This is an online only event. Zoom link will be sent out via email one hour before the lecture begins.
Bats are nocturnal, not just because they fancy a nighttime walk (yes, flight), but they are taking advantage of an untapped buffet of flowers, fruits, insects, and plenty more, yum! Bats are suitably adapted to finding this all-exclusive sumptuous spread in the dark, in a way that allows partitioning of the food resource, enabling stable coexistence with other bats in the same foraging space. How such a community of bats partitions resources can be through competition, environmental filtering, and phylogenetic conservatism, i.e., species from the same family or genus share similar traits. There are multiple foraging spaces that bats utilize, especially in forest ecosystems. The processes that allow bats to partition food are the core subject of my research, from lowlands to mountains and islands in West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea Forests.
Dr. Iroro Tanshi is a postdoc at the University of Washington, working on ecological communities. As part of a research agenda to target historically understudied areas, she is currently focused on West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea forests, where she studies insectivorous bat assembly structure, through an ecomorphological approach to understanding resource partitioning and species interaction. Iroro, also leads an NGO that works with local communities to protect critical forest and bat habitat in Nigeria, while expanding research infrastructure in West Africa. She enjoys hiking, and swimming.
