New study: Radar reveals bats are a bellwether of climate change

Scientists know that bats boost the profits of farmers by fertilizing crops and keeping hungry insects in check. According to recent research, they also could clue farmers in to shifting weather patterns due to climate change. “These bats spend every night hard at work for local farmers, consuming over half of their own weight in insects,” Charlotte Wainwright, a co-author of the study published online Feb. 14 by the journal Global Change Biology, said in a statement. In the first study to employ radar to study animal migration, Wainwright and Phillip Stepanian, both meteorologists with the agricultural research institution Rothamsted Research in the U.K., found that Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis Mexicana) now fly north to Texas from Mexico on their annual migration about two weeks earlier than they did a couple of decades ago. Brazilian free-tailed bats in Cartwright Cave in the Bahamas. Photo by Matti Mero [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. The discovery was something of an accident, Stepanian said in the statement. The team was combing through radar measurements for weather surveillance around Bracken Cave near San Antonio, Texas, where millions of Brazilian free-tailed bats roost in the spring, summer and fall. This data, it turns out, is a handy tool for estimating the size of bat populations. “Our initial goal was just to show that the populations could be monitored remotely without disturbing the colony,” Stepanian said. “We weren’t expecting to see anything particularly noteworthy.” But when they looked at the measurements between 1995 and 2017,…

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