The Lifesaving Legacy of Livingstone's Fruit Bats at Jersey Zoo

S5E48 Jersey Zoo in the Channel Islands is home to 90% of the world's captive population of Livingstone's fruit bats. With an estimated 1300 in the wild, this captive breeding programme is vital to the survival of the species in a disaster event. We join Dominic Wormell inside the bat enclosure as he explains how they care for the colony and how the bats are received by the visiting public.
Discover more about the colony here
Have a listen to our other zoo episode from Chester Zoo
More about the species on the BCI website

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Transcript

Steve Roe: 0:41

Hello, you're listening to the award winning podcast of the Bat Conservation Trust BatChat. I'm Steve Roe. And this is episode three of series five. Yes, hello, this podcast is for anyone with a fascination and the amazing nocturnal mammals that fill our skies at night. And we're back continuing with a brand new series. If you don't know by now, episodes will be released every other Wednesday from now until the spring. If you're new to BatChat, welcome along. I'm Steve Rowe. I'm an ecologist and in my spare time a trustee for the Bat Conservation Trust. This summer I had the opportunity to head out to the island of Jersey which is the largest of the Channel Islands of the British Isles. Whilst there I couldn't resist popping into Jersey zoo owned by the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, established by conservationist Gerald Durrell in 1959. They have a captive breeding programme for a colony of Livingstone's fruit bats, which make up 90% of the global captive population. And with just 1000, estimated to be left in the wild, this population is essential for the survival of the species. We're joined Dominic Wormell inside the enclosure as he explains how the colony is managed on a daily basis.

Dominic Wormell: 1:57

Come down, she's very uncoordinated. There's an old Rodricks back there called them Denzel. So he's, so every single that in here has a name, every single bath has transformed a chip. And the beauty of that is that we also you want to manage that colony on individual basis, every single batch is checked three times a day, every single batch is made of own medical records, its own behaviour records, everything. So if you don't have that individual knowledge, you can't work out things like inter birth periods, you know, social violence. And because we know every single bat in here, we've had some really interesting studies on their social behaviour, and how that relates to their cortisol levels, individual bats that maybe have higher urinary cortisol levels have a lower social ranking, found now that they do have these groups that they have friends that they stick with, that has implications on how you separate that off. So some banks like to stay with this bunch. Now that's like, you know, standard error. So we're really quite unique in that I think other institutions that maybe have bats in the UK, they don't manage them on an individual basis, or count them every single time, you know, which I personally I think he really should do to actually because they're the same as if you're managing a primate you know, there's a lot of social behaviour, there's a lot of things that can go wrong on a daily basis with an individual bat. So you've you've got to be honest, our biggest problem although this is a nice big area here and they can fly right round in this sort of elongated donut that we've created in one loop right round is almost 100 metres. And we've seen bats go five 600 metres and continuous fly which is is great to see is the fact that you know you've got your roof sight and your feet sight are essentially the same space and obviously in the wild fruit bats will go in many kilometres, you know, some like you know, the Tirpitz fan Paris, fly over to Northern Sumatra, and then back to the Malay Peninsula. And so in that sense, you're not bad animals aren't, they're not going to be as fit as wild animals nowhere near as fit. And so managing that is quite a bit of a challenge, you know, so you do have lots and lots of feed sights and will vary where we put food so we can keep the colony kind of moving around as it were, but also to try and break down and that sort of dominance hierarchy, which those dominant male backs what hands up then we've been really stingy and they can lose the ability to fly because they're gonna it's going to stay right so good site for food, it's a good site for a heat source, I'm just gonna stay here and my breathing opportunities we increased because I have more females coming into that area. So um, she's not aggressive so she'll just sort of prompt you to say I'm here. Give me a piece of banana.

Steve Roe: 5:09

And you said I mean we've come into this like say doughnut shape and it's it's always wet outside. And we've come in and all the kits gone really humid and it's really hot and humid in here. It's very different to I've seen in other institutions where I'm this is very lush and green. It's really nice John it tell us a bit about the history of the building when it was built and, and why you've gone through this really nice doughnut shape and, and all the lush green vegetation.

