On a dark night in northern Belize in early May, Gliselle Marin stands in the middle of a patchy forest in the Lamanai Archaeological Reserve , about a two-hour drive from where she grew up. Every few minutes, she and her fellow researchers sweep their headlamps over the nets they’ve strung up to see if they’ve caught anything. Before long, a chirping leaf-nosed bat the color of hot cocoa is entangled.
He’s small — about the size of a lemon. Marin works carefully and quickly to free him. “We’re trying to get the net off of him,” she says.
“It’s kind of like a puzzle. I like to take the feet out first. And then I do one wing, then the head.
” Within a minute, the tiny bat is out. Marin jots down some basic information about the bat and then places him inside a cloth bag for further study that night. All the tools Marin needs for this kind of delicate extraction — including an ordinary crochet hook for the worst tangles — fit into a fanny pack that’s adorned with little printed bats.
The scientist also sports bat earrings as well as a tattoo of small bats flying up the nape of her neck. Marin is a biology Ph.D.
student at York University in Toronto, and she’s here with the “ Bat-a-thon ,” a group of 80-some bat researchers who converge on this part of Belize each year to study these winged mammals. Growing up, Marin’s family had bats roosting under their house. “But when I actually started working with them and realizing we have close to 80 sp.