Biology professor shares her unusual enthusiasm with students
By Steven Blodgett
Lawrence Today magazine, Fall 2004
Her
students fondly call her the “bat lady” or simply “Batwoman.” A
feature article in the Appleton Post-Crescent in March, titled “Holy
bat detector: Lawrence professor immersed in the world of bats,” noted
that, while she hasn’t yet found a way to take wing, she regularly
puts on the ears of a bat through the use of a “bat detector” to
hear the nocturnal symphony of the bat world.
Clearly, Jodi Sedlock, entering her third year at Lawrence
as assistant professor of biology, is quickly making a name for herself,
both on and off campus.
I caught up with her in Youngchild Hall before her planned departure for
a one-month field trip to the Philippines in August, where she would again
haunt the tropical forests on Mount Banahaw in southeastern Luzon in search
of the objects of her affection.
As a young adult, Sedlock wasn’t particularly enamored of flying mammals
or even with science for that matter. A Wisconsin native, after graduating
from Waukesha North High School she attended the Center for Creative Studies
in Detroit and then the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, to study
drawing, design, and painting.
While at the Art Institute, she happened to accept a co-op position with
the Mammal Division of the Field Museum, which serendipitously ended up
changing her career path. Using her artistic talents, she became
an illustrator in the bat collection and found herself drawing bat skulls
to her heart’s content. That, in turn, sparked her interest in ecology
and biology, and finding a mentor at the museum led her to a love of not
only bats but of science. Her association with the Field Museum continues
to this day, having grown from a relationship first as an undergraduate,
then a graduate student, and now as a professional research associate.
For several years now, her laboratory has been the Philippine archipelago,
first for the completion of her University of Illinois at Chicago doctoral
dissertation on the ecology, community organization, and conservation of
insectivorous bats and now
for a long-term
population study of the bat communities of the Philippines.
"The Philippines is a unique place in the world in terms of biodiversity.
First, it is in the tropics, where species diversity increases as you move
closer to the equator because of longer growing seasons and the stability
of food sources across seasons. Second,
it is an
archipelago, one that has changed over millions of years as glaciers melted
and sea levels rose, breaking land masses into smaller parts,” says
Sedlock. “Archipelagos
like the Philippines have high endemicity, meaning that a large
number of species are found only there and nowhere else in the world.
As highland
areas
turned into islands, animal populations and plant populations also were
broken up and over time evolved into new species.”
Sedlock is currently engaged in a project documenting and describing
the diversity and distribution of insectivorous bats in the Philippines.
She
is also interested in studying the communal ecology of bats from a conservation
perspective, to learn how many bat species are able to co-exist simultaneously
within certain
habitats
and how humans’ alteration of the environmental landscape, such as
through deforestation, may affect species diversity.
"Of all of the mammals in the Philippines, insectivorous bats are rather
poorly known,” observes Sedlock. “In large part, that is simply
because they are very difficult to study.” Fruit bats, which use
their eyes to forage for prey, can be trapped in mist nets and physically
studied with
relative ease. Insect-eating bats, which use sound to orient themselves,
deftly avoid being captured in nets. “In the Philippines, we learned
a lot about fruit bats very quickly,” she adds. “Insectivorous
bats, however, have proven very illusive, so we have had to come up with
different ways of studying them.”
To catalog the bat species she researches, Sedlock utilizes an acoustic
device, a so-called “bat detector,” to fingerprint their echolocation
calls by bringing the frequencies down to the audible range of humans. Echolocation
is how certain bats use sound
to “see” or
find their prey.
Insectivorous bats send out through their noses or mouths distinct calls
that are unique to each species. When the sound bounces off an insect
or picks up the beating of the insect’s wings, it “echos” back
to the bat, which can then hone in on its dinner. Different echolocation
signals are used by different species for finding different feeding targets.
"Just as all birds have different calls, we can recognize bats by their
unique calls,” explains Sedlock. “When we think of resource
partitioning and species specialization, we often think of the Galapagos
Islands and the
finches that live there. They are a wonderful example of evolutionary adaptation — different
finches with different-sized bills go after different food sources. A large-billed
finch, for example, will be more efficient at eating large seeds and draw
upon that as its food source.”
For insectivorous bats, the species specialization is in the attributes
of their echolocation call, which can vary in frequency or pitch, the
duration of the call, the time between calls, and the overall intensity
of the call. “Depending
on the frequency, duration, or intensity, one bat might be more adept at
foraging in one habitat type than another,” says Sedlock. “A
bat with a higher pitch, for instance, is more efficient at foraging for
smaller insects.”
Beyond being intrinsically interesting to her as a scientist and bat
aficionado, Sedlock’s research has broader ramifications, not only through the
sharing of her work within the scientific community — the species
collections from the taxonomy work she is doing in the Philippines are
donated to the Field Museum — but also in
her teaching at Lawrence.
"I always use my research in my teaching,” she says. “In
teaching the course Conservation Biology, for example, I often
draw upon my firsthand experiences with conservation agencies in the Philippines
and elsewhere
to elaborate on a point.”
"In my Terrestrial Field Ecology course, one of the hands-on
projects the students do is a bat study. I have students go out with bat
detectors and map the big and little brown bat populations of forest preserves
in the Appleton area,” explains
Sedlock. “They use the bat detectors to obtain acoustic samplings
and identify species, then generate hypotheses as to where they would expect
these bats to be.” Students in the course also go up to Björklunden for
a weekend each year to net bats. “We go out on two nights and
trap bats, and the students compare their observations with the field work
they
have been engaged in around Appleton.”
Sedlock also taught a tutorial on bat ecology for the second time this
past spring, with five students enrolled. One of her students, Kelly
Scheer, ’05,
from Lisbon, Iowa, spent the summer living at Björklunden, conducting
an independent study project that mapped bat activity across the Door County
landscape. Sedlock hopes to work with Scheer in correlating the student’s
findings with the research the professor has been doing in the Philippines.
“Last summer, I brought two Lawrence students, Rachel Gates, ’06,
Mahtomedi, Minnesota, and Christina Balch, ’03, Hollandale, who had just
graduated, with me to the Philippines,” says Sedlock. “It was a wonderful
opportunity for them to experience field work in the tropics, even with
the wild pigs, pit vipers, and trekking uphill all the time on forest paths
that
were overgrown or even non-existent. Next year, I plan on taking two students
with me as well.”
Perhaps the best indication that Professor Sedlock’s enthusiasm for
bats is infectious among her students, is the fact that a number of biology
students have opted to sign up for independent study to work with her on
diet analysis. Diet analysis is a polite way of saying that these student
scientists are sorting through loads of bat guano — dried bat droppings — brought
back from the Philippines, examining the guano through a microscope in
order to identify specific insects from their parts and help determine the
bat’s
food source. “Because of the detailed nature of trying to identify
the insect remains, it can be quite tedious work,” says Sedlock with
wry humor, “but some students really enjoy it, because
it is like putting together a puzzle.”
In summing up why she so enjoys sharing her bat fascination with her
students, Sedlock puts it this way, “I don’t
know if bats can really teach us humans anything new, but what they can
do is inspire us to open our minds and think in a different way. When you
learn
about how bats perceive the world, it forces you to step out of your own
terrestrial vision-centered life and see things in a different way, to come
to appreciate
those bizarre aspects of nature that we so quickly want
to
write off.” And, she is quick to add, “Yes, it can be a challenge.
Not everybody thinks bats are cute.”