April UMAC surveys: Spotlight from Southampton MammalWatch
Hello Mammal Lovers!
*cue game show music*
Welcome back to the third instalment of #SotonMammals with your host, Georgia Harper!
Alright, alright, everyone settle down, we’ve had an eventful month of April, with a twist. As I mentioned in the previous post, all members of the Southampton Team were shooting off to their various countries, but in no way did we miss the target in terms of mammal watching.
Jack and I went off to Bolonia, Spain, on a first year field course, on which we were demonstrators. We took this opportunity to advertise the University Mammal Challenge to the freshers, and we got an overwhelming response of excitedness – the whole room we presented to wanted to be part of it!
Jack was back into being busy as soon as he came back to Southampton, he had a serotine bat to look after with a damaged wing membrane, and he was going through some more data of a foraging soprano pipistrelle, which you can see in the sonogram and oscillogram below. There are two complete 'feeding buzzes', shown where the harmonics (peaks) are very close together, suggesting that this pip caught and ate two meals in that one recording.
The rest of the team were busy too! A lot of us went to Belize to spend time in the Las Cuevas Research Station on our 3rd year Tropical Field Course, and Owen spent time in Mexico working on his dissertation. Here’s a small fraction of the wildlife they found, using the same camera traps we use back in England!
A cute little opossum found in Belize…
A beautiful jaguar from Belize, I would love to see one of these in the wild!
Foraging white-lipped peccaries found in Mexico!
And last but not least, an ocelot found in Mexico.
I think this just goes to show that we can apply the same principles to mammal watching out in any country, this Mammal Challenge Scheme just gives us the opportunity to learn then back at home.
This is why I encourage everyone to give it a go if you can, and to any universities who are not yet participating – why not!?
This was the #SotonMammals team keeping you updated with this instalment of our Mammal’s Tail.