University researcher finds Madagascan Flying Fox elusive
Trying to entice Madagascar's wary flying foxes into nets strung high in forest canopies proved almost enough to drive University of Queensland researcher Nicki Markus batty.
While it was Ms Markus' expertise in catching flying foxes in the Brisbane area which earned her an unexpected three-week sojourn in a dream destination for naturalists, the Madagascan flying fox proved unsurprisingly uncooperative.
The bats had seen too many of their relatives become meals for the Malgasy residents of the world's fourth largest island, situated 400km off the south-east coast of Africa, to go hurtling headlong into nets.
This presented a considerable challenge for Ms Markus, who is in her third year of her PhD in the Veterinary Pathology and Anatomy Department, supervised by Dr Les Hall, looking at the ecology and behaviour of the Black flying fox in an urban setting.
"The flying foxes in the Brisbane area roost in mangroves, eucalypt trees and casurinas, so the tallest trees are six to seven metres and it's relatively easy to set high nets as the animals are flying to their roosts in the mornings," she said.
"But the colony in Madagascar was between 10 and 15 metres high, at the top of the gallery forests. They have become extremely wary of people because they are always flying into nets, so they fly in and out of the colonies high, and setting nets to trap them is tricky.
"In the end we had to be quite sneaky and hide the poles the nets were attached to. Even so after four nights we had only caught one bat."
Ms Markus found herself tramping around the lush gallery and unique spiny forests of Madagascar after meeting Emma Long, a PhD student from Aberdeen University, at an international bat research conference in Brazil last year.
Ms Long was researching her thesis on the foraging of the Madagascan flying fox, but had no experience in catching the animal.
"My presence didn't mean we were going to catch bats because I had never seen the sites or what the equipment was like, so it was all pretty abstract until I got there," Ms Markus said.
"The fact that we caught two and that the team learnt enough to be able to catch four more after I left and attach collars to them was great, it meant that in the end they had filled their maximum quota."
For further information, contact Ms Markus on (07) 3365-1298 (work) or (07) 3374-0728 (home).
