Bats in macadamia: Lessons from South Africa
By Rani Davis
My PhD research investigates bats as pest suppressors in Australian macadamia orchards. Almost everything we know about bats in macadamia crops comes from one research group in South Africa, led by Professor Peter Taylor (University of the Free State). Thanks to the Australasian Wildlife Management Society’s Joan Southgate award, I spent three weeks there in 2026 learning from their work and sharing my findings.
The trip began with a lucky sighting of an Epomophorus outside of our accommodation at Dinokeng Game Reserve.
Then I attended a workshop on bat ecosystem services at the University of Pretoria led by Ara Monadjem. The workshop brought together 19 researchers from across the globe all studying how bats benefit us, from pest control to pollination and seed dispersal. This collaboration was first sparked at the 2025 International Bat Research Conference in Cairns, where we held a symposium and workshop titled: “Beneficial Bats: Enhancing pest control and bat conservation”.
From there I headed to the northern edge of South Africa, to macadamia orchards near Louis Trichardt. Professor Peter Taylor and Dr Valerie Whyte, whose PhD was on bats in these orchards, took me through farms where bat boxes had been installed. We peered into the boxes from the ground with a thermal scope and a mirror, and to my astonishment, nearly every one we checked had bats inside. The few empty boxes had been installed just months earlier. Back home it’s a very different story: of the boxes I have checked in southeast Queensland, or have records for, almost none have ever been recorded as occupied.
Why do boxes in apparently ideal locations in southeast Queensland sit empty, while most of the boxes in South Africa are occupied, even some in carparks in the city of Johannesburg (!)? Two differences stood out to me: the boxes in South Africa are larger, and they’re mounted on tall posts rather than on trees. But is it the boxes, or is it the bats?
Bat boxes weren’t the only thing on my agenda. Near Tshipise, I also got to see exclusion experiments in citrus orchards, where large cages are built around trees to keep bats and birds from foraging on crop pests. PhD student Thakgatso Manamela and master's student Elroy Sekgoka have spent two seasons collecting data on pest damage to fruit inside and outside the exclosures to directly measure the pest control benefits of birds and bats. It's a method that has never been used in Australia, and I'd love to change that.
That evening we stayed at Maremani Nature Reserve, where we set up mist nets beside the affectionately named ‘mud puddle’. Piles of elephant dung lined the water's edge, and we heard a leopard calling through the night.
We caught 26 bats, mostly Schlieffen's serotine (Nycticeinops schlieffeni) and Egyptian free-tailed bats (Tadarida aegyptiaca), plus one African yellow house bat (Scotophilus dinganii), one Roberts’s flat-headed bat (Sauromys petrophilus), and one Bushveld horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus simulator). We collected fur and faecal samples for ongoing student projects in the region.
After a quick jaunt through Kruger National Park (an essential detour on the road back to Pretoria), I finished the trip at the 2026 Southern Africa Wildlife Management Association conference. It was a great week of learning how researchers track and manage populations of giraffes, elephants, wild dogs, hyenas, and more in fenced reserves. I was also thrilled to win the award for the best full-length PhD presentation, titled: “Integrating ecological knowledge and practical management strategies to support insectivorous bats in Australian macadamia orchards”.
Back home, the real test begins. The Australasian Bat Society has kindly donated 24 bat boxes to our research. Later in 2026 we’ll install them on 4.8 m posts on macadamia farms, and I’ll be watching them closely.
If you'd like to learn more about my research, you can email me at rani.davis@uqconnect.edu.au
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