Cave bats are keystone species that serve as critical seed dispersal and pollination agents for plant communities at the larger landscape scale. Cave-dependent insectivorous bats consume thousands of crop pest invertebrates and play a critical role as natural pest control agents across the agro-landscape. Bats are also key species on which endemic cave-dependent biodiversity rely.

Despite the importance of cave biodiversity such as bats, little formal conservation and protection is provided on either international or national scales. While the species inventory for forests, wetlands, grasslands habitats have been given appreciable national and international attention to anchor conservation policies, very few baseline studies in Africa have considered caves and bats.

The ultimate project goal is to gather and use scientific data to lobby for the formal protection of caves through existing policy and legal instruments designated to the National Museums of Kenya. Caves are small centres of biodiversity that have tremendous ecological, scientific, economic and cultural value at the landscape scale.

The immediate objectives for the Illuminating Understudied Caves to Highlight Plant Pollination and Seed Dispersal Services by Bats project, is to implement a comprehensive bat inventory in two caves in each of the following two cave categories:

Object 1 Coastal caves are home to tens of thousands of bats that provide ecological support benefitting the entire Eastern coastal forest centre of endemism and biodiversity hotspot. These caves occur at sea-level elevations ranging from 0-50 meters above sea level. Other biodiversity present include invertebrates, reptiles, and small carnivore communities that complete the food chain (Metcalfe et al 2009). Major threats to coastal caves include the construction of tourist hotels, beach homes, quarrying and increased uncontrolled visitation, garbage dumping. Some caves are used as shrines by local communities and have records preserved under guano, of prehistoric human civilization (Martinon-Torres et al 2021 and Shipton et al 2018).

Object 2 Lava tube caves are found on extinct volcanic mountains; all of which are filled with largely uncatalogued populations of thousands of bats. Two caves will be selected in this category for this pilot phase of the study. Of the two in this category, one will be selected in the Rift Valley, a largely an agricultural landscape, while the other will be selected on Mt Elgon, an extinct volcano, a shared ecosystem between Kenya and Uganda, and is juxtaposed in a forest ecosystem mixed with intensive farmed landscapes. Both land use systems are beneficiaries of the valuable ecological services of cave bats.

Project Director, Dr. Bernard Risky Agwanda, is a mammalogist based at the National Museums of Kenya where he is GPS-tracking bats. He is the founder of National Taxidermy & Taphonomy Centre, and its program “Fading Heritage of Our Time’’ (FHOOT) which facilitates the identification, recovery, analysis and highlighting conservation plight of deserving species and ecosystems. Through this he has described bat, shrew and rodent species that are completely new to science; a recent species was named after Nelson Mandela, a renowned preacher of peace, and former South Africa president, (Rhychocyon C. mandelai). Since his specialized bat training in Ben-Gurion University, Israel, in 2006, his bat research expeditions have produced over 50 publications and over 70 DNA data added into public libraries. His current work seeks to demonstrate that a tiny number of caves make huge contributions to overall ecosystem health in East Africa.