Hi Everyone
Well it really rained last night! We had a bit of a storm around 6 pm and thought that was the last of it, but then just as we were going to check the traps it started pouring down again. A total of 20.4 cubic cm! This didn’t do much for the capture rates in the short term. When the traps get wet they become more apparent to the bats’ echolocation systems (because there are water droplets on the fishing line), and on top of that many bats don’t like to fly in the pouring rain. So if we are pretty sure we are going to get rain, we close the traps and take a night off — a low capture rate due to rain creates a bias – meaning we can’t be sure if there weren’t many bats because of the rain, or because there simply weren’t bats at the places where the traps were set. Scientists try to do their best to control factors like that, but rain is never easy to predict! So the trap rate was really down last night, although hopefully in the longer-term the rain will increase the insect availability and push up the capture rates again. The bats really need more food, as many of the females are pregnant and need alot of energy, and even more so when the young are born. When females have pups (baby bats) they have to give over alot of energy to producing milk (called lactation) to feed them. So they like to time giving birth with periods of high food availability.

So last night the traps set were KL0277, KL0279, KL0281, KL0283, KL0285, KL0287, KL0289, KL0291, KL0293, KL0295, KL0297, and KL0461.

Here are the data: