A Bat Man in the Tropics: Chasing El Duende

Preface

Preface My Spanish-English dictionary defines the word duende as “hobgoblin” or “ghost.” Duende can also be defined as “will o’ the wisp”—anything that deludes or misleads by luring on. In this book, I use the word duende in both senses. The first sense (hobgoblin or ghost) is meant to refer to bats, the principal subject of this book.To most people,bats are mysterious,ghostlike creatures, primarily because of their ability to navigate on the wing at night, often in total darkness. Many myths and legends have arisen about bats because of their seemingly mysterious behavior. In most of these legends ,bats are frightening,loathsome creatures.One of my aims in this book is to help dispel this view by portraying bats as the fascinating and ecologically important creatures they really are. I use duende in the second sense as a metaphor for the process of scientific discovery. As a professor of biology, I have been studying bats (and other organisms) in the field for over thirty years. My overall aim in many of these studies has been to document the lives and ecological importance of plant-visiting bats in tropical or subtropical habitats. These studies have taken me to tropical forests in Panama, Costa Rica, and Australia, and, more recently, to the lush Sonoran Desert of northwestern Mexico and Arizona. During the course of this work, my family, colleagues, and I have had many adventures.These adventures have arisen because science, particularly field xvii biology, is a very human endeavor. As scientists, our immediate goal may be to answer a particular question or test a specific hypothesis, but the pathway toward that goal is seldom straight.Nature and humankind always provide distractions along the way. Some of these distractions are delightful; others are frustrating. Some distractions are totally unexpected and lead to new scientific discoveries.Unexpected discoveries can be euphoric.They provide the only reason most of us need to continue the study of nature and its secrets. As we will see, some discoveries also open up new fields of investigation ,leading us into unexpected research directions (the “El Duende” effect). But the euphoria of discovery rarely appears in a scientific paper reporting the results of our studies, not even when the molecular structure of DNA was being described for the first time. The aim of this book, then, is to provide a personal account of over thirty years of biological fieldwork,primarily with tropical bats.I will describe some of the background behind my studies—Why did I conduct this or that particular study? What was our state of knowledge when I began a scientific study?—and some of the notable results. At the same time, I wish to convey the sights, smells, and sounds of everyday life in the field. What were my joys and concerns? And how did my family and I deal with my life as a field biologist? Finally, this book is about the conservation of bats. What do we need to do to make sure these captivating animals are around for future generations of curious naturalists to study? xviii / Preface ...