The lab is growing! We have two new PhD students, Bryson and Nakul. Bryson Loflin received his Bachelors in Biology from UNC Chapel Hill, where he was mentored by Karin Pfennig and did research on exploratory behaviors in spadefoot toads. He also worked with Matthew Zipple in Mike Sheehan's Lab on social behavior of re-wilded … Continue reading Lab updates: Fall 2025
Category: People
Carter Lab wins two awards from North American Society for Bat Research
The Carter Lab (left) attended the conference for the North American Society for Bat Research, and we won two awards from the society. Julia Vrtilek entered the student competition and received the Titley Scientific Award for student talk "on any aspect of the biology of bats" for her presentation "Vocal convergence in the contact calls … Continue reading Carter Lab wins two awards from North American Society for Bat Research
Field notes: scouting a new site for our lab in Costa Rica
Last month, postdoc May Dixon, former postdoc Basti Stockmaier (now faculty at University of Tennessee Knoxville), and his partner Claire Hemingway (also now faculty at UT Knoxville) went to Costa Rica to scout a new field site for tracking contact networks between vampire bats and cattle. Below is a summary of a trip report by … Continue reading Field notes: scouting a new site for our lab in Costa Rica
Gerry Carter becomes an HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholar
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the largest private biomedical research institution in the nation, named me and 30 other biologists as Freeman Hrabowski Scholars, selected as "outstanding early career faculty in science who have potential to become leaders in their research fields and to create diverse and inclusive lab environments in which everyone can … Continue reading Gerry Carter becomes an HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholar
Scientific mentors: celebrating John Hermanson on his retirement
As a professor, one is trying to excel in so many ways-- as a scientist, a data analyst, an academic scholar, a team manager, a teacher, a mentor, and for many of us, a parent. Each role could be its own full-time job, but we are expected to be excellent at all of them at … Continue reading Scientific mentors: celebrating John Hermanson on his retirement
Updates for January 2022
Some recent news from our lab: Former undergraduate lab member Emma Kline published her research project entitled "Habituation of common vampire bats to biologgers" in the open-access journal Royal Society Open Science. Emma showed that vampire bats habituate to proximity sensors if they are securely attached; however, they spend much of their time trying to … Continue reading Updates for January 2022
Podcast interview
There are a growing number of bat fanatics around the world! The new podcast "Give Bats a Podcast" interviews people who work in bat research and conservation. It can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc or here: https://linktr.ee/GiveBatsABreak I was featured on the latest episode "Episode 4: "Friends don't let friends die". We talk … Continue reading Podcast interview
Recent updates: March 2021
Soon-to-be-postdoc Basti Stockmaier just published a paper in Science entitled Infectious Diseases and Social Distancing in Nature. Our collaborator Liz Hobson just published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled Aggression heuristics underlie animal dominance hierarchies and provide evidence of group-level social information. I recently joined the Board of Directors at … Continue reading Recent updates: March 2021
Do bats sniff out their roosts? Lessons for understanding the role of uncertainty in science
A common misunderstanding perpetuated in most grade schools is that science is about “facts”. Contrary to popular belief, working scientists don’t talk much about facts. They talk about questions, hypotheses, models, and possible experiments. They say things like, “Here’s how you could really demonstrate that” or “Here’s what we found” more often than “These are … Continue reading Do bats sniff out their roosts? Lessons for understanding the role of uncertainty in science
New paper: Sick vampire bats make fewer contact calls to their groupmates
PhD Student Basti Stockmaier published his last empirical dissertation chapter entitled "Immune-challenged vampire bats produce fewer contact calls" in Biology Letters. He also presented a poster today at a virtual conference entitled "How do pathogens and parasites affect behaviour?". I've posted a copy of the poster below. The work was also featured in the New … Continue reading New paper: Sick vampire bats make fewer contact calls to their groupmates
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