Our Observation of the Week is this Bent-winged Bat (Miniopterus sp.) and its Nycteribiid Bat Fly (Family Nycteribiidae) parasite, seen in Kenya by @macykrishnamoorthy!

Macy Krishnamoorthy originally wanted to be a veterinarian, but after studying lowland gorillas at the Buffalo Zoo with Dr. Sue Margulis’s team, she realized research was her true interest. She took Dr. Margulis’s “Wildlife Ecology and Conservation in South Africa” course at Canisius College and 

We followed troops of monkeys through the mountains, tried eating mopane worms (which are really caterpillars), and tried mist-netting for bats....and caught nothing! The next year, when I returned as the TA for the course, we caught a singular Myotis welwitschii (Welwitch's bat).  But that's all it took and I was hooked. I wanted to do fieldwork and I wanted to do it with bats. 

Currently a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University, Macy’s research has focused on baobab trees, which are pollinated by fruit bats over much of their range. “My work,” she says, 

has focused on the landscape and individual tree characteristics (e.g., height and girth of the tree) that influence the number of fruit produced and identifying differences between hawkmoth and fruit bat pollinators that might change the number of fruit a baobab produces.

At the core of it, I am really interested in the fields of ecology, mammalogy, and natural history with emphasis on ecosystem services. How can research in these fields influence our perceptions of animals (such as bats!) and provide information for conservation decisions and wildlife management?

Originally returning to southern Africa to start her work, she and her colleagues used citizen science to determine that baobabs in that region are more likely to be pollinated by hawkmoths. So, they picked up and moved to Kenya, where she encountered the bent-winged bat and its fly parasite.

My first few nights, we mist-netted for bats at the water sites. This was extremely different from my experiences netting in the United States so far, the diversity and sheer number of bats was overwhelming. On a good night netting in Texas and New Mexico (depending on where you set up), we would catch maybe 20 bats a night on a good night and all from two families of bats.  In Nuu, Kenya on two nights combined (and we shut the nets earlier than typical), we caught 90 individual bats from seven families. Thanks to Paul Webala for helping to ID/assist with the research! One of these bats was the pictured Miniopterus species and its bat fly.  It's probably the largest bat fly I have ever seen on a bat.  As someone who's interested in the bats, I've done very little with their parasites, but know that the parasites are relatively understudied groups.

Don’t all bat wings bend? What makes the wings of Miniopterus so special that they’re called “bent-winged” bats? These tiny (about 10 cm in length) insectivores have relatively large wings (wingspan = 30-35 cm) and the third finger of each wing is particularly long. “In flight,” says Darren Naish, “this particularly long finger gives these bats extremely long, narrow wings. They're fast (though not particularly manoeuvrable) fliers in open spaces, and are also good long-distance colonisers: some species are long-distance seasonal migrants.”

This bat’s parasite may not look like a fly (note the lack of wings), but Nycteribiids are definitely in the order Diptera, and specialize in parasitizing bats. Adapted to living in caves along with their hosts, many lack eyes or only have rudimentary ones, and they are quite host specific. Both sexes feed on blood, but females will leave their host every so often to attach one fully grown larva to the cave wall. The larva has developed inside of her, going through multiple instars, and soon pupates after being deposited on the wall. After several weeks it will emerge and search for a host.

“I use iNaturalist because I really love the idea that anyone can be a scientist” says Macy (above). “I think the platform encourages people to pay attention to the natural world around them and engage in cataloguing what they see.” She first used iNat years ago out of curiosity, but tells me 

Now, I think there is value in everyone whether citizen scientist to someone actually working with the taxa to upload their sightings. When I was netting bats in Kenya, it wasn't the main focus of my research (I was curious if there were fruit bat species there that could pollinate baobabs) and hadn't collected enough data to publish from. But it was still useful data, so one night, hunting through old photos, I began uploading them. From the ecologist/mammalogist side, I'm very interested in finding ways to use the data collated here.

Side note from Macy:

I could also go into the numerous reasons that bats are cool! Firstly, they are the only mammals to fly. They're the second most diverse mammalian order, after rodents. They're a small animal and though small animals tend to have a short lifespan, bats defy the rules and (longest living wild bat is reportedly at 41 years). Bats are slow reproducers, having only one or two (depending on species) pups per year. Their ability to live with a variety of diseases without becoming sick is also an exceptional feat, physiologically speaking.

- Take a look at several past observations of the week about bats!

- Calvin’s report about bats is woefully fact-free. 

Our Observation of the Week is this mouth-brooding male Eastern Gobbleguts (Vincentia novaehollandiae) fish, seen in Australia by @emikok!

