Bat Speak: Social Calls and Communication in Bats

[Alyson Brokaw <>]

Hi All,

My name is Alyson Brokaw, a first year graduate student at Humboldt State
University. I am developing a thesis project on the structure and variation
of social calls in bats and how bats use these calls to communicate. This
will involved recording ultrasonic calls of bats from roosts and using
bio-acoustic software to analyze for fine variation in frequency and
pattern. I will also be conducting a field based playback experiment to
determine how bats respond behaviorally to these different social calls,
and will investigate the possible use of these calls to attract bats, with
implications for improving net captures of target species or attracting
bats for mitigation purposes.

In addition to the traditional structure of grant proposals and funding
applications, I have decided to try a modern, social networking based
approach to project funding and use crowd-sourcing to help support my
research. The site I have chosen to launch my project is RocketHub, a
crowd-sourcing website that is science and research friendly.

My project site can be found here: Bat Speak: What Bats Say and Why We Should Listen

I am contacting all of you to share this project and the opportunity to
directly fund real-time research in bat ecology, animal communication and
bioacoustics.

Thank you for your support. If there are any further questions or desire
for more information about myself or the project, I can be contacted at
this email

Sincerely,

Alyson Brokaw