Essay On Undergraduate Research And Creative Activity Symposium-- Ashland University

On April 10th, 2013, Ashland University hosted the Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Symposium. This event was designed to allow students to showcase their work in various fields, and allowed students to explore the different disciplines that are being offered at the university.
During the symposium, I interviewed a woman named Caitlin Duncan. She is a biology student, and very active in the university community. Her poster, poster number three was titled, A Fall Acoustic Survey of the Insectivorous Bats of the Mohican State Forest. Her faculty sponsor is Merrill Tawse, who is a member of the faculty in the Department of Biology and Toxicology. Duncan’s poster focused on the hibernating/hiding habits of insectivorous bats, particularly the bats called Myotis lucifugus. Duncan used a Batbox bat detector to try to determine where the bats are hiding or hibernating during the day, to try to find out more information about their habits.
The Batbox detector was set to a 45 kHz frequency so that the bats’ calls could be heard and tracked. It was also used to determine the level of activity that the bats were having in any particular area. This was good because they could use the Batbox to exclude areas that they believed had high levels of bat activity but turned out to not have much. They also used the Batbox to track the bats and find out where there were higher levels of bat activity, so the use of the Batbox was very good for her project.
Duncan did some very unique research for this Symposium. Not much research has been done on bat activity and hibernation in the Mohican State Forest, so what she did for a project added a lot to the scientific study of bats and their habits. She studied the bats for nearly two months, going to the forest to get readings twice a week. She is going to continue to monitor the bats to try to find out more about their habits, their hibernation schedules, and their eating habits by using the Batbox. She will continue to gather data on the bats and then she will write a paper on them and where they congregate and hibernate.