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| Well once again the crew from COG go forth into Jester Cave to count noses. | Not any noses, mind you, but hibernating bats here in Oklahoma. | We start on the resurgence (exit of water) part of the cave... |
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| ... go in for a ways... then back out and to the entrance. | The reason being is the middle is a lot of low water broken back tunnels. | Lots of parasites (yellow bugs) crawling on these bats. Most of the time they are in the ears but today they were crawling everywhere. |
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| Duane measured out a 1x1 area and found 18 bats on one side and 20 on the other... | making the packing rate this year at 360 bats per square foot. | On this trip we had the return of Cole Talbot. His last trip to a bat count was 2010 with his dad. |
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| This trip he was with his Uncle John and was very helpful in our count and scientific studies. | Two ways to count... count the ears and divide by two <grin> or what most of us do... count noses or faces. | Our bats looked healthy this year with no sign of White Nose Syndrome (WNS) or any other pathogen. |
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| You'll see a lot of the same group of bats from different angles on these pages. | We do that so that the scientists who want to see what our bats look like close up and do so from their desks rather than make a trip to the field. | Most of our count will be the common cave bat - Myotis Velifer (as seen here). |
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| They seem to prefer to hibernate in clusters called mats. | Some are way up on the cling so it makes it hard to get perfect count. | Others are low on the wall and let you get right up to them! |
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| Close up of one of the mats of Myotis. | ||
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| Typically the group has a recorder who writes down the number of bats that the counters call out. | They split the cave in half with one counting the center of ceiling (or water channel) to the right and the other the same on the left. | Usually you can walk to the mud ledge in Pip Hall before you get wet.... |
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| but this year there was a lot of water in the cave. | and it was very cold. Dale and Duane lost feeling in legs after only about a minute and a half. | The deepest it got was waist high.... that's a bit uncomfortable (if you know what I mean!) :) |
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| This is usually a warmer room and usually one of two places where we meet tricolor bats. | We used to call these bats Pips and many of us still do. Scientists changed the name a few years ago but it's hard to change ol' dog ways! :) | Yikes! Sharp teeth!! |
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| We entered pip hall where this year we did scientific work collecting swabs from the bats. | You open a clean DNA tube that has a few drops of distilled water in it and dip a clean sterile swab (giant Q-Tip) in it to pull the water on the swab. | You then roll the swab over the mouth and nose and arms to gather any pathogen's that may be on the bat. |