Dominic Wormell: 5:31

Yeah well actually the vegetation usually looks a lot better later on in the year, but ya know, it was it was there was two driving forces really one we really needed to give the bats more space because they weren't flying. And we knew that we had to get them fitter if we were going to increase our breeding success. And you know, back then we didn't, we didn't have much money like or any conservation charity, we're always skinned as it were. And so we hit on the idea that let's get let's get a second hand tomato tunnel. Yeah, so he got one second and tomato tomahto, which literally cost peanuts. For us, it was almost given to us. And then we dug out the floor of that. So we immediately created this height. And then to that we added another tunnel, tomato Tang, each of these tunnels is 40 metres long. And we dug out the valley again. So we've created this great big elongated doughnut, so the bats could fly around. And the reason you know it's making it cheap was one, we didn't have much money. But also, we wanted to use recycled material as much as possible, we didn't want to build a sort of Crystal Palace built of glass and heated with oil. Because that the message of that was so unsustainable, and we need a message of, you know, if we're going to save lives since fruit bats, we need to think about living sustainably on this planet. If the people on the commercials are going to have a future and survive on the animals, they need to think about sustainability on their islands protecting their water sources. And so, you know, I'd like to think that we we need to think of Island Earth, you know, we've got resources and we need to protect everything we need to protect the bardez T on planet Earth, because that's key to the ecosystem is working and therefore supporting us. So we've used recycled tires that have been packed with Earth as building blocks with used glass bottle windows to make a prettier effect. And which would look lovely when the light twinkles through windy, we've used straw bales for some of the walls, and also mud plaster and limewash. On the top of that, the tires. You know building the tire walls was the materials don't cost anything. Yeah, but obviously it takes a lot of time. So we had to have 200 volunteers are smashing these tires with Earth. And to fill a one tire you're talking 2025 minutes, it takes 23 wheelbarrows of Earth inside one tire. And when you finished, if you've done it properly, that tire will weigh 85 to 100 kilos. So that's a massive block that's immovable. So it's really heavy. But also, if you think about it's got a massive thermal capacity. So because we've essentially got two greenhouses here, even if we got a little bit of watery sunshine, like we have today, and it's an overcast day, it's pretty miserable outside, it's raining, but the sun is still quite high. So you're getting a lot of radiant heat coming in here. So we've got well will the building we've got to say 2324 degrees easily by itself. So Will those tires, those 300 rammed earth tires go up to 23 degrees centigrade. And then when the temperature drops tonight, say to eight 910 degrees, those tires will radiate that heat, and so on. On this side, on the western side of the wall, we've got this huge gabion wall. So it's 110 tonnes of waste granite rocks, the same thing there, it's all open. So the hot air will go inside that granite wall, heat up that granite wall. And that becomes a big heat sink as well. All this earth that's in below how it was scooped out from this, this valley in huge amount of Earth, we start out the other side of the granite wall. So that heat is going to come this way, it's not going to go the other way. And we kept both ends of that when you go outside you see this huge fire engine tires. So those are the old tires from the fire engine at the airport. So they cap on and that's quite nice when people leave they sort of think oh is recycled giant tires there as well. And the topic also have moped tires to sit on and over a tire bench to sit on. Which a lot of kids really love here and it sort of gives them that message. But one of the most amazing things is that people come in here and they see that in the daylight. And if you go to other institutions, other zoos. Sadly, most of the time, they just perpetuate those beliefs about bats, so they put them in a cage. It's dark. It's almost encouraging people to go oh aren't that scary and they go Ah, so you're reinforcing those misconceptions about bats, which are the most wonderful animals on the planet as we all know. But so by people coming in here, if we try and make it look like a wonderful rainforest, Paradise, all the things we don't want to lose, you see a bat, it's beautiful orange eyes and it's big Mickey Mouse ears. It's essentially an upside down teddy bear that no one's gonna hate. They see them interacting together and nursing their pumps. It literally changes people just there. And then in that five minutes, and I've seen people come in, and it's bats and they stop and they look at them and they go silent, and they think it's challenging their their their conception, their perceptions of what a bat is. And then once they've been challenged, then they see some, then someone goes on a cue. And some of their black angels really aren't they, when they leave, they change their opinion has changed. That's for me is the biggest possible to see people's being changed. And of course, the this bat is such a wonderful looking bat. It's probably the most fantastic species to do such as

