Researcher is featured in new documentary on saving bats
H-E-B is working on a conservation documentary series featuring individuals championing for the environment across the state. The film, “Batsies,” features Texas State University professor Sarah Fritts and her friend and fellow researcher Sara Weaver. Their research aims at protecting bats, an often misunderstood creature that as a species provide many benefits to farmers and the environment.
Fritts said the opportunity to have her work featured in the short film was surprising and exciting.
“It still doesn’t feel real,” Fritts said. “It’s very odd to watch myself on screen.”
Fritts said she likes working with both bats and snakes because they are the most feared and misunderstood vertebrate taxa. She stressed that every species is part of an ecosystem and has some type of importance to the environment.
“Specifically for bats, they eat a lot of insects—a lot of pesky insects,” Fritts said. “Just the bats from Bracken Cave … There are an estimated 10 to 20 million Brazilian Freetails in there. They eat 140 tons of insects every single night.” She added that they save farmers a lot of money on pesticides and the reduced pesticides also have positive health impacts for humans. She said bats are also pollinators, which plays a huge role for plant reproduction, and they are prey to certain predatory species like hawks and owls.
Fritts said that people often fear bats because they think they have rabies, but less than 1/10th of 1% actually do. She added that bats are incredibly intelligent creatures that have their own languages, live for up to 50 years and only have one to two pups per year, which babble much like human babies.
“They have individual recognition. They know each other. They talk to each other,” Fritts said. “The Brazilian Freetail bat–I think it’s up to 30 distinct language calls … They have social calls. They have distress calls.”
Fritts said she has been working with bats in one form or another for 20 years and has even worked with them at Yellowstone National Park. She said her work at the park was a bit brutal because it required sleeping for a couple of hours then working for a couple of hours on repeat without a predictable schedule. That is something she stresses to her students–if they’re interested in working with a particular animal, she said she encourages them to try it out for three or four months to ensure that they are well-suited to the work environment.
Her bat research was reinvigorated in the past six years or so, when she said she began working with the renewable energy ecology component of bat studies; She got her Ph.D. in Renewable Energy Ecology at North Carolina State University where she was studying biomass from wood and the impacts on reptiles and small mammals in North Carolina and Georgia. She said it was the marriage between her experience with renewable energy ecology and bats that led to her latest research endeavor.
“Then coming to Central Texas–Well, Texas in general—the big issue regarding renewable energy is really bats and wind,” Fritts said. “Because we’re the largest producer of wind in the country and have the greatest diversity of bats and the largest population of bats.”
Bats, for a reason that Fritts said is yet unknown, might be attracted to wind turbines, which are incredibly deadly to the species. Her research through Texas State University, and the research discussed in the film, involves creating audible deterrents that prevent Bats from going near the wind turbine blades.
On site at Freeman Ranch, she has a bat flight cage in which bat deterrents can be tested. The flight cage is quite large and was, at the time of its inception in 2019, the size of a wind turbine blade, which she said has since doubled in size. Right outside of the flight cage, Fritts pointed to thermal cameras that are used to track bat flight patterns. She said the deterrents tested through her research emit a frequency that, for some reason, bats avoid. She said the device would be placed on the actual wind turbine and plugged in, which was effective when the blades were at their previous length. She said she had a colleague that studied the ultrasonic deterrents by placing them on wind turbines and leaving them on or off for the night and counting the dead bats in the morning. She said they found it reduced bat fatalities in some species by up to 70% and for Freetail Bats it reduced deaths by 50%, but it didn’t work for all species.
“The problem is these are ultrasonic frequencies,” Fritts said. “Ultrasonic frequencies don’t travel very far in space … So, as wind turbine blades get longer, they’re just not able to reach the full distance.”
Fritts said she is currently in the process of trying to get funding to test solutions to this issue.
“One potential solution is creating passive detectors that are actually kind of like whistles,” Fritts said. “They’re put on the wind turbine blade themselves. They’re just powered by the wind going around” She added that they would be testing different combinations of the whistles mounted on the blades or the nacelle mounted device or both to see what configurations are most effective at deterring bats.
Fritts noted that she plans to research olfaction in the flight cage as well–whether or not certain smells can act as a bat deterrent. She said she currently has a Ph.D. student conducting research to see if bats scent mark via pheromones—much like dogs–in certain areas and whether that might be applicable for deterrent purposes.
Another issue negatively impacting bats is white nose syndrome, which she said is a fungus that is naturally located in Europe and some of Asia but was detected in the United States in a cave in New York in 2006. She said the fungus thrives in the cold, so they previously thought it wouldn’t come to warmer places like Texas– but it was detected in Texas in 2017 on three different species. She said in 2020, Texas had their first die-off due to the fungus and those were the Cave Myotis bats.
“It has caused population declines of up to 99% of some species [which] caused listing of protection under the endangered species act for some species. Entire colonies have completely failed,” Fritts said, adding that they’re susceptible in the winter when they hibernate; they’ll wake up to try to groom the fungus off, and waking up increases their metabolism. She said they’re isn’t enough food or water around to sustain them– leading to their demise.
“People are trying to treat caves and culverts. UV light is shown to kill it,” Fritts said. “It’s really identifying where the susceptible species are going to be hibernating then cleaning that environment before they get into the hibernation.”
To watch the HEB film Batsies and learn more about Fritts research go to this link youtube.com/ watch?v=euxtQ6Vyga4.
