NEW NGO - BIOCONCIENCIA
Bioconservación, Educación y Ciencia
TO LAUNCH IN APRIL 2005

Dr. Rodrigo Medellín and his group have been preparing the launch of a new NGO in Mexico, to assist them increase their effectiveness and impact in conservation. The new NGO, called BIOCONCIENCIA, Bioconservación, Educación y Ciencia, will be launched in April 2005.

Its objective will be to promote the conservation, recovery, management, and sustained use of biological diversity. This NGO will open new possibilities in collaboration and interaction with other groups, both in Mexico and abroad, and it will provide stability to the PCMM initiative, and others.

Visit www.wildlifetrust.org for upcoming news about BIOCONCIENCIA, Bioconservación, Educación y Ciencia.

In this online interview, Rodrigo discusses his work with Linda Shockley.

1. When did you first become interested in bats?

When I was twelve, I participated in a national TV contest known as the Great 64,000 Peso Contest . I chose the subject on which the questions would be asked, and that subject was mammals. At the time I had spent every cent of my weekly allowance on magazines on animals, I always asked for animal books for birthday and Christmas presents, and my favorite holiday was to spend it at the zoo, so it was only natural that I wanted to be asked about mammals.

I was the first child to participate in the contest. After one of my weekly appearances on TV (on which I was asked one question), the people at the Institute of Biology at the National University of Mexico called me at home and invited me to visit the Institute to continue learning about mammals.

Pretty soon I was the assistant of the assistant of the assistant in the field trips of the Institute, and my first trip was to a cave in the state of Guerrero, where I became completely enthralled with bats. Since then I worked at the Institute right through college and my undergraduate biology studies, always going to the field with researchers, and learning and becoming more fascinated with bats.

2. You have studied and worked on the ecology and conservation of mammals, specifically bats, for 25 years. As a scientist, what makes bats so fascinating?

Well, bats are the second most diverse group of mammals, after rodents. Rodent natural history is pretty uniform throughout the group, whereas there is no other order of mammals (of vertebrates!) more trophically and ecologically diverse than bats. So if you like diversity and multispecies coexistence systems, you find that in bats.

If you like ecological interactions like predation, pollination, or seed dispersal, you find them in bats. If you like ecomorphological questions, bats are the paradise for those types of questions.

Additionally, bats are the group of mammals that are numerically declining the fastest. On top of all this, bats are not just a group of species that are declining like so many others; bats provide very significant ecological services. Their influence is critical for ecosystems and for our own life styles. For example, bats pollinate many ecologically and economically important species of plants, such as ceiba trees, morning glory trees, columnar cacti, and agaves, from which tequila (the Mexican beverage par excellence !) is made. Bats disperse more seeds per square mile per night than birds do in the rainforests of southern Mexico. Seeds dispersed by bats include many important species such as figs, cecropias, guavas, zapotes, chicle trees, and many others.

Finally, bats are crucial allies of agriculture, by their devouring millions of insects every night. Some caves in northern Mexico and Texas with millions of Mexican free-tailed bats in them, illustrate this point. Each million bats destroys about ten tons of insects every night. We can all imagine what would happen if, all of a sudden, bats disappeared. Without that biological control, insect populations would mushroom uncontrollably.

3. You currently work with a 25-member team to monitor 26 cave systems in Mexico. What is the nature of this work?

The Program for Conservation of Mexican Bats (PCMM for its Spanish acronym) was established ten years ago. This program was created to stop and reverse the alarming declines in bat populations throughout Mexico. The PCMM has a three-pronged strategy, using research, environmental education, and conservation actions as interactive lines that help us advance in this long-term task of conserving and recovering Mexico's bats.

Because Mexico is such a diverse country, being the fifth in the world in terms of species of bats with 139 species (and counting!), we need to prioritize our work. Given that over 40% of Mexico's territory sits on karstic rock (the geological equivalent of a Gruyére cheese), it has been estimated that Mexico has over 30 thousand caves. With the human and financial resources available, we cannot save all caves.

The PCMM has designed a cave and species prioritization strategy.

Out of the 139 Mexican bat species, we have identified those that require the fastest conservation action. These include about 20 focal species that are either considered at risk, or migratory, or endemic to Mexico. We also work identifying priority caves, those with important colonies of the focal species. And then we launch a research program to determine the role of that particular cave on the biology of the priority species that inhabits it, the threats that affect it, and prepare a management and conservation plan for the cave.

Many times, this conservation plan includes a strong environmental education component. That is how the number of caves we monitor keeps growing and making our task ever-expanding. Each new cave is a new challenge and each community near a cave represents a new opportunity to educate people about benefits provided by bats.

