Tigga Kingston

Texas Tech University | TTU · Department of Biological Sciences

Many wild-animal species are harvested and sold as ornaments—a lucrative trade that contributes to the global extinction crisis and increasingly happens online. Unfortunately, research and policies addressing this threat mainly focus on charismatic and easily identified taxa, leaving the online trade in bats under-researched and bats poorly protect...

As human activities continue to negatively affect bat populations, bat conservation efforts continue to rely on questionnaires to understand human actions toward bats; however, the use of questionnaires constrains understanding by limiting the sample size to those who choose to participate, being subject to selection bias, and overall may not be th...

Bats are often considered to be objects of biophobia, i.e., the tendency to respond with a negative emotion, such as fear or disgust, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, existing studies have rarely compared both positive and negative emotions towards bats, leading to a potential negativity bias. This is crucial given the importance o...

Substantial global attention is focused on how to reduce the risk of future pandemics. Reducing this risk requires investment in prevention, preparedness, and response. Although preparedness and response have received significant focus, prevention, especially the prevention of zoonotic spillover, remains largely absent from global conversations. Th...

These guidelines are intended for all people who do fieldwork with bats in the field anywhere in the world. They update our previous IUCN Bat Specialist Group guidelines, which were developed specifically to address bat-related fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic. These guidelines address "ordinary" circumstances and aim to minimize the risk of...

Bats are often considered to be objects of biophobia, the tendency to respond with a negative emotion, such as fear or disgust, even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, existing studies have rarely compared both positive and negative emotions towards bats, leading to a potential negativity bias. This is crucial as emotions are important...

The emergence of SARS-like coronaviruses is a multi-stage process from wildlife reservoirs to people. Here we characterize multiple drivers—landscape change, host distribution, and human exposure—associated with the risk of spillover of zoonotic SARS-like coronaviruses to help inform surveillance and mitigation activities. We consider direct and in...

Large Old World fruit bats (LOWFBs), species of Pteropus, Acerodon, and related genera of large bats in the pteropodid subfamily Pteropodinae, play important roles as agents of dispersal and pollination across the Paleotropics. LOWFBs are also collectively the most threatened group of bats in the world, with 71% of extant species assessed as threat...

Implementation of a One Health approach varies considerably between different geographical regions and remains challenging to implement without greater inclusivity of different disciplinary capacity and expertise. We performed comparative analyses of abstracts presented at the 1st World One Health Congress (WOHC 2011) and 6th WOHC (2020) to explore...

The emergence of SARS-like coronaviruses is a multi-stage process from wildlife reservoirs to people. Here we characterize multivariate indicators associated with the risk of zoonotic spillover of SARS-like coronaviruses in different areas to help inform surveillance and mitigation activities. We consider direct and indirect transmission pathways b...

Bangladesh is at the ecological transition between the Indo-Himalayan and Indo-Chinese subregions. The country also has one of the highest human population densities in the world and only 6% remaining natural habitat, putting much of its biodiversity at risk. With more than 1455 species worldwide, bats are an important, but threatened, component of...

Bat species commonly comprise at least 50% of tropical mammalian assemblages, but Afrotropical bat faunas have been little studied leading to perceptions that they are depauperate. Here, we compare alpha taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity of insectivorous bats belonging to the narrow‐space foraging ensemble from a bat diversity hotsp...

Extreme heat is an underlying, less known driver of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) propagation in the environment that can operate in at least two ways. First, extreme heat can induce cellular structural changes in bacteria similar to those resulting from antibiotic stress, conferring antibiotic resistance. Second, extreme heat events can induce be...

Both plant size and distribution of plants and resources across landscapes are known to influence pollinator behavior and resulting plant reproductive success. However, the relative influence of these intrinsic and extrinsic factors is unknown. We evaluated the relative contribution of individual plant size and landscape variables to reproductive s...

Global changes in response to human encroachment into natural habitats and carbon emissions are driving the biodiversity extinction crisis and increasing disease emergence risk. Host distributions are one critical component to identify areas at risk of viral spillover, and bats act as reservoirs of diverse viruses. We developed a reproducible ecolo...

Aim: Comprehensive, global information on species' occurrences is an essential biodiversity variable and central to a range of applications in ecology, evolution, biogeography and conservation. Expert range maps often represent a species' only available distributional information and play an increasing role in conservation assessments and macroeco...

The hunting of bats for food and medicine is one of the greatest threats to bat conservation. While hunting for consumption is the focus of increased attention, the specific medicinal uses of bats are poorly documented, limiting mitigation efforts. Here, we determine the distribution of bat hunting for food and medicinal use and characterize medici...

Bats comprise a quarter of all mammal species, provide key ecosystem services and serve as effective bioindicators. Automated methods for classifying echolocation calls of free-flying bats are useful for monitoring but are not widely used in the tropics. This is particularly problematic in Southeast Asia, which supports more than 388 bat species. H...

