How do you track a wide-ranging flying mammal that weighs an average of 27 grams, or less than one ounce? With a tracker tag that weighs about one twenty-seventh of that. That’s how researchers followed the movements of 21 Nyctalus noctula bats, or the common noctule, a species spread widely across Europe, and found that the bats can surf.
It’s not waves, of course, but weather fronts. The bats, tiny creatures that sometimes will migrate close to a thousand miles, need some clever strategies to cover those distances. That’s especially true in the face of a changing climate and hazards like declining insect populations, a potentially dire drop in energy supplies for many of the 1,400 or so bat species around the world. Enter the storm surfing.
These particular bats, 71 of which were captured and tagged near Lake Constance in Southern Germany, often took to the skies just ahead of an arriving storm system. This allowed them to ride tailwinds much farther than previously assumed possible: publishing in Science, the researchers found that the nightly flights got as far as 383 kilometers (238 miles), or farther than it is from Boston to New York. That’s more than twice as far as previously recorded noctule flights.
Bat migration is generally far less understood than that undertaken by birds or other animals. And having a better idea of what they’re up to on these journeys could help protect them — just for example, by curtailing wind power in certain areas on certain nights, like when a bunch of the little flyers might have sensed a favorable wave to grab coming through.
As University of Waterloo biologist Liam McGuire wrote in an accompanying perspective piece, bats are critical parts of many ecosystems and “Populations of many migratory bat species around the globe are increasingly imperiled…. [and] if action is not taken to address threats facing bat populations, they may not be around much longer to study.”