Her name is Ina, a small and enterprising Leisler’s bat, scientifically known as Nyctalus leisleri. After departing from Tuscany and making two short stops in Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy, she crossed the Alpine arc and was tracked all the way to Germany, southwest of Munich. Her long flight route was identified through a bat-monitoring project carried out by scientists from the Research Institute on Terrestrial Ecosystems of the National Research Council of Italy, the National Biodiversity Future Center, and Oasi Dynamo, the private WWF-affiliated nature reserve from which she began her journey.
The research group includes Leonardo Ancillotto and Emiliano Mori for CNR-IRET, Giulia Santalmasi and Matteo Bianchi from Oasi Dynamo, and student Greta D’Angelo from the University of Florence. The team describes the finding as highly significant for scientific research on the migratory routes of European bats, marking the first recorded journey of a specimen across the Alpine arc.
Monitoring was made possible thanks to the application of tiny geolocators to animals studied as part of research activities carried out at the bat boxes in Oasi Dynamo. The signal transmitted by Ina was later interrupted due to the limited battery life of the devices, which weigh less than 1.5 grams and provide an autonomy of approximately 30–40 days. Nevertheless, the collected data represent exceptional confirmation of the species’ ability to cross the Alps during its seasonal movements.
For more than a year, the monitoring project has been using this innovative technology to deepen the study of the Leisler’s bat, a species considered migratory but still poorly understood in terms of its routes and movement habits. Recently, the research has focused particularly on females, which researchers believe are responsible for the species’ main migratory movements related to reproduction.
“The scientific literature,” explain Emiliano Mori and Leonardo Ancillotto, “suggests that while males tend to be more sedentary, females undertake long seasonal movements: in autumn from northern and central Europe to the southern Mediterranean regions, and in late spring back toward the northern parts of their range, in search of more favorable areas for giving birth and raising their young, thanks to a greater availability of food and environmental resources.”
However, the precise destinations and routes followed by these bats remain largely unknown. For this reason, tracking Ina opens new perspectives in the study of bat migration and contributes to expanding scientific knowledge about one of the most fascinating and mysterious species of European wildlife, while also supporting the conservation of these still poorly understood animals.
“The tracking of Ina,” explain Giulia Santalmasi and Matteo Bianchi, project coordinators at Oasi Dynamo, “marks an important step forward for the monitoring activities we are carrying out. Bats are considered migratory animals, but their routes and movement habits are still largely unknown.
The work we are doing allows us to gather valuable information on a phase of these animals’ lives that is extremely difficult to observe directly. Focusing on females is particularly important because they are the ones undertaking the most significant movements related to reproduction and the search for suitable areas for giving birth and raising their young.
This result confirms the value of the research activities conducted at Oasi Dynamo and reinforces the need to study and protect bats not only as species living within a single territory, but as animals connected to much broader ecological networks that cross regions, landscapes, and national borders.”
Meanwhile, a new Visitor Center has opened at Oasi Dynamo and is becoming a reference point for scientific research and environmental education. The center will host residencies for researchers, study projects, educational activities for schools from across Italy, ecotourism experiences, and public outreach events open to the local community.
