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After several months of work, I am proud to announce the realease of the book "Bats by sound" that I translated from english to french for the editor Delachaux et Niestlé. This book is a must-have for all french-speaking people working with bat ultrasounds in Europe. The book edited by Jon Russ and co-authored by many people is 480 pages long. It contains monographies about ultrasounds and social calls from 44 species. Last but not least, it contains a library of 450 downloadable calls to help you with your species identification. I hope that this book will be of interest to many of you, it contains an incredible amount of information about bat ultrasounds and social calls!
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Each scientific publication has a very specific journey and faced numerous challenges before being published.
My third published paper from my PhD is probably one of my strongest stories of resilience. This is a paper that was included as the first chapter of my Phd but that I could only publish after submitting and defending. Started at the end of 2011, this paper was paused and restarted multiple times. I wrote this publication in different places of the world. For example, I worked on an earlier version of this paper in a writing course organised by my doctoral school in Scotland. I also worked on the paper in the bat lab of Gamboa (Panama) before doing fieldwork during the night. And I remember writing later versions of this paper after ending in my PhD, when my first daughter was having naps. I submitted the paper in July 2018 and it was finally accepted in October 2018. This publication is called „Information transfer as a reason for sociality in bats“ and there are many reasons why I like it. First of all, it is a literature review about my PhD with an evolutionary framework including a glossary. Writing a review is a challenge because of the number and diversity of topics but it helps you get a clearer idea oft he topic. Second, I am proud that I managed to publish in Mammal Review which is a guarantee of quality. Last but not least, this is my first peer-reviewed published as a single author. Importantly, this paper could not have reached its current state without the feebdack of all the people listed in the acknowledgments. This is a small „behind the scenes“ story about this publication like there are so many others. Next time you see a publication, ask yourself: „What is the story behind this paper?“. You can have a look at this publication on the website of Mammal Review. Glad to see that the paper was already cited 16 times. Financial and spatial instability is what I experienced as the biggest challenges to combine professional and personal life in academia.
Before the end of my PhD, I found a great opportunity to do a post-doc. It proved unfortunately incompatible to similarly wrap up my PhD and write a funding proposal as I was expecting my first child. I had to leave academia with regrets because I wanted to become a bat professor. Years after, I can say that I am quite happy to be in the private sector because I can better juggle with my job and my private time. And I am still connected to many bat researchers that became mentors and friends. I am convinced that this is one of too many stories. Too bad that academia is not better at keeping their young researchers. But this is a win for the private sector which benefit from workers with a lot of experience in project management, critical thinking and many other topics. Feel free to share your thoughts in the replies! A lot of things have happened since my last blogpost. First of all, I am now officially a doctor since my defense in April 2016 at the University of Konstanz (Germany). My PhD thesis 'Causes and consequences of sociality in a neotropical bat' includes four chapters. With the help of many collaborators, I managed to publish two of these chapters in 2016:
1. The first one 'Group size, survival and surprisingly short lifespan in socially foraging bats' was published in BMC ecology. Overview of the publication: To test if and how social group size affects survival in bats, we studied Pallas’s mastiff bat Molossus molossus (Pallas, 1766), a species that forms stable social groups that roost and forage together. Based on recaptures from 14 mixed-sex groups of thespecies in Panama, we found relatively small and intermediate, but stable groups, with a mean size of 9.6 ± 6.7 adults and juveniles. Strong selection towards small group size may result from psychoacoustic and cognitive constraints related to acoustic interference in social foraging and the complexity of coordinated flight. The short lifespans were unexpected and may result from life at the energetic edge due to a highly specialized diet. Median survival of females was very short with 1.8 years and a maximum estimated longevity of 5.6 years. Contrary to our expectations, we found no relationship between variation in group size and survival, a result similar to few other studies. The absence of a relationship between group size and survival may reflect a similar but optimized survival within the selected range of group sizes. We expect the pattern of small group sizes will be consistent in future research on species dependent on social information transfer about ephemeral resources. 2. The second one 'The value of molecular vs. morphometric and acoustic information for species identification using sympatric molossid bats' was published in Plos One. A press release of the publication is available in german on the website of the IZW Berlin. Overview of the publication: A fundamental condition for any work with free-ranging animals is correct species identification. However, in case of bats, information on local species assemblies is frequently limited especially in regions with high biodiversity such as the Neotropics. The bat genus Molossus is a typical example of this, with morphologically similar species often occurring in sympatry. We used a multi-method approach based on molecular, morphometric and acoustic information collected from 962 individuals of Molossus bondae, M. coibensis, and M. molossus captured in Panama. We distinguished M. bondae based on size and pelage coloration. We identified two robust species clusters composed of M. molossus and M. coibensis based on 18 microsatellite markers but also on a more stringently determined set of four markers. Phylogenetic reconstructions using the mitochondrial gene co1 (DNA barcode) were used to diagnose these microsatellite clusters as M. molossus and M. coibensis. To differentiate species, morphological information was only reliable when forearm length and body mass were combined in a linear discriminant function (95.9% correctly identified individuals). When looking in more detail at M. molossus and M. coibensis, only four out of 13 wing parameters were informative for species differentiation, with M. coibensis showing lower values for hand wing area and hand wing length and higher values for wing loading. Acoustic recordings after release required categorization of calls into types, yielding only two informative subsets: approach calls and two-toned search calls. Our data emphasizes the importance of combining morphological traits and independent genetic data to inform the best choice and combination of discriminatory information used in the field. Because parameters can vary geographically, the multi-method approach may need to be adjusted to local species assemblies and populations to be entirely informative. Some fresh news from southern Germany! After the lab session in London to retrieve genetic data, I spent most of my time analyzing survival data and writing my first manuscript. The manuscript - first chapter of my thesis - is approaching its final version and I expect it to be ready for submission by the end of this year or early next year ...
