Two Bats and a Spider

Pregnant bats and the world's largest spider; your average evening in the Amazon. Studying bats allows biologists to make valuable connections between the animals and their environments, as insect eaters thrive in jungles and fruit-eaters act as seed dispersers and plant pollinators. We may not have netted an incredible number that evening, but the two bats documented provide important insights on the biodiversity of their forest home. This is a segment in a series about The Field Museum's Rapid Inventory No. 27, a journey through the forests between the rivers Tapiche and Blanco in Peru. Every year, the Museum's conservation group [the Action Center!] gathers together leading scientific experts across a number of disciplines (botany, zoology, geology, and anthropology) in order to gain an understanding of little-known areas of the rainforest. They work with local communities and their governments to help inform decisions made for conserving these unique, precious, and threatened parts of the world.