Like other wildlife, Manitoba’s bats face familiar threats like habitat loss but in the last 15 to 20 years, two new impacts have emerged causing devastating declines. The invasive fungal disease, white-nose syndrome, has killed millions of hibernating bats in its spread across North America and we have lost ~80% of the once-common little brown bat in Manitoba. At the same time, industrial wind turbines are now known to kill hundreds of thousands of migratory bats across North America each year. As a result of these two impacts, five of Manitoba’s six bat species are now listed as federally endangered or have been recommended for endangered listing. The University of Winnipeg ‘Bat Lab’ has been studying these issues for over 15 years and Dr. Willis will report some of their discoveries as well as recommendations for conservation and recovery of these ecologically and economically important insectivores. 

Dr. Craig Willis is Professor and Graduate Program Chair in Biology at the University of Winnipeg and leads the UofW’s ‘Bat Lab’. He first became fascinated with bats during an undergraduate field course and has studied their physiology, ecology and conservation ever since. Willis has co-authored over 130 publications and his work has been covered by outlets like CBC’s ‘The National’, ‘The Current’ and ‘Quirks and Quarks’, CTV National News and The Guardian. In 2019 he was awarded the ‘Erica and Arnold Rogers Award for Excellence in Research’ by the University of Winnipeg and in 2024, the ‘Gerrit S. Miller Jr. Award’ from the North American Society for Bat Research for outstanding service and contributions to the study of bat biology.

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