Steve Roe: 11:35

its it has a bit more about living. You've got two species in Eco, Livingston's. And Rodriguez tells a bit more about the live instincts and where did the original population for these come from?

Dominic Wormell: 11:44

Well, the limitations were, they come from and Joanne Emma Healy, which are two islands in the Comoros goo, which is the top of the Mozambique Channel. So northwest of Madagascar, back in the 80s, there was a guy in from Reading University, we wanted to go out there to sort of rediscover them because there was thought to be extinct. Yeah. So he got a little bit of money from Gerald Dara, and he went out and Expedition and he, and he did indeed find them high up in roosting high up in the mountains there. And then, you know, subsequently, more expeditions, when it happened, it was thought that they were really, really in a critical condition with a prognosis that wasn't going to end with hurricanes and typhoons. And it was deemed that we needed to have an assurance population in human care. And so we went out in 9293, and 95. To collect 18 individuals, it was really quite difficult to collect females. So it took those three expeditions to get them. And they came back to Jersey. And we started the captive population. The the never bred as well as Rodriguez, the rod reeks came back in 1978 grabbed that time back then, when Darryl was on Rodriguez, which is a tiny remote island in the Indian Ocean, it was thought to be 70 to 100, individual Rodriguez left, that's crazy. But through a very, very healthy captive population of Rodriguez. Now, amazing things have happened on restoration on the Rodrique. Since there's 20,000, bats, Rotary through bats on retreats now. But the broderie has been a small amount they bred really easily in captivity, and that popular captive population grew really quite, quite well. But with a live instance, the critical species out of the two species we have here, it didn't breed at all. Well, you know, and we were, you know, up until about six, seven years ago, we were still at very low numbers, but lower 50 individuals in captivity. And it's only in recent years that, you know, through the development of given more space, that we managed to expand the population here. And now we're exporting to other institutions says three institutions that have lived since fruit that is still critically low activity. Still only, you know, 1300 left in the wild, you know, and you know, fires, hurricanes, typhoons when you've got to a species, so low, low stochastic events can be just to be devastating. But I'm really hopeful what's happening now, I really think we, you know, we had five perhaps this year, we've had 16 Pups last year, you know, if we can get another institution to work with the species? Well, I really think we can start to massively expand this captive population. And we're no way out of the woods in the wild. You know, there's been some amazing work in recent years out in the wild, there's been an NGO that was was helped to be set up by Bristol universe, Bristol zoo and Daraa wildlife, because we were the two institutions that worked on their captive population in the early days. NGO was set up to work on the biodiversity on the commodes, do surveys but also work with the local people on agroforestry techniques and improving soils. The whole thing about looking at the ecosystem as a whole and the fact that they need the ecosystem if they're going to survive. those items, and that's been massively beneficial. But to restore a lot of habitat is going to take a long time that one of the key things is protecting the, the key resources of the limits as fruit bats. And that's, it's gonna be essential to work with local communities to do that in the short term, but the longer term, trees are getting bit planted into the ground. And so if we can, if we can get the, you know, the, the habitat that's there, you know, buffered as much as possible, I think we'll save the species in the wild.

