Kepler, Chris Sample, Kathryn Hudak, Jeffrey Roach, Albert Haines, Allyson Walsh and Elizabeth A Ramsburg. 2010. Chiropteran Types I and II interferon genes inferred from genome sequencing traces by a statistical gene-family assembler. BMC Genomics 11:444.
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Protecting Africa's Greatest Animal Migration, Kasanka, Zambia.
 Zambia hosts an amazing ecological event every year; the migration of approximately eight million Straw-colored Fruit Bats (Eidolon helvum) through Kasanka National Park. This annual migration forms probably the largest mammal migration and one of the biggest mammal concentrations in the world. Lubee is working with the park management to explore basic ecological information about the colony and to educate visitors and local school children about the importance and consequences of the bats to the ecology of the region. In 2003, Lubee supported a University of Florida student project student to explore fruit availability and bat foraging in the park and testing the use of satellite transmitter technology to determine where are the bats coming from and where are the bats going to. In 2009, Lubee received a Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund to support conservation work being carried out by Frank Willems of the Kasanka Trust. To ensure long-term protection of the bat colony, the focus of our project during 2010 has been on increasing education opportunities for local communities, equipping park guards as both guides and protectors of the site, and enhancing site accessibility to improve bat viewing and generate ecotourism revenue. Outreach and on site bat viewing reached over 6000 schoolchildren. In adiition twenty five talented high school pupils were selected from a large number of candidates for sponsorship to attend a 5-day "Nature Camp" at Kasanka Conservation Center. New viewing pavillions were built, access roads improved, and Frank reliably informs me that not a single tourist got stuck this year! This migratory colony potentially covers thousands of kilometers during its migration phase, and the prospective loss of this resource has implications for a significant portion of Africa. Lubee needs your generous gifts to continue funding support of projects like this. DONATE NOW
Global Flying Fox Monitoring Network Progress
One of Lubee's key long-term initiatives is to encourage the global monitoring of flying fox population trends and the threat posed by hunting, consumption and trade, through connecting a network of quality monitoring projects. Over a number of years, we have supported the start-up of model and population monitoring and bushmeat survey projects, most recently in the Philippines, Borneo and Madagascar.
Bat Bushmeat Surveys in Borneo reveal soaring losses of Pteropus vampyrus and extent of health risks to hunters
 Widespread hunting of flying foxes across Southeast Asia has generated concern regarding population declines and the potential for disease from bats to spread to people involved in hunting and handling bats for meat. Since 2006, Lubee has been supporting a team (led by Matthew Struebig and Mark Harrison) conducting widespread assessments of hunting and trading of large flying foxes (Pteropus vampyrus natulus) in Central Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. This project is a continuation of a project started in 2002 which monitored flying fox hunting in a foraging area in the Sabangau peat-swamp forest. In 2003, over 4,500 individuals were extracted in a single month and, in 2008, upwards of 17,500 animals may have been captured over a four-month fruiting/hunting season. This level of hunting effort is almost certainly unsustainable, so there is an urgent need to thoroughly document the scale and impacts of hunting across Kalimantan. A recent grant from Columbus Zoo to Lubee helped the team continue to widen the scope of this work through this year. Local dialect surveys reported province-wide decrease in catch by hunters (reflecting likely population declines), and unintentional by-catches that included keystone bird species and slow lorises. Most hunters and vendors are unaware that flying foxes carry viruses and are frequently bitten by bats, representing a potental health risk. The scale of hunting over Central Kalimantan represents a serious threat to the long-term viability of flying fox populations.Lubee needs your generous gifts to continue funding support of projects like this. DONATE NOW.
News just in! Bat Conservation International and Lubee Bat Conservancy aim to partner on a project lead by Dr Tigga Kingston/SEABCRU to develop a research collaboration network across Southeast Asia over the next five years.
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Lubee Director contributes to USFWS National planning process for the management of White Nose Syndrome.
 White-nose Syndrome (WNS) is a disease responsible for unprecedented mortality in hibernating bats in the northeastern U.S. This previously unknown disease has spread very rapidly since its discovery in 2007, and poses a considerable extinction threat to hibernating bats throughout North America. Biologists estimate that a million or more animals have been lost, with populations at some sites eliminated. Six species have the disease, two of which are already listed as endangered; the Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis) and the Gray bat (Myotis grisescens). More than 50 agencies, organizations and individuals are working in concert on the white-nose syndrome response, and this year Dr Walsh attended a USFWS-BCI led workshop designed to assess the feasibity of captive insectivorous bat populations as a conservation strategy. For insectivorous hibernating bats, the data we reviewed made it clear that the probability of achieving successful breeding and reintroductions is unfortunately very low for this particular group of animals. The complex nature of such a conservation approach demands weight be given to other conservation strategies to combat this disease, and no recommendations to take bats into captivity have so far been made. You can read more about WNS in a recent article in National Geographic Bat Conservation organizations unite for Year of the Bat 2011-12
To celebrate the environmental impact of bats and encourage more international cooperation on bat conservation, the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) and EUROBATS have designated 2011-2012 the Year of the Bat. The Year of the Bat aims to raise awareness of these often misunderstood animals and their diverse biodiversity benefits. Lubee Bat Conservancy is proud to be a partner in the Year of the Bat initiative, and we will be working to highlight the conservation plight of fruit bats across the globe with many exciting new conservation and education awareness initiatives in 2011-2012. Please visit the Year of the Bat website to read more as plans and events develop.
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Lubee is succesful because of its dedicated team of staff, interns and volunteers, and also because of you, the people and organizations who make our work possible. I'd like to extend my personal thanks to each and every one of you for your interest and commitment to the conservation work of Lubee Bat Conservancy. We hope you know how much we appreciate your support.
Sincerely, 
Allyson Walsh, Director
Lubee Bat Conservancy |
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