Bats, Flies on Bats and the Fungi That Feeds on the Flies!

During a fieldtrip to Panama last summer, PhD student Danny Haelewaters (Pfister Lab) worked with a team of six researchers -- including PhD student Jasmin Camacho (Hoekstra Lab) -- to capture bats using mistnets for seven subsequent nights in a cloud-forested reserve in Darien, Panama. The team captured 227 bats representing 17 species to study the bat's parasitic associations. Their findings, published in Parasite, showed blood-sucking bat flies living on more than half of the bats. Thirty of the 437 bat flies were parasitized by ectoparasitic fungi in the order Laboulbeniales, while other fungi are still undescribed.