Science Friday - Raising A New Generation Of Bat Conservationists In West Africa

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

Nigeria is home to 100 known species of bats—about a third of Africa’s bat species—but scientists don’t know much about them. Ecologists Iroro Tanshi and Benneth Obitte, collaborators and life partners, are trying to change that. In addition to studying and protecting the bats of their homeland, they’re also working to raise up a whole network of bat scientists across West Africa. Host Flora Lichtman talks with them about how they started their work, what they’ve learned, and how they’re paving the way for other bat conservationists. Guests:Dr. Iroro Tanshi is an ecologist at the University of Washington and cofounder of the Small Mammal Conservation Organization.Dr. Benneth Obitte is a conservation ecologist at Texas Tech University and cofounder of the Small Mammal Conservation Organization.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

I'm Flor Lictman, and you are listening to Science Friday. Today in the show, a pair of married scientists are on a mission, save bats in their homeland, Nigeria. We are raising basically just raising an army of bat conservationism. Nigeria is home to 100 known species of bats. That's about a third of all of Africa's bat species. But when my next two guests met, before they were collaborators, before they were married, not so much was known about the flying furry mammals of the region. Dr. Iroro Tanshi is an ecologist at the University of Washington,

and Dr. Beneth Obite is a conservation ecologist at Texas Tech University. Irro, Ben, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Flora. It's very nice to be here. Thank you, Flora. Thank you for having us. Irrero, why bats? Are they a lifelong love for you? Absolutely. The question why bats has, you know, a few answers for me. Everything from, you know, the adventure that comes with just being out in the field studying bats

because you've got to go to caves, forest canopies, you know, and all that. But also it was the point, I feel like bats kind of rescued my career. I was at the point where I started asking questions about whether I could really do biology in a really exciting way. And then I heard about someone climbing into the forest canvents. be and studying bats, I was like, yeah, this is it. That just dead drop. There is no question. This is what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life. What do you mean it rescued your career? You weren't sure if you could do biology in a fun, exciting way. Like, what were the other options?

So I had studied at the University of Pinnin for my undergrad. And while there are a few professors who were doing cool stuff, they weren't doing research in vertebrates, you know. So the people were doing cool stuff for either fans people or mulls people. I wanted to do work with things that had, you know, a backbone. You see what I mean? In any case, so I wasn't really thrilled by, you know, the research around me. And I was just really craving, being in the field, observing animals, and be able to explore what you do, because that's kind of how my interest in animals started, was watching

nature documentaries and hearing all these people talk about what's going on with the animals. And I was just puzzled. Like, how do they know? I wanted to be that person who would ask those questions. The mollusk people are going to come for you. But no, but that's the thing, though. The mollusk people and the palm people were doing cool research, it just wasn't what I wanted, you know. Different strokes, of course. Yeah, there you go. And so if you want to do a sex and research, It's not something you do on and off. It's something you set up. And so that was my dream.

I wanted to see that it would become this thing where people, not just come and go once in a while, you really set up an engine that keeps going for bats. Ben, what about you? How did you get to bats? Oh, I fell in love with a specific species. And I met in Roro, you know, 24. was when we met, she gave this talk.

I was a hydrobiologist, you know. I spent all my time on brackish waters collecting aquatic samples and aquatic insects. But she was working with bats and then she gave this talk about museum collections and stuff. And I was quite interested. I mean, you have to know that nobody really studied bats. in Nigeria. So this was new, right? So, and she was going on one of her field, you know, collections and I volunteered to just go with her. And the second night, I caught a very cute bat. It's the cyclops around live bat. If you know this species, it's very codly.