“I’m just a scuba diver,” Emiko Kawamoto tells me, “I learned how to dive in Japan back in 1994. I moved to Sydney in 2003 but I only started to dive here 2-3 years ago so I am not an experienced Sydney diver yet.” She’s been posting her her photos to iNat for ID help.

Rather than cover a lot of ground when she dives, Emiko likes to “macro dive,” staying in one place and observing the life in front of her. “I stay in a small area and watch the same critters, so my diving style can look very boring but it allows me to observe their particular behavioral patterns,” she explains. 

This technique allowed her to get some great photos of eastern gobbleguts brooding behavior over the past few years. Like some other fish, this Australian endemic engages in paternal mouthbrooding. After the eggs are fertilized, the male holds them in his mouth, protecting them until they’ve hatched (or even longer). Last March, Emiko followed a gravid female:

As I watched, she met a male and they started to dance. It looked like kissing, hugging, and holding. Then the female released two coloured egg masses (orange and white), and fertilization occurred during the ‘‘holding’’ behavior and took about 1- 2 minutes to be completed. I felt quite long, though. During this period the female held the male with her pectoral fin - the “holding” position - while the male kept his genital papilla over the egg clutch as it was being released. I was so excited when the eggs were transferred to male’s mouth. He looked very tired and could not swim with such a heavy mouth. The female disappeared as soon as the eggs were transferred.

She saw the same behavior again this year and posted her shots to iNat, curious as to why the egg mass consisted of two colors. iNat user @markmcg, with the help of a colleague, found a paper describing a similar species. It said the egg mass contained two types of eggs, “a smaller part composed of a compact white mass of small non-functional oocytes and a larger part composed of the bright orange mature ova.” (Vagelli, 2019)

Learning that the eggs are kept in the male’s mouth for days (and sometimes much longer), Emiko (above, with a sea dragon) continued to dive in the same area until she found a male with maturing eggs in his mouth - perhaps even the same one she saw earlier.

Orange eggs had become silver and I could see the developing fish's eyes. The male often kept his mouth closed, but he opened it for regular churning of the eggs so I stayed quiet, sneaking up on him, and waited until he opened his mouth so I could take photos.

After I got home, I saw in my photos that one of the eggs hatched in this mouth. I believe that they stay in dad's mouth for another 4-8 days. I hope to watch them moving and playing in their dad's mouth next time!

(Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- Emiko’s photo of a gorgeous sea spider (and its eggs) was iNat’s Observation of the Day last June!

- Check out the Australasian Fishes project, created by @marckmcg and curated by many others, they’ve done amazing outreach work with underwater photographers.

- Here’s some footage of a Banggai cardinalfish (Pterapogon kauderni) - same family as gobbleguts - engaging in paternal mouthbrooding.

Our Observation of the Week is this Amorphophallus dracontioides plant, seen in Benin by @bahleman!

Amadou Bahleman Farid resides in Tanguieta, the main town of Pendjari National Park in northern Benin (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and is currently studying Abyssinian Ground-Hornbill (Bucorvus abyssinicus) population, distribution and habitat use for his master’s thesis. He was inspired to work in biodiversity conservation by his father and uncle, who are retired Water, Forest, and Hunting officers. “They have devoted more than half of their career to activities in the fight against poaching and the conservation of fauna and its habitat in the biosphere reserves of Pendjari and W-Benin,” he explains, “which made me aware that the major issue of the 21st century is the conservation of nature.”

While he’s always been passionate about birds, Farid tells me he’s also interested in insects, plants, mammals and freshwater fish, and has taken photos of wildlife for many years 

with the goal that one day I would find the opportunity to work or collaborate as an explorer for institutions like National Geographic for the production of documentaries about wildlife and their habitats. However, they were not the best photos since I only had a small camera with a very low megapixel count.

In 2017, Farid met Dr. Horst Oebel, a German who’s lived in Benin for more than 20 years. Dr. Oebel runs the RBT-WAP | GIC-WAP program, a program that supports the management and conservation of the protected areas of the complex W-Arly-Pendjari and at the same time he is a very active member of the NGO OeBenin and manages the NGO's account on iNat.

Farid first heard about iNat from Dr. Oebel and started using it in earnest in 2019 after Dr. Oebel gave him access to better cameras. “Once I started using iNat I felt useful in conserving biodiversity through my observations by contributing to science, and scientists started to take an interest in me to be of service to them,” he explains. That includes his observations of Amorphophallus dracontioides, for which he’s the current iNat observation leader.

For a few months now I have been helping botanist Evan Milborrow (@evnep), a researcher based in South Africa, who is particularly interested in African species of Amorphophallus which are incredibly under-studied and about which very little is known. So, I help him collect and find research material (seeds from all African species of Amorphophallus), ideally with rough geographic information (the region they came from) in order to keep track of their locality and organize them correctly into a botanical collection. 