4. You have shown a lifelong dedication to education as an integral component of your conservation efforts. Has it been a difficult task to educate people about the importance of bat conservation, when bats invoke such a complicated mythology?

The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) is my home institution here in Mexico. Being the largest University in Latin America and among the best in the developing world, we are never short of opportunities to recruit young students, give talks, and appear in the media.

But one person (or a group, for that matter!) will always have severe limitations. The PCMM has a steering team that includes Laura Navarro, an environmental educator with two decades of experience in Mexico. Laura serves as Director of Education in the PCMM. She has written six children's story books about bats and we have worked together in a large number of projects to educate the public.

One of the most effective instruments has been a radio show series of 20 15-minute-long programs on bat biology for children. This show ( Aventuras al Vuelo ) has won international awards, such as Best Radio Show for Children in Latin America.

So, you see, it is difficult, but a well-prepared, interdisciplinary team with clear objectives and effective strategies does the trick.

5. One element of your work involves the control of vampire bats. What are the greatest challenges surrounding the conservation of bats and the problems caused by vampire bats?

Vampire bats include only three of the 139 Mexican species of bats. Only one of these three species is abundant enough to occasionally cause problems to humans, either by transmitting rabies to cattle or by biting humans, both instances being unacceptable to people.

But the lack of information of average people means that whenever rabies happens with no quick government response, local human communities take the task in their hands and they frequently go to the nearest cave (typically inhabited by harmless, beneficial bats) and destroy thousands (sometimes more!) of innocent bats, further opening room for new colonies of vampire bats and therefore making the problem grow.

We have a three-step vampire bat control strategy. Dr. Joaquin Arroyo is our vampire bat coordinator. If any one of the PCMM members is visiting a priority cave and receives reports on vampire bats biting people or creating a problem, Dr. Arroyo determines whether he or she should apply the control. The second step is when we learn about vampire bat attacks on people in the news or other media. When that happens, we send a group of PCMM people to apply the control in that region.

Finally, the third step is applying preventive vampire bat control. Dr. Arroyo has established a collaborative agreement with the Mexican Federal Government agency in charge of agriculture. We work with them on capacity building and training for vampire bat control, and cooperate to help as much as possible in avoiding these outbreaks. This includes an important research component to understand the natural history of rabies.

6. Over the span of your career, what would you consider the most gratifying successes? Toughest challenges?

Over the course of 30 years of working on the conservation and ecology of mammals, I have learned that one of the most gratifying feelings anyone can have is the interaction with an endless chain of young people where we discuss their projects, have stimulating intellectual exchanges, and reciprocal learning.

The number of people interested in my work has fortunately steadily grown for the past 20 years, and seeing students graduating and becoming integrated into the Mexican conservation arena is a wonderful way of "leaving a footprint."

Also, when visiting priority caves incognito and talking to people, I have become ecstatic at listening to local people lecture me about how good are bats for us and the services they provide for nature and for our every day life.

This is exactly the kind of project we need to replicate thousands of times all over Mexico. Similarly, having been invited to other Latin American countries to help them establish their own programs for the conservation of bats and seeing the Latin American initiative grow, offers me hope that we are on the right track to help bats.

One of the toughest challenges in my career has been to try to coordinate a team of 20 to 30 people, all working in different institutions throughout Mexico, and all in need of coordination, so that the data on bats are gathered in the same fashion, in about the same week of the same month.

The scarcity of financial resources and the urgency of the goals at hand are constant sources of frustrations and we can only tackle it by expanding our educational activities further to funding agencies and the like, and doubling our fundraising efforts.

Finally, division among conservationists and government-related delays to the conservation goals jointly outlined, are making us miss golden opportunities and losing more and more populations of species that may end up disappearing altogether. In particular, the current government of Mexico has been very slow and nearly ineffective in moving forward the conservation agenda, on bats or otherwise.

7. We know you are active in other subjects of conservation. Can you tell us a little bit about other, not-bat-related conservation work you do?

Being one of the less than 30 established professionals working on conservation of mammals in Mexico, and Mexico being a mega-diverse country that occupies the third place in the world in terms of numbers of species of mammals, I cannot help but diversify and attempt to tackle many issues, all equally urgent, and with varying degrees of complexity and success.

I work on ecology, conservation, and management of large mammals such as pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, black bear, and jaguar (I edited the only Latin-America continent-wide compilation on the biology of the jaguar to learn about its conservation needs). I also teach conservation biology and community ecology at the University.

My main study site for 20+ years has been the Lacandon rainforest in southern Mexico, the largest and most diverse extension of rainforest remaining in Mexico. I work here on conservation questions understanding and countering the negative effects of human activities on the ecological processes of the forest.