Raising A New Generation Of Bat Conservationists In West Africa

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’m Flora Lichtman, and you are listening to Science Friday.

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Today in the show, a pair of married scientists are on a mission to save bats in their homeland, Nigeria.

BENNETH OBITTE: We are raising– basically, just raising an army of bat conservationists.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Nigeria is home to 100 known species of bats. That’s about a third of all of Africa’s bat species. But when my next two guests met, before they were collaborators, before they were married, not so much was known about the flying, furry mammals of the region.

Dr. Iroro Tanshi is an ecologist at the University of Washington and Dr. Benneth Obitte is a conservation ecologist at Texas Tech University. Iroro, Ben, welcome to Science Friday.

IRORO TANSHI: Thanks, Flora. It’s very nice to be here.

BENNETH OBITTE: Thank you. Flora. Thank you for having us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Iroro, why bats? Are they a lifelong love for you?

IRORO TANSHI: Absolutely. The question why bats has a few answers for me, everything from the adventure that comes with just being out in the field studying bats because you get to go to caves, forest canopies, and all of that. But also, it was the point– I feel like bats kind of rescued my career.

I was at the point where I started asking questions about whether I could really do biology in a really exciting way. And then I heard about someone climbing into the forest canopy and studying bats. I was like, yeah, this is it. That just dead drop. There is no question. This is what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What do you mean it rescued your career, you weren’t sure if you could do biology in a fun, exciting way? What were the other options?

IRORO TANSHI: So I had studied at the University of Benin for my undergrad. And while there are a few professors who were doing cool stuff, they weren’t doing research in vertebrates. So the people who were doing cool stuff were either plant people or mollusk people. I wanted to do work with things that had a backbone, if you see what I mean. In any case–

So I wasn’t really thrilled by the research around me. And I was just really craving being in the field, observing animals, and be able to explore what they do. Because that’s how my interest in animals started, was watching nature documentaries and hearing all these people talk about what’s going on with the animals. And I was just puzzled. Like, how do they know? I wanted to be that person who would ask those questions.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The mollusk people are going to come for you. But–

IRORO TANSHI: No, but that’s the thing, though. The mollusk people in the plant people were doing cool research, which just wasn’t what I wanted. So–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Different strokes, of course.

IRORO TANSHI: Yeah, there you go. And so if you want to do exciting research, it’s not something you do on and off. It’s something you set up. And so that was my dream. I wanted to see that it would become this thing where people not just come and go once in a while. You really set up an engine that keeps going for bats.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Ben, what about you? How did you get to bats?

BENNETH OBITTE: Oh, I fell in love with a specific species. And I met Iroro– 2014 was when we met. She gave this talk. I was a hydrobiologist. I spent all my time on brackish waters, collecting aquatic samples and aquatic insects.

But she was working with bats. And then she gave this talk about museum collections and stuff, and I was quite interested. I mean, you have to know that nobody really studied bats in Nigeria. So this was new. And she was going on one of her field collections, and I volunteered to just go with her.

And the second night, I caught a very cute bat. It’s the cyclops roundleaf bat. If you know this species, it’s very cuddly. It looks like a small Teddy bear when you hold it in your hand. So I was like, I want to keep doing this.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Ben, when Iroro started working on this– because you heard her give a talk about this, right? How many Nigerian bat scientists existed?

BENNETH OBITTE: I would say none that I knew about. I was in an ecology program. It was weird to see someone who was passionately talking about bats that we all thought were bad omens. But I was curious. I was fascinated.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What’s the most interesting part about the bats that you study?

IRORO TANSHI: As far as Nigeria goes, I want to say it’s the hottest hotspot for bats in Africa. So if you really want to do bat research in Africa, Nigeria is the place to be because we’re in a transition zone between what you would consider West African species versus Central African species. And that means a lot for many things, from the ecology to disease ecology. But it’s just a really interesting landscape to study bats.

BENNETH OBITTE: And then I’d like to say this. We have some of the prettiest bats around the world. I mean, you look at the Lavia frons, the yellow-winged bat. It has yellow wings and very cool. You look at all the fruit bats we have, some of them poppy face, so cute.

