Visit Organic Bouquet, the world’s first online organic florist, from our website and Lubee will receive a 10% donation for each order of organic flowers purchased.
Back to Conservation Programs
Zambia hosts an amazing ecological event every year - the migration of approximately eight million Straw-Colored Fruit Bats through Kasanka National Park. The Kasanka Trust Ltd., responsible for the management of the park, invited Heidi Richter, an ex-volunteer from Lubee Bat Conservancy, to study their bat colony and educate visitors about the importance and consequences of the bat migration to the ecology of the region. Richter took this opportunity to put together a Masters research project, bringing together Dr. Graeme Cumming of the Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Department at University of Florida and The Lubee Bat Conservancy, to provide funding for the first stages of the project.
The bat colony visits Central Zambia from mid-October through late January every year. Almost every visitor who sees the enormous bat colony at Kasanka asks the same questions: Where are the bats coming from and where are the bats going to when they leave Kasanka? Where do they go to feed each night? How do they find food ? What do they eat? The bats are capable of migrating long distances and of travelling long nightly distances to feed, so a large-scale approach is needed to answer these questions.
One of the main goals of Richter and Cumming's research is to identify the driving force behind the migration of the bat colony through Kasanka National Park. Through weekly vegetation surveys, from August through January, Richter was able to examine whether the amount of fruit available in the park increased in tandem with the bats' arrival. Throughout the bats' stay, she tracked the depletion of food resources in the park. If food is the resource drawing the bat colony to Kasanka, eight million bats would be expected to have a visible effect on the food supply. Most likely, the bats eat the available fruits until it requires a great deal of search time to find food. They then probably leave Kasanka for regions with a greater and more accessible food supply.
Richter also employed mist-netting, in conjunction with vegetation data, to explore the relationship between forest structure, number of fruiting trees and the number of fruit bats caught in a specific area. This may help us understand the consequences of trading off forest quality versus quantity from the bats' viewpoint.
Understanding the basic ecology of this species is vital to developing effective conservation strategies. Straw-Colored Fruit Bats play a major role in the seed dispersal of economically important African trees. However populations are in decline and areas that once had large numbers of bats (for example Kampala, Uganda) now find it difficult to spot colonies. With deforestation a growing problem in Africa, changes from native forests to agricultural fields can have serious implications for the food availability for this species. If we can understand the bats' foraging ecology in relationship to key tree species, we will be one step closer to preserving African forests and related industries. 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.
Back to Top
