I have no expertise in epidemiology or disease ecology, but it's hard to ignore these important topics if you study vampire bats, which cause deadly rabies outbreaks throughout Latin America. Preventing rabies outbreaks is one of the most important reasons that scientists study vampire bats. Surprisingly, though, few studies look closely at how rabies actually … Continue reading New paper: How often does rabies make vampire bats aggressive?

Our newest postdoctoral researcher May Dixon and her co-authors (Patty Jones, Mike Ryan, me, and Rachel Page) have a new paper entitled “Long-term memory in frog-eating bats” in the journal Current Biology. The frog-eating bat (or fringe-lipped bat) is an acoustic eavesdropping predator that learns and remembers the calls of different frogs and katydids. As … Continue reading New paper: Long-term memory in bats

In this study led by recent PhD graduate Karthik Yarlagadda at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, we looked for evidence for social convergence in vampire bats that clustered, groomed, and shared food. Karthik used shotgun sequencing to measure the microbial similarity of samples from six zoos in the USA, a wild colony in Belize, and three … Continue reading New paper on convergence in the gut microbiomes of vampire bats