My entire last month was a blur of hectic activity, related mostly to the opening of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory in Gorongosa National Park. This kept me from updating the blog, but it was definitely worth it – the Lab is a fantastic facility that will serve as a research base to current and future scientists in the park, and as a center of advanced biodiversity education for Mozambican students for years to come (I just finished teaching its first African entomology workshop there, and it was great.) We are also creating the Gorongosa Synoptic Collection, which has the ambitious goal of documenting, over the next 15-20 years, all (or at least as much as physically possible) multicellular diversity of the park – I will try to post frequent updates from this effort. In the meantime, I would like to invite all biologists to come and work in Gorongosa – there is an entire universe of unexplored life out there, waiting to be studied and saved. Contact me if you are interested – Gorongosa wants your research projects, and we will help you make them happen.

One of the many benefits of having a permanent and safe logistical base in a place as biologically rich as Gorongosa is that I am not afraid to bring and leave behind my expensive high tech gear, and experiment with it. For months I had been dying to try out my high speed photography system, and finally was able to use it last month to shoot flying bats in the comfort of our lab. Now, bats have been photographed in flight by many, and the technology to do so has existed since at least the 1980’s. But, as far as I could tell, few had tried to take images of flying bats using the white background technique, made popular by the Meet Your Neighbours project, and I really wanted to try it.

The setup for photographing bats in flight will be familiar to anybody who has ever worked with high speed photography: I used an external, very fast shutter (6mS response time, 10-50 times faster than the shutter in a typical SLR) mounted on a Canon 7D with a 100mm macro lens, triggered by two intersecting laser beams, and with four Canon flash heads that provided the illumination. Cognisys is a company that sells turnkey solutions for high speed photography, and their excellent StopShot system is what created the basis of my setup. The tricky part was to create a stage where the bats’ flight path was relatively narrow, allowing me to illuminate it properly. Last year I photographed bats in a cave, which was relatively easy, but gave me little control over the lighting. I needed to restrict their movement better, and decided to bring a large diffusion box that I would then turn into a flight chamber for the bats.

The box was about 1 m (3 ft) long, giving even the largest Gorongosa species ample room to fly. On the sides of the box I cut out two small windows (covered with thin, clear Perspex) that allowed the laser beams to go through. The front of the box had to remain unobstructed to the lens, but something had to stop the bats from flying out; I ended up using a large piece of thin glass (and had to adjust the flashes so that they would not reflect off the glass). But somebody had to put the bats in there, and it was not going to be me (one word – rabies!)

Luckily, I got help from Jen Guyton, a Princeton graduate student and a bat specialist, who is working on her Ph.D. in Gorongosa. Since capturing bats to get samples of their DNA (or rather the DNA of their prey) was part of her nightly routine, Jen was able to bring live bats to my studio and control them while I took the photos. Once all the technical kinks were ironed out, the system worked like a charm – in a few minutes I would get multiple shots of each bat, and then the animal was removed from the chamber unharmed.

But some species turned out to be more difficult than others – members of the family Molossidae (my favorite bats) are not able to lift off from horizontal surfaces and thus could not fly in the box. Next month I plan to photograph them in the wild by combining this system with a UV light – I hope that the bats will be attracted to insects coming to the light (which they often are) and sooner or later will hit the laser trigger. Watch this space to see if it worked.

One final note – don’t try any of this at home! Nobody but professionals, vaccinated against rabies, legally permitted, and fully trained to handle live bats should ever attempt catching these animals. If you are interested in photographing bats, get in touch with a mammalogist at a nearby university or a conservation group that works with these mammals, and they may be able to help you. They are an awesome group of animals, but don’t risk their or your own life. Having seen Gorongosa bats’ unbelievably sharp, lyssavirus-carrying teeth in action, I now think of them as flying vipers – cool, beautiful and fast and, potentially, very deadly.