A bat colony’s long history in Central America
A Jamaican cave yielded a bat guano deposit extending back over 4,300 years, revealing a bat colony’s long history.
With over 1,300 species, bats are a diverse group that occupy many ecological niches across the globe. Some feed on plants, like the nectar and fruit eating varieties, whereas their carnivorous counterparts include both insect eating and the more nefarious blood-drinking varieties.
In tropical environments like Jamaica, bats nest all year, sometimes choosing caves as their refuge. These caves are home to thousands of bats that flutter in the dark above large mounds of reeking bat guano. As unappealing as this environment may seem to the casual observer, we have been excited to discover a rich history recorded in these bat guano deposits. We have been analyzing core samples of bat guano in Jamaica that reveal details about the bats and how these bats have been affected by humans. In particular, chemical analysis in guano core samples have so far chronicled the arrival of agriculture to Jamaica in the seventeenth century, and in more recent times, the rise and fall of leaded gasoline, and the arrival of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and fungicides, revealing details about how bats are exposed to pollutants, how they derive their nutrition, and how their feeding strategies have changed over thousands of years.
We have since developed this study further to explore sterols in bat guano to see what these chemicals can tell us about bat diets over the last four millennia. To do this, we joined a group of biologists in Belize and collected guano samples from bats that eat a range of different diets, from the fruit and nectar eating varieties, to the insect eaters and blood drinking varieties.
Media on this story:
Smithsonian Online, January 23, 2020