It looks like a small teddy bear when you hold it in your hands. I was like, I want to keep doing this. And when Aurora started working on this, because you heard her give a talk about this, right? How many Nigerian bat scientists existed? I would say none that I knew about. I was in an ecology program. It was weird to, you know, see someone who was passionately talking about bats that, you know, we all thought were, you know, bad moments. But it was, I was curious. I was fascinated. What's the most interesting part about the bats that?

you study. As far as Nigeria goes, I want to say it's the hottest hotspot for bats in Africa. So if you really want to do bad research in Africa, Nigeria is the place to be. Because we're in a transition zone between what you would consider West African species versus Central African species. And that means a lot for many things from the ecology to diseases. ecology, but it's just a really interesting landscape to study bats. And then I like to say this. We have some of the prettiest bats around the world. I mean, you look at the Lafayette, the yellow wing bat.

It has yellow wings and very cool. You look at all the fruit bats we have. Some of them poppy face, so cute. You know, there are some that are very unique, like the short, tailed round leaf bats, you know, which is endangered. And one of my favorites, which is a mionicteris bat, it likes, it likes to be robbed. You hold it in your hands. And then when you try to touch it, scratch it, it gently just raises the neck upwards. And it wants it, it wants you to get in them. Exactly. This is so, this is so adorable, so cute. I mean, yeah, we, we have very, very,

nice-looking, cute species. And they're also very important ecologically. They do all kinds of walk across the landscape, helping communities sustain their livelihoods. Ben, you mentioned the short-tailed round-leaf bat. Erroro, you have a story about this, right? About an encounter with this bat. I do. And I love to tell it because it helps you relieve that experience. All right, so the story is about how we found the first individual in Nigeria. So when I went to the field, I had a list of things you would expect that hadn't been recorded in Nigeria. So I wasn't really looking for that one. And so this evening, we were out trapping bats.

And what you do when you trap bats is you go out to the traps and you put them in individual bags. And so you bring them all to your recording station and they take them out one by one. And so I was doing that, you know, going through each of those bags. It's like Christmas morning. And I pulled this one species. I know. I pull one species out. And I was like, wait.

That is something different. What I was seeing was a species with really big ears. I was like, I have not seen that before. And it's got this flat-ish stubby round nose. Button. It's a round button, really. So I, you know, picked up the figure. I was flipping through.

And I got to the species that I suspected that it was. And I was struggling to speak because I was so excited. And that's where we confirmed that it was the shorter around leave bad. But I could not sleep that night because it hadn't been seen in the wild life 45 years before. When you start getting to 45, 50 years of not finding something, people start to worry if it's going extinct or if it's gone extinct. But in our case, no one's been looking with the right equipment. And so when we found it, we were just, you know, completely taken. away and I yeah, come sleep that night.

Anyway, yeah, sorry, I'm kind of going back there now. I think about it. Enjoy it. Enjoy it. Enjoy it. Yeah. Yeah. Ben, what are the biggest threats to bats in Nigeria?

Oh, I'm just kind of segueing from the experience era was reliving. A few nights after that, After we found this species, there was a wildfire, you know, like. And then we were like, this is not, you know, really going to come here. So we continued walking. Two hours later, the fire was literally in our camp. So we were running, you know, trying to just pick a few. equipment, the most expensive equipment, just to run down the mountain.

You know, this is when it downed on us. I keep telling people this was probably the saddest experience we've ever had in the forest because this was perhaps the greatest find we've made in the last few years. And cave bats are very sensitive to smoke. And forest fire could just completely run. roost them in the caves. So this was how we actually formed our conservation organization to, first of all, protect the forests from wildfires, because these were not just normal wildfires. These fires come from farms. Wait, so is that one of the big threats? Yes.

Wildfires. Wildfire is one of the major threats. Beautiful mountains. So, forest are surrounded by farms, mostly cocoa farms. So annually farmers use fire to burn brush or maintain these farms. They do this annually, true generations. But because of, you know, changing climate, they are no longer able to predict the best times to do this farm maintenance. So they end up every year these fires escalating from one farm to the other, sometimes devastating hundreds of farms before even get into the mountain. And once he gets into the mountain, it's uncontrollable. You don't have to wait.

Sometimes it burns for weeks until there's a rain. Yeah. Because there's no way to manage it. Actually, the major threat, most important one is habitat loss. of habitat degradation. And this is coming from encroachment, from smallholder farms, logging from timber dealers.