Steve Roe: 16:11

And it's, I mean, these these guys won't be released into the wild once that habitat is restored, if that wild population doesn't bounce back, is to very long term plan, perhaps to think about doing some sort of release programme

Dominic Wormell: 16:22

here. Yeah, I think, you know, if tragedy struck, you know, you need to have animals. So you're always trying to manage animals in a way that they you could release them, I wouldn't release these as they are at the moment, they'd have to go into training, as it were, you know, I don't know if you know, about the, you know, the chuff release programme that was done on the north coast here. And that was, you had large cages that had quite similar to this, where you had captive chops that were flying, and then you do a sort of release, recall, release, recall, yeah, animals are getting fitter all the time. So you could sort of see a picture where captive bats went to the commercials, and you could set up a similar type thing in the Commonwealth. And indeed, I personally think we need to be thinking about that there's the on the Solomon Islands, there's a monkey face back, which is really getting critical. Now. There is a bird bird centre, they're working with the endangered bird species there, we need to think about working with maybe the, the endangered bat species on those islands. And doing a captive set up there. One of the reasons we had we didn't do a captive set up in the early days, because he was so politically unstable on the controls, yeah, probably is not the capacity there to do it. But if you think about the Rodriguez fruit that when the, when we set up the captive population, we had a captive population in the Black River ovaries and Mauritius, with also a captive population here as well. And now you could argue that the Rodriguez fruit back, there isn't really a need to have a captive insurance population, if the numbers are up at 20,000. But we're nowhere near that with a live instance, we've got a long way to go. But if it is in captivity, we'll use this fantastic animals and Macedon as much as possible.

Steve Roe: 18:15

And in terms of the visitors, you have any sort of ideas in terms of how many visitors come to see the attraction? And what's when you've watched visitors engage with the attraction? Do you send the takeaway? positive experience? Yeah,

Dominic Wormell: 18:25

in Yeah, I do. Very much. So and, and we many, many years ago, we did a little kind of survey thing about people's favourite animal at the zoo. And, you know, I think the gorillas came out on top. Yeah, that's for people second with their own beat bears. I mean, that was pretty remarkable. Really, this is people you hear often it sort of half past three quarters before in the wintertime, screaming landscaping about go to the bat, you might say, because it's winter, and it's warm. But kids love them, you know, kids, they do absolutely love the bats. And it's, it's kind of the our societal conditioning. You know, but you can sometimes hear adults say, no, no, the bats, you know, their pests, you know, the, instead of always conditioning their children, but it's, I think, this changes public's mind. And we did a recent online survey, this was actually a bit of research that was done over the pandemic period, I don't know if you've seen it. It's where we show some video of a keeper interacting with a bat and, and sort of talking about the bat and sort of then, and then it was actually me. And there's a little puppet and you go, and if you look under the wing, there's a pup here. And then gauging the response after that went out to hundreds of people to see what they they thought before about that. And then after watching the bat very closely, and it's amazing how it changes people's opinion, when they can see bats in that different way. You know, to them, it's just essentially it's an upside down puppy, isn't it for people who don't really know much about that, you know, many of you feel this way in here, you know, incredible material. You know, that muscle really, isn't it? You know, it's just, we could go into the main area. Yeah, if you want. Yeah, I mean, we'll get a lot of bats coming down really close to our biggest problem we have now is because we've got so many in this area. Now. We need to move somewhere. are so many of your listeners as a very large greenhouse kicked out. Yeah. Is that we're having to wash down every day. And it's you know, we don't want to limit breeding with any contraceptive implants. We just need to get this population up to sort of to 300 as quickly as we can.

Steve Roe: 20:56

For expansion is definitely on the cards then.

Dominic Wormell: 20:58

Yeah, definitely. We've had five pups already, we can go inside and see some now if you're great. That particular female, if you want to give her some banana, she will be she'll snatch it. So don't feed it with your fingers. You see, that's the dominant I forgotten. I think he's called Nazarene. But he's got. So he's got he's not pregnant. He's fat. He's overweight. So he's, he likes to hover around here and keep this area. But that's a female there. She looks like a nice, good

Steve Roe: 22:26

white. And in terms of diet, you know, is it just bananas? Or is it a mixture of all sorts of bits and pieces? No,

