Q&A: What bats mean to the ecosystem, why we should protect them and how

From deadly funguses affecting hibernating bats to windmills killing migrating bats, Canadian bats are in danger. I spoke to NAIT Conservation Biology student, Alicia Gavigan, to learn more about the impact of bats on our ecosystems and what people can do about it.

Q: What is affecting Canadian bat populations right now? 

Alicia Gavigan: Right now, one of the biggest threats to Canadian bat populations is white nose fungus syndrome. White nose fungus is a fungus that affects bats, and it grows all over their skin, and it sort of wakes them up when they’re supposed to be hibernating or in torpor and they’ll have to go outside during winter, and they’ll eventually die of exposure. White nose fungus has been spreading all over the US and Canada in the last about 10 years, and it’s starting to really affect our bat populations. They’ve all gone to being sort of threatened from least concern, and it is continuing to become a really big issue and it’s still spreading. 

Q: What do bats do for the ecosystem? 

Gavigan: So a lot of people know that bats eat insects, so they are very important pest control, eating things like mosquitoes and flies and stuff, but a lot of people don’t know is they’re actually really important pollinators, so bats when they are interacting with plants and stuff. They will pick up pollen and spread it, and a lot of plants are actually mostly dependent on bats instead of other bugs, because bats can carry a lot more pollen than a little bee can. 

Q: What would happen if bats were to go extinct in Canada?

Gavigan: Well, you can probably imagine. We’d have a huge over abundance of bugs in Canada, and it would probably cause a lot of mutation and things like that. A lot of pest borne diseases such as west nile virus and stuff, things that are carried by mosquitoes, but also, we’d see a lot of extinctions of plants, things that are really dependent on bats for pollinating them would end up becoming so isolated, they would eventually go extinct. 

Q: What can people do to help bats in Canada? 

Gavigan: So there’s a lot of options to help the bats here. You can volunteer with places like the Edmonton Area & Land Trust, and you can help them to build bat boxes and help monitor bats. You can also purchase your own bat boxes or go online and find the guidelines to build your own bat box, so those can help bats, they provide them with darkness to shelter in. You can also report any injured bats you see to rehab centres like WILDNorth in Edmonton, and it’s also important to avoid bothering bats in the wild, and especially do not go into caves during the winter time, because it can wake up the bats and when they wake up, it reactivates their metabolism, and they’ll have to go outside to eat. Because they’ll starve otherwise and when they go outside to eat, they’ll freeze to death. So yeah, there’s a lot of options like bat boxes and things like that.

Image Credit: Ann Froschauer

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