BATTY OVER RESEARCH
LAUREN GONZALEZ herald@mediactr.com
Three painful rabies vaccinations were all worth it.

During March and April, I received inoculations to protect against rabid bats I may come in contact with.

When Dr. Thomas Kunz invited me to participate in an internship through Boston University this summer, I jumped at the chance. I saw the opportunity to participate in fascinating research and to also return to my home state.

The aim of the research project is to ascertain the agro-economic impact of Mexican free-tailed bats in south-central Texas. I'm helping other researchers census the bats using thermal infrared cameras, conducting colony compositions, and energetics research at several caves.

Our team of five is working at caves and bridges throughout central Texas, from Fredericksburg to Uvalde and even at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.

Our research focuses mainly on the emergence of these bats. The bats exit the caves in large columns at dusk, searching for insects and other agricultural pests. Since the nightly emergence can last several hours, my schedule is not the typical nine to five job. A typical day starts at 4 p.m. and lasts until 3-4 a.m.

One of l Lauren Gonzalez's coresearchers, Caitlin Casey from Boston University, wears a respirator in order to safely descend into Ney Cave in Central Texas. She calls her pose "queen of the bats." PHOTOS: LAUREN GONZALEZ

One of my favorite assignments is at the Bamberger Ranch Preserve, Selah, where far-sighted owners have constructed a manmade chiroptorium, an artificial cave for bats. The chiroptorium is just one of many brilliant ideas burgeoning from David and Margaret Bamberger. They've created workshops for ranchers to learn how to care for land, established camps and educational programs for under-privileged children to learn about science and created a truly beautiful and pure environment.

It's ingenious how ecofriendly this ranch is. Everything that's been done has been so well thought out. The Bambergers have gone to great lengths to make their ranch and the animals there self-sustainable. That means no grain or pellets for the cattle. Instead, they graze upon the grasses they were meant to graze on naturally. As a consequence, the land looks rich and healthy, and the streams and lakes crystal clear.

A Mexican k free-tailed bat has a white stripe on its belly, indicating a recessive gene for albinoism.

One of the great things about this nocturnal job is that the daytime can be spent in the outdoors in the beautiful Texas hill country. Three of us frequently leave for the caves much earlier than needed, just so we can spend time outdoors in a new area. We'll drive through some of the most beautiful parts of the country, swim in the Medina, Frio and Guadalupe Rivers, then lounge for hours in the sun before working at a cave.

If it happens to be a censusing night, we'll set up cameras for thermal infrared imaging to count the number of bats that exit the roosts each night. Some caves number in the hundreds of thousands, while others have over a million bats.

Other nights, we might conduct colony compositions. We'll catch 25 bats every 10 minutes to determine what groups of bats are living in the roost: male, female, pregnant, lactating or juvenile bats.

Later in the month, we'll be outfitting eight bats with transmitters and tracking how far they are flying using radiotelemetry. There have been a lot of outlandish estimates on how far the bats travel each night to feed. With our research, we're hoping to establish concrete evidence of how far these amazing creatures are flying nightly.

I've studied some of these scientific processes since high school, and now I'm relating them to my experiences daily. It's a great feeling to fully comprehend the concepts I've learned over the past several years at both Trinity University and Boston University, and apply them to my future career in the scientific field.