Craig Hood, Ph.D. is the city’s Batman. No, he’s not out fighting crime. He’s out in the night, listening and studying the bats that live in the Greater New Orleans area, and creating a space for high school and college students, and the community to learn more about the species.
Bats have a reputation for being pretty scary. But Hood has a mission to normalize the small mammals and show that they’re not the scary animals that the general public believe them to be. In fact, there are over 1200 different species of bats and they make up 20 percent of the world’s warm-blooded mammals that are alive today.
Bats indeed are mammals. They’re like any other mammal, except they just happen to have these really long fingers and the skin between them, we call them wings.
When Hood was 19, he held his first bat during a research trip with a graduate student who was studying bats in Death Valley National Park in California. From there, he found a strong interest in bats and how they behave, live, and thrive.
Through the Loyola Bat Lab in the Environmental Program in the College of Arts and Sciences, Hood and a few of his research students go out at night and set up bat detectors in order to see and listen to the tens of thousands of bats in the Greater New Orleans area, specifically in City Park and Loyola’s neighbor, Audubon Park.
In November 2018, Hood launched the first citywide bat population monitoring project involving a dozen local area high schools, including New Orleans Charter Science and Mathematics High School. Hood mentors students from Sci High and other schools as they use the detectors to study how bats adapt to natural and urbanized habitats throughout their area that have undergone complex environmental changes over time.
When Hood was 19, he held his first bat during a research trip with a graduate student who was studying bats in Death Valley National Park in California. From there, he found a strong interest in bats and how they behave, live, and thrive.
Through the Loyola Bat Lab in the Environmental Program in the College of Arts and Sciences, Hood and a few of his research students go out at night and set up bat detectors in order to see and listen to the tens of thousands of bats in the Greater New Orleans area, specifically in City Park and Loyola’s neighbor, Audubon Park.
In November 2018, Hood launched the first citywide bat population monitoring project involving a dozen local area high schools, including New Orleans Charter Science and Mathematics High School. Hood mentors students from Sci High and other schools as they use the detectors to study how bats adapt to natural and urbanized habitats throughout their area that have undergone complex environmental changes over time.
This is an opportunity for students to do good science, but because we’re engaging the general public and these high schools locally, they get to do community engagement and, for those students interested in formal or informal environmental education, it’s a chance for them to build their skillsets.
This work - and data collected in other citizen science projects, like the Loyola-led BioBlitz events in City Park - and student trips to Audubon Park will help naturalists, scientists, and city planners with bat conservation and help New Orleanians learn a little more about their urban biology.
Most bats have only one baby at a time and those babies when they’re born, tend to weigh about 25 percent of the mother’s weight.
It is the equivalent of a 120 lb human mother giving birth to a 40 lb newborn baby.
Read about Craig Hood's research on WGNO
Sonograms of bat echolocation calls recorded by Dr. Hood and his research students at Audubon Park. Electronic bat detectors are used to record bats as they fly by and can be used to identify them to species and investigate their ecology
Listen to the first bat call.
Listen to the second bat call.
Every year, a group of philosophy students teach elementary students the fun of philosophy through a service learning program called Philosophy Kids? The core mission of the program is that there is no age requirement to begin to learn how to think critically and philosophically!