There are some that are very unique, like the short-tailed roundleaf bat, which is endangered. And one of my favorites, which is a Myonycteris bat. It likes to be rubbed. You hold it in your hands, and then when you try to touch it, scratch it, it gently just raises the neck upwards. And it wants–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Like a dog.

BENNETH OBITTE: Exactly. This is so adorable, so cute. I mean, yeah, we have very nice-looking cute species. And they are also very important ecologically. They do all kinds of work across the landscape helping communities sustain their livelihoods.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Ben, you mentioned the short-tailed roundleaf bat. Iroro, you have a story about this, about an encounter with this bat?

IRORO TANSHI: I do, and I love to tell it because it helps me relive that experience. [LAUGHS] All right. So the story is about how we found the first individual in Nigeria. So when I went to the field, I had a list of things you would expect that hadn’t been recorded in Nigeria. So I wasn’t really looking for that one.

And so this evening, we were out tracking bats. And what you do when you trap bats is you go out to the traps, and you put them in individual bags. And so you bring them all to your recording station, and then you take them out one by one.

And so I was doing that, going through each of those bags–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Like Christmas morning.

IRORO TANSHI: And I pulled this one species. I know. I pulled one species out. And I was like, wait. That is something different. Well, what I was seeing was a species with really big ears. I was like, I have not seen that before. And it’s got this flatish stubby round–

BENNETH OBITTE: Button.

IRORO TANSHI: –nose. Button. It’s a round button, really. So I picked up the field guide. I was flipping through. And I got to the spaces that I suspected that it was. And I was struggling to speak because I was so excited. And that’s when we confirmed that it was the shorter roundleaf bat.

But I could not sleep that night because it hadn’t been seen in the wild like 45 years before. And when you start getting to 45, 50 years of not finding something, people start to worry if it’s going extinct or if it’s gone extinct. But in our case, no one had been looking with the right equipment.

And so when we found it, we were just completely taken away. And yeah, I couldn’t sleep that night. Anyway. Yeah. Sorry, I’m kind of going back there now and thinking about it, just–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Enjoying it.

IRORO TANSHI: –feeling the excitement. Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Enjoy it.

IRORO TANSHI: Yeah, yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Ben, what are the biggest threats to bats in Nigeria?

BENNETH OBITTE: Oh, I’m just kind of segueing from the experience Iroro was reliving. A few nights after that, after we found this species, there was a wildfire. And then we were like, this is not really going to come here. So we continued walking.

Two hours later, the fire was literally in our camp. So we were running, trying to just pick a few equipment, the most expensive equipment, to just to run down the mountain. This is when it dawned on us. I keep telling people this was probably the saddest experience we’ve ever had in the forest, because this was perhaps the greatest find we’ve made in the last few years, and cave bats are very sensitive to smoke. And forest fire could just completely roast them in the caves.

So this was how we actually formed our conservation organization to, first of all, protect the forests from wildfires. Because these were not just the normal wildfires. These fires come from farms.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wait, so is that one of the big threats?

BENNETH OBITTE: Yes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wildfires.

BENNETH OBITTE: Wildfire is one of the major threats. Beautiful mountains or forests are surrounded by farms, mostly cocoa farms. So annually, farmers use fire to burn brush or maintain these farms. They do this annually through generations.

But because of change in climate, they are no longer able to predict the best times to do this farm maintenance. So they end up every year these fires escalating from one farm to the other, sometimes devastating hundreds of farms before you even get into the mountain. And once it gets into the mountain, it’s uncontrollable. You then have to wait. Sometimes it burns for weeks until there’s a rain because there’s no way to manage it.

Actually, the major threat, the most important one is habitat loss or habitat degradation. And this is coming from encroachment from smallholder farms, logging from timber dealers. And then we have hunting. People actually hunt bats. In fact, the Egyptian fruit bats, the record was 404,300 individuals captured from a single cave in one hunting effort.

FLORA LICHTMAN: For food.

BENNETH OBITTE: For food.

FLORA LICHTMAN: For food.

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Don’t go away because when we come back, how do you make bats lovable?