Dominic Wormell: 22:32

that when they don't get bananas at all, on special occasions, like now, they'll get there's, there's no UVB penetrating this building. So what we have to do is cover for that. We're not sure what their requirements are in terms of vitamin D. I don't know how much research has been on micro at bats in that sense. But so we give them this as a leafy to primate pellet, this stuff is red stuff in these baskets. So it's almost like they're not crazy, go crazy for where they will eat it. But it takes a lot of sort of nutritional basis. And so you know, there's no commercial sort of fruit that nutritional food concentrates in a way I think there are some things in in Australia, possibly, but over here, you know, it's, so we use a primate defeater wrong. And so that's going to cover vitamin D, B vitamins. Just it just gives us reassurance that they are getting certain box nutritional boxes ticked, then in the afternoon, they will get vegetables and fruit. And that rotates. And a lot of that is grown on our organic farm here are a lot of the produce there. So they'll also get things like Willow bamboo in the router, as forage. So you'll get some, because in the wild, they do eat a lot of leaf. Yeah, so um, as you know, probably know that you know, they have a very short alimentary canal. And they'll spit out food, see, like that one's just spat out. So that's a lot of fibre, non digestible fibre. So he's spitting that out, because he was not going to have a big, bulky gap like us that can digest those such things. And so they you know, we've measured their gut passage time, and it's around sort of 50 minutes. It's craziness. And again, you know, if you think about that, that's a sort of weight saving thing, if you're on a mammal that has heavy mammal bones, as opposed to like birds, but you're gonna have to think about weight conservation time. For now, we have a little sort of little group who focuses in on the banana.

Steve Roe: 24:57

Since when they become active in do flight, is that is that all the way through the day was at nighttime, or

Dominic Wormell: 25:03

will it be more active overnight, if you can imagine they in the wild, they would have an active phase, midday ish, but that's mainly just around their roof cycle was around the roof, cyber, but then what they'll do is they'll fly off to their feed sites, wherever they might be that day, and they'll use thermals for that. And so they are they are flying during the day, and there'll be active sort of late afternoon, early evening, mainly and then they'll be at their feed site most of that night, and then come back. But so what, what we've done is obviously, we have to try and fit it in around keepers day because you know, we want them to be a bit active while we're here. So we put that breakfast in, that goes in at 10, half past 10. They're a little bit active, then they're checked. They're counted while they're roosting eight o'clock in the morning, and then they're counted again at half past 10 checked with their breakfast feed, but then they get their main vegetable and fruit feed at sort of three o'clock or three. They're very active just before then. So then what we do is we sort of hold that back a bit Because let them know it's arrived in the building, and they're always around. And so that's kind of simulating them flying off to their feed sites, wherever they might be that day. Then I know you've got something you probably haven't feed this one gently. Not snatcher. Eugen you've kind of see that, you know, quite dominant males will be far more relaxed with humans. So let's walk around this way, we're here and we'll go and see some pups. This material, obviously, it's all off cuts of people's gardens or astroturf and things like that. So but it's nice in hardware, and isn't it, it's hardware, and but it also allows detritus to permeate through. So if you have two layers, you're, you're creating a filter bed. So if you if you lift up that there, it's really, really quite clean. So yeah, so you're filtering ruining things, probably is because we've got this plant disease going on, it's not covering. So you can see down there usually that the plants would basically eat all this up very quickly, these plants here don't seem effective, they look pretty good. One of the things that you see, obviously in captivity is that mothers are more tolerant than normal, they would be in the wild. Yeah. And so that's last year is pup is still associating with the mother. So when that mother gives birth this year, that can be a problem, because you might get competition for the nipples. And that then sometimes what you have to do is separate last year's pap off, just while the young neonate is sort of getting a foothold as it were at all of the sort of feed areas, because they will have some little bit conflicts around the feed sites is so soft. So if you're gonna imagine the edge of that, that wing in areas you want it to be soft, you don't want any so the whole of this building padded pillows down the middle, everything soft. And that was especially important when we were we introduced the bats into this area because they couldn't fly well at all. So we had to create a soft environment. And

