GA4

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Rodrigues Fruit Bats: The Rob Miles Interview

Spinal Column Online has a very nice interview with Rob Miles, the director of the Organization for Bat Conservation at the Cranbrook Institute of Science. He has worked with bats for 15 years and has done lots of work on Mauritius and Rodrigues.
Two of the main hot spots that we're working on right now are in India and a group of Islands called the Mauritius Islands in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Madagascar. Right on our web site home page [Link: www.batconservation.org/] it talks about Mauritius fruit bats. I've been there and I've done work with the Mauritius and Rodrigues (part of Mauritius) fruit bats. Both of the bats are large, beautiful fruit bats. Rodrigues bats are an endangered species found on a tiny little island. We have an education project there teaching people about the importance of bats but that we also help fund research on the islands to survey the bats. I've done that there, helping to survey the health and population of the bats. So a lot of my research has to do with surveys and then also helping to give advice on how to best protect bats.
Well done Rob, great work! Good luck with your appearance on the Ellen Degeneres show!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this post. Most people hate bats and consider them a blood sucking menace. I love bats; really love them. Most people don't understand bats and don't know of how similar, in some ways, they are to Man.