By Dina Weinstein

Tamara Eddy was first drawn to Virginia Commonwealth University so she could study a lifelong passion: dance. She ultimately found another: bats.

As with many of her peers, COVID-19 became a formative part of her academic journey. Eddy, who is from Northern Virginia’s Woodbridge area, arrived at VCU for freshman year and decided that studying business, instead of dance, might be more practical. But the pandemic arrived in full force that spring, and it prompted her to take a break from college and the online class format that emerged.

“When I came back to VCU for biology, I made sure to have all in-person classes,” said Eddy, whose love of the outdoors had pointed her in a new direction. “Having that interpersonal connection with the professor, as well as making friends in the class and building a community, is so important to my success and motivation.”

With environmental studies shaping her sophomore year, she learned about Footprints on the James, an intensive summer field program in which students, faculty and VCU Outdoor Adventure Program student guides conduct research and develop outdoor skills while traversing the James River.

“That opened up a whole new world for me – not only with expedition field research, but also outdoor peer leadership,” said Eddy, who enrolled in the FOTJ class this past summer.                                                                         

That “new world” also included bats. In FOTJ, Eddy studied correlations between bats and bugs.

“I was like, bats are cool. I know nothing about them, but doing audio recordings for them, that sounds really interesting,” Eddy said. “I wanted to get as much experience with collecting field data as possible, because that was something that I had in my mind about my career path.”

She used a microphone and an app that identifies bat calls. She read academic papers about acoustic identification and surveying, and she took a lead role in data collection during FOTJ. Her initial data on the number of bat calls was accurate, and this deep dive into chiropterology – the study of bats – left Eddy smitten. Or as she likes to put it: “bitten by the bat.”

FOTJ was a key step along Eddy’s path to become an OAP trip leader this year, and to earn a River Studies and Leadership Certificate, which is offered at VCU as a program from the River Management Society. The society’s Southeast chapter president is VCU professor James Vonesh, Ph.D., assistant director in the Center for Environmental Studies, a unit of VCU Life Sciences.

In addition to Vonesh, Eddy praised the influence of biology associate professor Shannon Leigh McCallister, Ph.D., whose aquatic ecology lab class helped forge her academic path.

This past fall, Eddy reconnected with Vonesh to continue bat research to develop her data set as an independent study. And in April, she presented a poster at the VCU Undergraduate Research Symposium as well as the River Management Society’s symposium in Oregon.

“I used my new knowledge of acoustic calls to manually ID all of the bat calls that we got on Footprints on the James for five sites, and I ended up finding a suggestively positive connection between riparian emergent insect abundance and bat species richness, looking at the amount of different species in an area,” Eddy said.

Eddy plans to deepen her work on bats in the coming year and then apply to graduate school. But she has made a mark in her senior year at VCU: Her capstone project involved constructing bat houses in Richmond’s Bellemeade Park, along with informational signage.

She also enjoyed a far-from-campus opportunity: Eddy went to Belize in December, visiting the Toucan Ridge Ecology and Education Society for an internship through which she learned bat capture and handling techniques.

Eddy acknowledges that chiropterology is not without danger, and she had to get a rabies shot before going to Belize. But bats play crucial roles in nature – from pest control to pollinating plants and dispersing seeds – and they should be celebrated instead of feared.

“Their immune systems are really strong, so they can carry viruses and not be affected by it,” she said. “But actually, in a healthy bat population, less than 1% of bats have rabies. They get a bad rap, but most bats aren’t aggressive.”