And then we have hunting. People actually hunt bats. In fact, the Egyptian food bats, the record was 400,4,300 individuals captured from a single cave in one hunting effort. For food. For food. For food. Don't go away because when we come,

come back, how do you make bats lovable? We sort of said, we're trying to save this forest for the bats and for you. And they're like, oh, really? Oh, okay. I guess we're we bats now. We're on team bat, like you said. You know, getting people to care about conservation of any species, obviously this is a big global challenge. in your work and the work that you two do, trying to get people on Team Bat, what have you learned about the strategies that are effective and the things that don't work?

So what hasn't worked? So to be honest, I think just talking about bats is not enough. You have to show people. Because the thing with bats is because people don't see them, They just write them off as evil or whatever, but the question is always, well, so you're spending your time doing this research, how does it benefit the common man, as they say in Nigeria? Because if you tell them, oh, in the U.S. bats save $22 billion of dollars every year to avoid the costs of agricultural pest removal, it doesn't make a difference to the cocoa farmer in Guangzhou in Boki, in Nigeria, you know? So that person wants to see how X, Y, Z trees that we harvest or we use their seeds or we use their fruits or whatever is pulling knitted by bats. And we've got many examples.

And so when people start to see that, oh, this, because a lot of the things that threaten biodiversity also threaten people. And that's where we've got in the local communities too is we've sort of said, we're trying to save this forest for the bats and for you. And because we're preventing fires from getting to forests, what it then means is that fires are not getting to other people's farms. You start to let people know that, oh, we're solving this problem that you also have because of the bat. And they're like, oh, really? Oh, okay. I guess we're we batts now. We're on team bat, like you said. Do you all feel responsible for the bats in Nigeria? Do you feel like it's on your shoulders to conserve them.

There's a big sense of responsibility. I mean, there's a big sense of duty. That's the word, you know. It's not just about we made noise about this bads. It's more like if we don't act, then we're not being responsible. It was heavier when we started. This is why we have devoted a huge amount of resources. raising more bad scientists and conservationists.

Not just in Nigeria across West Africa, we have a program where we have students across the West African region coming into Nigeria. And we have experts from across the world who we invite to train these students. And then we go beyond that. We maintain mentorship. until they graduate from the programs. And so we are raising, basically just raising an army of bad conservationists.

Probably in the next 10 years we will not be feeling this much responsibility. There will be probably hundreds of other people doing what we're doing right now. Is the goal to sort of help people who avoid the challenges that you faced? Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Sometimes you get traumatized by some of these experiences. And this is how sometimes people get into charity.

You know, you survive cancer. You want to help others. You know, so this was like that for us. Let me quickly describe what that means by trouble. So my PhD required a lot of trapping gear. And when you load up your fuel truck, the height of the gear, it really towers over the truck. And that was because, you know, we didn't have anywhere to, any, anywhere to hold our gear. But it also reflects how the fact that there's very little scientific infrastructure for this sort of long-term.

you know, deep in the mountains, deep in the forest, research. Because, you know, we'll spend three to six months at a time in the forest. Now, in terms of physical infrastructure, we're building field stations to make sure that we don't, we no longer have field trucks that are towers high when we go to the field. You know, it's been my lifelong dream to be able to just sit in the forest in the field station and walk. And so we now have two field stations that are getting constructed. I couldn't really get support when these all started in Nigeria.

And so we wanted people to find joy in doing the research, but we really want people to not experience the same struggles that we had, both in terms of access to mentors and access to facilities. That's awesome. Ben, Euroro, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having us once again. This was such a pleasure. Thank you so much, Flora. Thank you for having us. Dr. Iroh Tanshi is an ecologist at the University of Washington.

And Dr. Bennett Obite is a conservation ecologist at Texas Tech University. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to rate and review us. And you can always leave us a comment on this segment on Spotify. We'd love to hear from you. Today's episode was produced by Rasha Airedi. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.