The Husbandry and Veterinary Care of Captive Local Cave Nectar Bats Colony for Use in Bio-Medical Research
In the past three episodes of Annual SALAS Conference, the interest and imaginations of Singapore bio-medical research community were tickled by exciting talks about captive bats and its use in biomedical research. SALAS have invited experts and the Bat topics has always been the most talked about after the conference. The local research community maybe aware and some may recall from previous speaker talks that the colony of captive bats has been existing in one of the research facilities in Singapore which is also one of the very few in the world and perhaps the only one in Asia.
Rewind year 2014, the group of Duke-NUS Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) has collaborated with Singhealth Experimental Medicine Centre (SEMC) to develop the local bat breeding colony for use in infectious diseases and immunological studies. The original plan is to import breeders of fruit flying fox from Australia, propagate and develop the specie as model for EID’s research. The attempt to import was unsuccessful due to tough regulatory requirements until the group decided to develop the local cave nectar bats colony instead. The collaboration of Duke-NUS EID and SEMC was ideal as the former has a pool of scientist with experience in bats research and the latter currently manages the National Large Animal Facility (NLARF) which has an outdoor housing available for various species of animals and team of veterinarian and animal care staff. The project was not an easy journey for the group as it started from planning and modifying the outdoor shed, cages and workflow tailored to the requirements of cave nectar bats. There were limited references available on the husbandry and veterinary care standard of the said specie and the group had an intensive discussions/planning in formulating the right diets, feeding program, enrichment and daily maintenance as appropriate to the requirement of captive colony. Another huge challenge was the design of breeding program as the starting population of bats were captured from the roost in the wild and the animals have no information of age, strain and health back ground.
Fast forward 2017 – the captive colony of cave nectar bats at NLARF has a total population of about 40 heads as of August this year from the starting population of five (5) heads in 2015. The increased in numbers were not because of breeding as there were batches of captured bats added in the inventory. But in recent months there were successful pregnancies and significant birth of pups years after challenging management and veterinary care.
In my presentation, I will be giving you an insight of daily husbandry program of the captive colony of cave nectar bats at NLARF. I will also share the veterinary care program we especially design to achieve the breeding targets with a big hope of success to achieve the goal of the project.