Leading bat expert: Dr Emma Teeling
She has been called Ireland’s “Batwoman”, and is a leading international expert on how bats have evolved their flight and echo-location abilities.
Now Dr Emma Teeling talks about her childhood fascination with biology and the science of bats in the latest issue of Science Spin magazine.
Emma, who is is Director of the Centre for Irish Bat Research, and is a lecturer and researcher at UCD, has spent much of her career studying these often misunderstood little creatures.
She explains in the Science Spin interview that she has been fascinated by the natural world since she was a young girl, and she loved physics and biology at school. She also talks about her work and how she progressed through her career.
“It is not quite a profession in the traditional sense,” she says. I think that studying science in school enabled me to realise that this was what I really wanted to do.”
The advice Emma would give students thinking of a science career is to “take the subjects that you love at college level, at least for the first degree. You want to get high grades in your degree then you can study anything at fourth level.”
Breakthrough bat research
Emma hails from Dublin and graduated from UCD’s Zoology Department in 1995. For her doctoral research at Queen’s University Belfast, she investigated bat genetics.
Then her groundbreaking paper in the prestigious journal Science totally rearranged the bat family tree. Previous research suggested that large “megabats” evolved first, but Emma’s genetic analysis showed that “microbats” predated their larger, seeing counterparts. Microbats use echolocation, whereas most megabats don’t.
In 2007 Emma won a €1 million science award. The prestigious Science Foundation Ireland President of Ireland Young Researcher Award has allowed her to study the molecular evolution of sensory perception.
The aim is to identify which genetic mutations and genes are most likely to cause deafness and blindness in humans and mammals such as bats.
Bats are friendly
While bats have a bloodthirsty reputation, Emma says bats are “lovely creatures” that are very friendly.
“I think they are absolutely beautiful. I also think they have had terrible bad press. People are frightened of them”
- Bat expert Dr Emma Teeling
Bats have a soft side too: they are loving mothers and constantly groom their pups. Injured bats that are hand-reared by humans can become pets. “They recognise people and will purr in the hands of their owners. They are wonderful creatures, actually very friendly.”
Now Emma’s lab at UCD is developing new techniques to count bats, and to identify them into species.
“Bats regulate insects,” she explains. “If one species is to go extinct we have no idea what this will do to Ireland’s natural landscape. All environments depend on the species that are present in them. To remove one may cause the entire ecosystem to crumble. Therefore we must carefully monitor these environments and species.”
Learn more
Read the Science Spin interview with Emma Teeling
Listen to an RTÉ interview with Emma about her research into the genetics of goats (MP3 file)
Visit the Centre for Irish Bat Research website