Recordings of bat echolocation and social calls are used for many research purposes from ecological studies to taxonomy. Effective use of these relies on identification of species from the recordings, but comparative recordings or detailed call descriptions to support identification are often lacking for areas with high biodiversity. The ChiroVox w...

Global changes in response to human encroachment into natural habitats and carbon emissions are driving the biodiversity extinction crisis and increasing disease emergence risk. Host distributions are one critical component to identify areas at risk of spillover, and bats act as reservoirs of diverse viruses. We developed a reproducible ecological...

Human dimensions (HD) research is a discipline of conservation social sciences that applies social and psychological sciences to understand and influence conservation-relevant human behaviour. An understanding of the human dimensions is particularly required for bats because they are widely maligned and misunderstood and face many threats due to hu...

One Health concepts highlight the inter-relationships in health among people, animals and the environment. However, intersectoral research gaps and regional biases in One Health activities may undermine the world One Health commitment. Here we evaluated the extent of these biases in One Health research based on abstracts presented at the 6th World...

Pacific Island bats are utterly fascinating, yet under threat and overlooked. Meet 4 species https://theconversation.com/pacific-island-bats-are-utterly-fascinating-yet-under-threat-and-overlooked-meet-4-species-165765 Paci c Island bats are utterly fascinating, yet under threat and overlooked. Meet 4 species

Large island fruit bats (LIFB), species of Pteropus, Acerodon, and related genera in the pteropodid subfamily Pteropodinae, are keystone species for island conservation in the Palaeotropics, playing critical roles as agents of dispersal and pollination of native island plant communities. This keystone role is crumbling because LIFB are collectively...

Many of the world's most pressing issues, such as the emergence of zoonotic diseases, can only be addressed through interdisciplinary research. However, the findings of interdisciplinary research are susceptible to miscommunication among both professional and non-professional audiences due to differences in training, language, experience, and under...

One Health concepts highlight the inter-relationships in health among people, animals and the environment. However, intersectoral research gaps and regional biases in One Health activities may undermine the world One Health commitment. Here we evaluated the extent of these biases in One Health research based on abstracts presented at the 6th World...

Flight and nocturnal behavior hinder direct observation of bats, limiting our knowledge of their ecology, thus creating the impetus for effective capture techniques. Mist nets have been used to trap bats for nearly a century, but are less effective under certain scenarios, including when nets are easily detected and avoided by many aerial and glean...

Human perturbation of natural systems is accelerating the emergence of infectious diseases, mandating integration of disease and ecological research. Bats have been associated with recent zoonoses, but our bibliometric analysis of coauthor relationships identified a separation of bat ecologists and infectious disease researchers with few cross-disc...

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the substantial public health, economic, and societal consequences of virus spillover from a wildlife reservoir. Widespread human transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) also presents a new set of challenges when considering viral spillover from people to naïve wildlife and other...

The long-term conservation of Borneo’s rainforests is critical in terms of biodiversity importance yet is undermined by failing management of protected areas, and insufficient consideration of the value of well-managed production areas. The High Conservation Value approach (HCV) has been adopted by a wide range of corporations and NGOs as a tool to...

The iconic African baobab tree (Adansonia digitata) has “chiropterophilous” flowers that are adapted for pollination by fruit bats. Although bat pollination of baobabs has been documented in east and west Africa, it has not been confirmed in southern Africa where it has been suggested that hawk moths (Nephele comma) may also be involved in baobab p...

Biosphere reserves, designated under The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Man and Biosphere Programme, aim to sustainably integrate protected areas into the biological and economic landscape around them by buffering strictly protected habitats with zones of limited use. However, the effectiveness of biospher...

Differences in wing morphology are predicted to reflect differences in bat foraging strategies. Experimental tests of this prediction typically assess the relationship between wing morphology and a measures of flight performance on an obstacle course. However, studies have lacked measures of obstacle avoidance ability true scores, which may confoun...

Species differ in vulnerability to anthropogenic land use changes. Knowledge of the mechanisms driving differential sensitivity can inform conservation strategies but is generally lacking for species‐rich taxa in the tropics. The diverse bat fauna of Southeast Asia is threatened by rapid loss of forest and expanding agricultural activities, but the...

Bats are an ecologically and taxonomically diverse group accounting for roughly a fifth of mammalian diversity worldwide. Many of the threats bats face (e.g., habitat loss, bushmeat hunting, and climate change) reflect the conservation challenges of our era. However, compared to other mammals and birds, we know significantly less about the populati...

Environmental and biological context play significant roles in modulating physiological stress responses of individuals in wildlife populations yet are often overlooked when evaluating consequences of human disturbance on individual health and fitness. Furthermore, most studies gauge individual stress responses based on a single physiological bioma...

Ecological thresholds represent a critical tipping point along an environmental gradient that, once breached, can have irreversible consequences for species persistence and assemblage structure. Thresholds can also be used to identify species with the greatest sensitivity to environmental changes. Bats are keystone species yet are under pressure fr...

