Studying bats can be smelly and messy, but bat biologist Nickolay Hristov explains why he finds his job to be such an exhilarating endeavor. As he attends to high speed cameras at a cave mouth in South Central Texas, several thousand Brazilian free-tailed bats per minute create a breeze that rustles his hair, and as Flora Lichtman explains, that’s not even “a fraction of the colony. Between 200-500,000 individuals live in that cave…”
With the help of technology, Hristov is innovating on the chiropterology front. A long-range laser scanner, high speed cameras, and portable thermal cameras are helping researchers study individual bat behavior, bat environments, and how bats are interacting with each other inside their pitch black caverns.
From Science Friday in 2012: To the Bat Cave!
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