Transcript:

Ambience: Malaysian rainforest

“Bats provide all sorts of services for us: they control insect populations, they pollinate fruits and flowers.”

Welcome to Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries, a glimpse of the world of science from the inside. Tigga Kingston is a biologist from Texas Tech University. She’s in a wildlife reserve in Malaysia, where she studies the country’s diverse bat species - and tries to understand how best to protect their threatened populations.

“Malaysia is a critical country for international bat conservation. It's at the very center of old-world bat diversity with at least a hundred and twenty-five species.”

Protecting threatened species depends a great deal on educating people and getting them to care about the species survival. That may be easy enough for dolphins and koalas. But with bats, inspiring fond thoughts might be a bit tricky.

“Bats are a bit of a hard sell; it has to be said. When we started our outreach program we began with Earthwatch volunteers by interviewing people who were visiting the reserve. And these people were already fairly interested in wildlife, but we asked them what they knew about bats, and basically, pretty much nobody knew anything. Nobody knew of the ecosystem services that bats provide as agents of pest control and as pollinators and seed dispersers. And on top of that everybody pretty much didn't like them -- fifty percent of the people interviewed didn't like them, thought they were scary, and believed many of the myths such as they get tangled in your hair, they're vampires, and so on and so forth. So, we're really starting from ground zero when it came to our outreach program, so that's another thing that we've done a lot about.”

Tigga Kingston has made numerous presentations on behalf of bats to students and educators in Southeast Asia and the United States. Our thanks to Earthwatch. Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries are made possible by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.