Bats and fungi

April 13, 2018
Haelewaters
Danny Haelewaters grabbing for Pteronotus parnellii bats in his mistnet.
Last summer Pfister Lab graduate student, Danny Haelewaters, teamed up with 5 other researchers to capture bats

in a cloud-forested reserve in Darien, Panama to examine parastic associations. The team captured 227 bats representing 17 species and found blood-sucking bat flies on over half the bats. 30 of the bat flies were parasitized by ectoparasitic fungi in the order Laboulbeniales. Some of these fungi are still undescribed. 

Read the resulting research paper, published this week in Parasite, here.