I have already presented most of the results of this manuscript at the European Research Symposium bats held in Croatia from 1 to 5 September. My next talk will be held Dec. 15 at my old institute, the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences, in Montpellier. I will present some results of survival analysis and also new results about foraging efficiency, based on the automatic scales installed at the entrance of the roosts of my social groups of Molossus molossus... Back to Panama, for the fifth fieldwork season of data collection of my PhD. I have three determined goals for this session : (i) collecting survival data, (ii) collecting DNA samples and (iii) manipulating group size. This is the third consecutive season where I am catching a network of a dozen roosts where I can determine group size.
During captures, animals are marked individually with transponders. With relevant statistical analyses, I will try and estimate survival based on recapture rates and detection probabilities. My species foraging in groups, group size probably has an effect on individual survival, that’s what we are trying to determine with these analyses. In parallel, I am collecting wing biopsies. These DNA samples will be genotyped to obtain microsatellites. They will be used to study relatedness of individuals within groups. I am especially interested in male reproductive success in function to group size. I assume it will be more difficult for the dominant male to insure paternity in groups with more females. And the main goal of this mission is to study the foraging efficiency (weight gain relative to time spent out of roost) in function to group size. Several roosts studied are equipped with automated systems with automated transponder reader and integrated scale. To investigate the effect of group size, I am comparing foraging efficiency for a group of normal size and of modified size. To modify group size, I capture individuals of the group that I keep for several days in captivity. Captive individuals are fed each night with mealworms and released within few days. I have already manipulated three groups, a fourth is ongoing and a fifth will come in the days to come. I have now collected a lot of data, in parallel I am now working on the analyses. As announced in a previous post, I prepared a poster about my PhD project for the evaluation of my doctoral school. And the poster is available to download !
I was also in France a few days, namely at the Museum of Natural History of Paris. I had the chance to present my work during the "café scienti" - a talk session that takes place every monday. I presented new graphs about the activity patterns of my bats. My next stay to Panama is coming soon, I am back to the village of Gamboa in a month ! Meanwhile I am focusing on data analysis - especially survival and foraging activity and efficiency of my bats. Yann This video has been made with a drone, owned by a colleague from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the institute with which I collaborate in Panama. This is basically an aerial discovery of my fieldwork site. My bat model species roost in the houses of this village - all the data from my PhD is coming from there...Enjoy! Back to Germany for a little while. I am back to my survival analyses using the mark-recapture data of my bats.
A lot of programming is required to shape the data the way I want. For the end of the month, I have to finish the preparation of a poster for the evaluation of my doctoral school. I will update it on the website when ready! And always as a parallel task, I am taking care of the logistics for fieldwork, by wrapping up last season (finance report) and preparing the season to come (travel preparation, material order). Back to the field November and December! Good news for this beginning of the scholar year, the paper about project I was involved in during my master has been published! In a few words, we studied the second biggest genus of Mammals - the bat genus Myotis - to learn about their evolutionary history. We used DNA and models to learn the "genealogic tree" of these bats and estimate their biogeographic origins. I stayed a short month in Panama this summer – from mid-July to mid-August. The priority was to catch all the colonies we work on – more than 20 nights of catching for a total of around 300 bats. Many new bats have been transpondered and I have collected a lot of DNA (relatedness analysis) and feces samples (virus and diet studies). The highlight of the stay was the catch of 96 bats in one night. The catch started at 6PM and we finished processing the bats around 6AM.I had a small army of people from the batlab to help me – thanks to Teague, Basti, Julia, Sebas, Michelle, Toni, Santi, Dallas…
Unfortunately, three of the roosts with automated monitoring systems were abandoned (probably due to house renovation) but we installed two other automated monitoring systems. I also had the opportunity to present my PhD project to the scientific community – good practice with a lot of interesting questions. In addition, I helped Sebas for a parallel project. As a pilot study for his master thesis, we equipped these bats with heart-rate and temperature transmitters. The bats were kept in captivity and video-taped. This preliminary data will help understanding the relationship between heart-rate, temperate and clustering prevalence. My fieldwork season is over but Sebas will stay until early September to operate more trials and continue this project in November-December, when we both go back for a new fieldwork season. |
AuthorLittle blog about my bat research Archives
February 2018
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