The genus Amorphophallus ranges through Africa, Asia, and Australia, as well as various islands. From an underground tuber they produce one leaf and one inflorescence. The inflorescence has both male flowers and female flowers on the lower part of the inflorescence, the latter of which are receptive to pollen only on the day it blooms. To attract flies and other carrion eaters, Amorphophallus dracontioides emits a smell “reminiscent of rotting carcass and excrement” according to POWO, and Farid concurs, saying some of the plants he found were quite pungent. According to Purdue University, the corms of the plant [I’ve seen “corm” and “tuber” used in different descriptions of the plant, does anyone know which is correct? - Tony] can be “eaten after being cut up, repeatedly washed, and boiled for one or two days” and are considered a famine food. 

Bahleman Farid (above) admins two projects on iNat, Biodiversite en Zone Girafe Niger and African Spurred Tortoises in West Africa, and tells me he’s taught more than 100 tourist guides, academics, students, schoolchildren (below), and others working to conserve protected areas. 

iNat is the tool that our NGO SOS Savane mainly uses for environmental education sessions in schools around the W-Arly-Pendjari complex through specific transects. The schoolchildren are then introduced to digital tools and discover the biodiversity of their regions with smartphones equipped with iNat.

(Farid speaks French and used machine translation for his responses, which were then lightly edited for clarity.)

Easily the most famous member of Amorphophallus is A. titanum, known as the titan arum or corpse flower. This video delves into its pollination process.

Our Observation of the Week is this Guatemalan Red-rump Tarantula (Tliltocatl sabulosus), seen in Guatemala by @ricardelremate!

Ricard Busquets grew up in Premià de Mar, Barcelona, Spain, and tells me he was always interested in nature.

I had the good fortune to grow up in a house full of books and encyclopedias collected by my father. One of these encyclopedias inspired my love for nature: the “Enciclopedia Salvat de la Fauna”. I used to enjoy snacking in the afternoons, after coming home from school, browsing through some of the eleven volumes of which it is composed. It was my favorite, and as I leafed through its pages I traveled around the world discovering incredible animals. The coordinator of that encyclopedia was Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, a Spanish naturalist and environmentalist, defender of nature, and producer of documentaries for radio and television who died too young in a plane crash in Alaska. I remember the day he died, I was 7 years old and I felt very sad.

Now an adult, Ricard resides in a place teeming with incredible flora and fauna: Guatemala! Living there for about twelve years, he’s married to a biologist and he manages a small hotel (ten cabins) outside of “the protected biotope Cerro Cahuí, harmoniously integrated in the humid subtropical forest of northern Petén, on the shores of Lake Petén Itzá,” he explains.

It was after inspecting the empty rooms of the hotel last August (the tourism industry, of course, has been decimated by the pandemic) that he encountered the colorful tarantula documented in this observation.

I entered the apartment where I live inside the hotel. As I opened the door, I moved the curtain and out of the corner of my eye I saw a dark shape near my shoulder. I took a step back and then I saw it. So beautiful, so spectacular, so calm. The tarantula slowly moved through the glass of the wooden door and I ran like crazy looking for my camera to immortalize it. My wife was with me, and we both kept exclaiming, "Wow, what a beauty, what a cute little thing!” 

In the end, the tarantula landed on the ground, and what I did was to pick it up and take it to a safe place, a huge mound of stones that we have at the hotel, where we usually take the spiders and scorpions that guests find in their rooms. All life forms are respected at the hotel.

Recently split from the genus Brachypelma, members of the genus Tliltocatl occur in Mexico and Central America. Like most other New World tarantulas, their abdomens are covered in urticating hairs, which can irritate the skin and eyes when brushed off by the tarantula as a method of self-defense. 

Ricard (above) heard about iNat from his wife’s colleagues, who recommended it to him because he likes photography and nature. I can say that discovering iNaturalist has been one of the best things that has happened to me during this pandemic,” he says.

I am taking very seriously the observation and documentation of every living thing around me, with the humble intention of contributing to citizen science and suddenly helping biologists and scientists with my observations from Petén, Guatemala. Hopefully this is just the beginning.

To conclude I would like to share with you this thought from Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente:

"Man is a poem woven with the mist of dawn, with the color of flowers, with the song of birds, with the howl of the wolf or the roar of the lion. Man will be finished when the vital balance of the planet that supports him is finished. Man must love and respect the Earth, as he loves and respects his own mother".:

(Photo of Ricard by Asgeir Rossebo Almas. Some quotes have been lightly edited.)

- Nearly five years ago, our Observation of the Week was a spider that had been found in someone's ear!

- Check out our recent blog post about @naufalurfi, the top spider identifier in Southeast Asia!