From Fangs to Flight: The Evolutionary Story of Bats

Engaging, thought provoking lectures by experts, professors and storytellers in Ottawa bars 📚Lecture: From Fangs to Flight: The Evolutionary Story of Bats ⏱️Time: Doors: 6pm Lecture: 7pm 🎤Speaker: Lauren MacDonald (Bat Researcher & Science Communicator) Have you ever seen a bat? You might think of them as small, brown, mouse-like flying creatures. Maybe you’ve even had one as an unwelcome house guest. But lift the veil on our nocturnal neighbours and you’ll discover a wondrous world of weird biology, puzzling physiologies, and far more diversity than you might expect. Join bat researcher and science communicator Lauren MacDonald for a journey through the evolutionary story of bats and the one adaptation that changed everything: flight. We’ll explore how taking to the skies reshaped nearly every part of the bat body, from their muscles, metabolism, and enormous hearts to their unusual reproductive strategies, immune systems, diets, hibernation, and echolocation. Along the way, we’ll explore vampire bats with remarkable saliva, bats with suction-cup thumbs, surprisingly complicated love lives, and species whose biology can seem almost too strange to be real. Through photos, videos, weird science, and plenty of bat myths busted along the way, you’ll discover how evolution turned one flying mammal into an extraordinary variety of species and why these misunderstood animals are worth protecting. Lauren MacDonald is a science communicator who has studied bats across Canada, the American Southwest, Belize and Guyana. She holds a Master of Science in Biology with an emphasis in Behavioral, Ecological, and Evolutionary Biology. Her research focused on the intersection of female reproductive biology and immunology in bats. She is passionate about bat education, having launched a province-wide citizen science bat project in Saskatchewan and still regularly hosts public bat walks to see, hear and share more about the bats flying overhead. Outside of science, Lauren is passionate about classical music and participates in several choirs.