Red list assessment of Pteropus niger, a Mascarene endemic and endangered ecological keystone species subjected to repeated mass-culling campaigns by the Government of Mauritius since 2015, when the country's terrestrial biodiversity protection law was changed specifically to enable culling of the species.

With 70 named species and multiple morphologically cryptic lineages, the genus Hipposideros is a diverse and taxonomically contentious group of insectivorous bats in the Old World tropics. Half of the named species and most of the cryptic diversity in Hipposideros are concentrated in the bicolor species group. Here we resolve the taxonomic status o...

Human-wildlife conflicts pose a growing threat to many species worldwide and require increasingly innovative and multi-disciplinary resolutions. Because of their apparent simplicity and political appeal, lethal approaches like culling are often favoured, decisions to cull are typically poorly supported by scientific evidence and the limitations and...

Synopsis: Host-associated microbiomes are integral components of host health, but microbiome community structure varies among and within hosts. Reconciling community variability with the apparent dependence of hosts on community function, and characterizing how functional divergence proceeds across niches, remains challenging. Here, through the st...

Polymicrobial bacterial infection is an important factor contributing to wound chronicity. Consequently, clinicians frequently adopt a biofilm-based wound care approach, in which wounds are treated utilizing DNA sequencing information about microbial communities. While more successful than treatment not using community information, there is little...

Open-source species locality data are widely used in species distribution modeling but may be spatially biased by uneven sampling effort across a species' range. Spatial biases may vary across ecological trait groups if traits affect associations with landscape features and capture probability. Furthermore, spatial biases may change across time as...

Flying foxes provide critical ecosystem services by pollinating and disseminating diverse plant species. Yet, they face intensifying threats, particularly on islands. The situation is epitomized by the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. In December 2016, the Mauritian government implemented the second mass cull of a threatened, endemic flying fox sp...

Bats in temperate and subtropical regions typically synchronize birth of a single young with peaks in resource availability driven by local climate patterns. In tropical rain forest, insects are available throughout the year, potentially allowing departures from seasonal monoestry. However, reproductive energy budgets may be constrained by the cost...

Arid environments are characterized by resource pulses that cause spatio-temporal variability in species abundance, which can make population assessments difficult. Mobile acoustic methods may improve survey success by maximizing geographic extent, characterizing landscape distribution patterns, and improving encounter rates. Bats exemplify survey...

This book focuses on central themes related to the conservation of bats. It details their response to land-use change and management practices, intensified urbanization and roost disturbance and loss. Increasing interactions between humans and bats as a result of hunting, disease relationships, occupation of human dwellings, and conflict over fruit...

Conservation networks link diverse actors, either individuals or groups, across space and time. Such networks build social capital, enhance coordination, and lead to effective conservation action. Bat conservation can benefit from network approaches because the taxonomic and ecological diversity of bats, coupled with the complexity of the threats t...

Bat populations around the world are declining as a consequence of human activities. Bat conservation thus hinges on changing human behavior, but to do so, we must understand the origins and drivers of the behavior. As natural scientists, most bat biologists lack the knowledge and training to implement rigorous studies of the human dimensions of ba...

Humans have inadvertently changed global ecosystems and triggered the dawn of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. While some organisms can tolerate human activities and even flourish in anthropogenic habitats, the vast majority are experiencing dramatic population declines, pushing our planet into a sixth mass extinction. Bats are particularl...

Recent conservation efforts suggest large artificial roosts, such as “bat houses”, may not only serve as alternative sources of guano fertilizer but also provide opportunities to re-establish bat populations and associated ecological services in disturbed landscapes. To achieve this goal, it is essential to evaluate the economic benefits of harvest...

To date, three species of the genus Glischropus are recognized from the Indomalayan zoogeographic region—G. bucephalus from the Indochinese subregion, G. tylopus from the Sundaic subregion (Peninsular Thailand and Malaysia, Borneo, Sumatra, Moluccas) and G. javanus, restricted to Java. The investigation of the holotype and three topotype specimens...

Increasing concern over trade in bat souvenirs from South-east Asia - Volume 49 Issue 2 - Benjamin P.Y.-H. Lee, Matthew J. Struebig, Stephen J. Rossiter, Tigga Kingston

Bite force is used to investigate feeding performance in a variety of vertebrates. In all taxa studied, bite force is strongly correlated with body and head size. Studies of bite force in bats have largely centred on neotropical species with a particular focus on species that maximize dietary differences. Little is known about the bite force of bat...

Responses of biodiversity to changes in both land cover and climate are recognized [ 1 ] but still poorly understood [ 2 ]. This poses significant challenges for spatial planning as species could shift, contract, expand, or maintain their range inside or outside protected areas [ 2–4 ]. We examine this problem in Borneo, a global biodiversity hotsp...

Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park is one of the last refuges protecting intact forest and a representative mammalian fauna in Sumatra. However, knowledge of bat diversity in the area is limited. From 2010 to 2012, 47 bat species were recorded through a series of surveys in 12 localities within and around the national park. An additional six speci...

Southeast Asia is home to over 25 % of the world