Hi Everyone
I hope you all enjoyed this year’s MBEA. We had quite a few ups and downs especially with the weather and the er.. exciting flood!

At the back of your workbooks there are some final questions that will help you pull together all that we have done. You will need to go through the data, summarize it and then find the answers! Ms Steele’s class may have access to the data for last year, so if you have time you might want to see how things this year compared to 2009. That will be one of my jobs when I get home too!

I know some of you may be a bit disappointed that “your bat” wasn’t caught. All the bats given to you have been recorded at Kuala Lompat in previous years, so if a species wasn’t caught this year it is disappointing but it is also interesting. Why didn’t we catch it? Is it because most of the trapping was along the main trail or near the house? Is it because something has happened to the population? There have been alot of changes in the area immediately around Kuala Lompat, a huge tract of land (400ha) was cleared for an oil palm plantation last year, so we lost the “buffer” against the high winds and high temperatures. The forest near the house has experienced alot of tree falls and no longer looks like “good forest”. Did that affect the bats?

Perhaps it just ‘bad luck’ that we didn’t catch some of the species, perhaps the bad weather didn’t help.

The only way we can really answer these questions is to keep coming back! If the “missing” bats still aren’t around next year or the year after, then yes, maybe the habitat has changed so much that those bats can’t live in it anymore. We won’t know for a while!

I have a final few days at Kuala Lompat sorting out equipment and then I will be in the capital, Kuala Lumpur for a few meetings. I fly back to Lubbock on Monday. Meanwhile, Ain and Julie will be here for a while longer (Ain until the end of the year, Julie until mid August). I will see both of them in the Czech Republic in August because the whole lab group is going to the International Bat Research Conference in Prague. The conference is held every three years and over 450 bat researchers from all round the world will be presenting the results of their research. I will be talking about the differences between the assemblages at Kuala Lompat and the other four study sites in the Krau Reserve. Ain is going to give a poster about reproduction in Hipposideros bicolor 142 kHz, and Julie will be giving a talk about bite force (how hard the different bats bite). It should be alot of fun!

A final thank you for joining in with the project, it was great to talk to you, I was very impressed with your questions, I think there are some budding bat scientists out there!

With best wishes for a great summer,

Dr Kingston