IRORO TANSHI: We’ve sort of said, we’re trying to save this forest for the bats and for you. And they’re like, oh, really? Oh, OK. I guess we’re with bats now. We’re on team bat, like you said.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Iroro, getting people to care about conservation of any species, obviously, this is a big global challenge. In your work, in the work that you two do, trying to get people on team bat, what have you learned about the strategies that are effective and the things that don’t work.

IRORO TANSHI: So what hasn’t worked? So to be honest, I think just talking about bats is not enough. You have to show people. Because the thing with bats is because people don’t see them, they just write them off as evil or whatever.

But the question is always, well, so you’re spending your time doing this research. How does it benefit the common man, as they say in Nigeria? Because if you tell them, oh, in the US, bats save 22 billions of dollars every year to avoid the costs of agricultural pest removal, it doesn’t make a difference to the cocoa farmer in Buanchor in Boki land in Nigeria,

So that person wants to see how x, y, z trees that we harvest, or we use their seeds, or we use their fruits or whatever is pollinated by bats. And we’ve got many examples. And so when people start to see that, oh, this– because a lot of the things that threaten biodiversity also threaten people.

And that’s where we’ve got in the local communities too, is we’ve sort of said, we’re trying to save this forest for the bats and for you. And because we’re preventing fires from getting to forests, what it then means is that fires are not getting to other people’s farms.

You start to let people know that, oh, we’re solving this problem that you also have because of the bats. And they’re like, oh, really? Oh, OK. I guess we’re with bats now. We’re on team bat, like you said.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you all feel responsible for the bats in Nigeria? Do you feel like it’s on your shoulders to conserve them?

IRORO TANSHI: Yes. [LAUGHS] There’s a big sense of responsibility. I mean, there’s a big sense of duty. That’s the word. It’s not just about we made noise about these bats. It’s more like if we don’t act, then we’re not being responsible.

BENNETH OBITTE: It was heavier when we started. And this is why we have devoted a huge amount of resources in raising more bat scientists and conservationists, not just in Nigeria, across West Africa. We have a program where we have students across the West African region coming into Nigeria. And we have experts from across the world who we invite to train these students.

And then we go beyond that. We maintain mentorship until they graduate from their programs. And so we are raising– basically, just raising an army of bat conservationists. Probably in the next 10 years, we will not be feeling this much responsibility. There will be probably hundreds of other people doing what we’re doing right now.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is the goal to help people who avoid the challenges that you faced?

IRORO TANSHI: Yes, absolutely.

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BENNETH OBITTE: Sometimes you get traumatized by some of these experiences. And this is how sometimes people get into charity. You survive cancer. You want to help others. So–

IRORO TANSHI: Yes.

BENNETH OBITTE: –this was like that for us.

IRORO TANSHI: Let me quickly describe what Ben means by trauma. [LAUGHS] So my PhD required a lot of trapping gear. And when you load up your fuel truck, the height of the gear, it really towers over the truck. And that was because we didn’t have anywhere to hold our gear. But it also reflects how the fact that there’s very little scientific infrastructure for this sort of long term, deep in the mountains, deep in the forest research. Because we’ll spend three to six months at a time in the forest.

Now, in terms of physical infrastructure, we’re building field stations to make sure that we no longer have field trucks that are towers high when we go to the field. It’s been my lifelong dream to be able to just sit in the forest in the field station and work. And so we now have two field stations that are getting constructed. I couldn’t really get support when this all started in Nigeria.

And so we wanted people to find joy in doing the research, but we really want people to not experience the same struggles that we had, both in terms of access to mentors and access to facilities.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s awesome. Ben, Iroro, thank you so much for joining me today.

IRORO TANSHI: Thanks for having us once again. This was such a pleasure.

BENNETH OBITTE: Thank you so much, Flora. Thank you for having us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dr. Iroro Tanshi is an ecologist at the University of Washington, and Dr. Benneth Obitte is a conservation ecologist at Texas Tech University.

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Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to rate and review us. And you can always leave us a comment on this segment on Spotify. We’d love to hear from you. Today’s episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. I’m Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.

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