From Rescuing A Bat To Discovering A New Species | Dr. Rohit Chakravarty | Moving Forests | EP- 31

If I'm not wrong, bats are generally found in moist and damp places.

Is it right or wrong? It's right and

wrong.

Like because we are talking about bats, we are talking about 135 species in India.

All of them have their own, you know, weather tolerances.

So or as we would call microclimatic tolerance, like the climate that you need in your immediate surroundings.

So many species of bats are indeed found in more moist areas.

But then there are also bats, for example, the ones now we are studying in Delhi.

They're called mousetail bats.

There are bats called tomb bats.

They are all found in the driest of places, like all across the Middle East and going into Delhi.

So they are adapted to a whole range of temperatures, like, you know, from 0 to 5 degrees all the way up to 40, 45 degrees.

Interesting.

So even a little bit of information about bats is like so revealing.

How is it working with bats for so many years? Is it like, do you still get surprised by what you learn or you think, oh, this has reference to this, something that I studied 10 years back?

I think it's both.

Like as naturalist first and then a scientist that, you know, I mean, I enjoy watching animals before I start collecting data on them.

And so for me, it's both.

It's a mix of both that that even watching them just routine observations on bats and bats are everywhere.

I mean, I could watch bats in the city as well.

So so every day of watching bats ends up being a new day that it could be something as simple as, oh, I wasn't expecting the species here in this kind of a place.

And it is found here.

I wasn't expecting four, five species of bats right above my house in Nagpur, but they are there.

And

it could