Steve Roe: 28:38

that's why you're saying you've chosen some of these larger leaf plants. So if there's a crash land and they've got some soft land, and

Dominic Wormell: 28:43

then you know when the plants are in better health than they will be later in the year. We all try to scan through your cupboard the whole fall. It's just a cushions like those steps, they're sort of tires, soft tires in the cupboard with astroturf. Yeah, I mean, it looks a lot better than that. It looks terrible at the moment love these plants. So we're just coming up to this is a group of mainly younger bats. So these will be some pups over the last last year in the year before. So they're all you can tell. They're not territorial, yet. They sort of hang out together and there's a Mother's Day with a pup as well. Look how beautiful their wing membranes. The few of those little white dots are where they've had scraps before and it's the thumbnail. Some of the older territorial males like that one we saw over there they'll have real peppered wings. This female she can smell the banana. So if you've got a bit of an honour we might be lucky she might show that the mums get quite some because we give them a little bit of extra banana we give the mums a little bit of extra banana just to help this one here see the pop up on the on the window. This I think this is a nightmare so she's a good mother and they get used to you know keep coming forward and giving them the banana just takes that edge over having to frantically come compete if they're not getting enough she's she's she's a dominant female so she was She's no problem why as you'll get say, like this. This guy here is That's enough. And there's one here called kadogo who's really quite strong. This one here. He's got to keep an eye on make sure we get to know

Steve Roe: 31:00

we've got several puts together they're all clearly made and and given birth the same time a year even in a capitalist environment then,

Dominic Wormell: 31:07

yeah, it's different. At first it didn't have any sort of seasonality, but we do see that. It's mainly it starts sort of early Well mid April, May is the main pumping month and someday we'll go right on to August in the wild. I think it's mainly August you'll see so you sort of when you go into the wet season of fruit Weber's is higher for when they're lactating. Because initially, you know that their resources here are pretty much the same all year round. They appear to lose that seasonality but now they definitely appear to be getting it back. So again, you've got two pups here we've got a pop up there. And there's a pup ship female showing us a pup there next to the heap then we got over here that that female with her pups, she'll come over with the with the pups, as with all bats, I suppose that the little pup will just cling on latched on to the nipples under the arm. It's about three, three and a half weeks, and then they start to leave them at their site after feed, but up until that point, most of the time they will will carry them one of the things that people do commenting on is the smell. Unfortunately, they focus on that more than the bats there's no there's no denying that let go. The problem is sometimes you'll get a lot of them well that's the youngster they're probably near a wild Wait, I would say is another female here with a pop coming under

Steve Roe: 33:39

and you were saying they have different areas. So you've got groups that that say they tend to stay in those little groups

Dominic Wormell: 33:45

tend to Yeah, you'll say that females will stay. There'll be several areas where they sort of congregate with their parents. So if you look behind you now you're getting a lot of that showing interest. Like I said, they got this incredible sense of smell but when you see people looking at them now they're not screaming. The other thing was that the reason I got into this is the mind weaves into nature conservation. He was he was the first Warden on the island Ramin and we used to go ask the guys are the kid wanting to do something, I never thought I would work fruit bats or tamarind because I came here on summer school, and then I'll apply for jobs, see what happens. I've done a sort of zoology degree and all the rest of it. And then I wanted to go to the rainforests. So came out to our work here and now went out to Bolivia after a year to look for little primates out there. Now been in 34 years, so you get trapped because you? Yeah, the stories and the issues that you have you you have to stay with them. Until some experience.

Steve Roe: 35:01

That's great. Dominic, thank you very much.

Dominic Wormell: 35:03

Cheers. Thank you. My pleasure.

Steve Roe: 35:08

A massive thanks to Dan for having me along for the day. We've put a link in the show notes to the Livingston's page on the Jersey website. Have you enjoyed this instalment of series five? If so, please tell the world about Bat Chat on your social media channels. And we'll be back in two weeks time where we'll be walking with bats. See you then