The Midwest Bat Repository is a collaboration between the Illinois Natural History Survey Mammal Collection, the Collaborative Conservation Genetics Lab at the Illinois Natural History Survey, and the Illinois Bat Conservation Program.
Thousands of bats are killed each year in the U.S.A. by wind turbine strikes. The Endangered Species Act requires wind energy companies to collect these bats, but these bat specimens are often at risk of being lost due to substandard storage, failing infrastructure, and lack of long-term planning. This has resulted in the accumulation of tens of thousands of bat carcasses that are an untapped and often inaccessible scientific resource, that could be used for morphological, genetic/genomic, toxicological, stable isotope, and other studies.
We have established the first node (Midwest) of what we hope will become a national network for the accumulation and curation of biological material from bat wind turbine strike mortalities. We triage the bat carcasses that we acquire into either whole specimen fluid collections or other tissue libraries for use in genomic, toxicological, stable isotopic, and other investigations to maximize the scientific information available from each sample.
Ultimately, we hope the curation of these biological materials will provide substantial opportunities for researchers. The accessioned bat specimens from wind turbine strikes are available through the Mammal Collection database, as with all other specimens in the collection.