Bats feature at the Australian Macadamia conference

Bats can eat over 50% of their bodyweight in insects in a single night! Some of these could be pests – which has been shown in a variety of crops around the world.

We are scratching the surface of understanding what pests bats eat in macadamia orchards in southeast Queensland, but keen to work with growers to find out how we could work together to get more bats eating more pests in and around their farms.

April and Rani at the AusMac2026 conference

PhD student Rani Davis and supervisor April Reside are learning a lot here at the Australian Macadamia Conference AusMac2026, including work done on beneficial insects including native pollinators and the nutritional value of nuts. There have been interesting plenaries from Landline TV presenter Pip Courtney and on opportunities for natural capital benefits for orchards. Macadamia trees can store a lot of carbon and can have great biodiversity benefits, which we are finding with our work too.

April and Rani with Rani's excellent poster on bats in Australian macadamia farms

Chatting with delegates we’ve learned about artificial bat roosts that have been deployed around farms in Canada which come with the additional benefit of guano available for harvest for crop fertiliser!

Rani's research presentation at AusMac2026

Rani gave an excellent talk which generated broad interest, with questions on pollination, orchard spacing and the impact of spraying. More of Rani’s results coming soon!

We were very happy to be able to eat our fill of locally grown macadamias at the conference and learn about all the great initiatives in the world of macadamia growing.