Question: What qualifications do u need to be a bat biologist and what skills do u need

Keith Grehan answered on 22 Jun 2014:

That is actually a tough question as most people end up working on a given animals or plant (like bats) by just trying to be a scientist and then becoming more specialized.
The key skills are probably patience (the bats don’t really like people being nearby so they sometimes make life difficult), enthusiasm, and ability to work hard (this is both for working with bats and also to get the qualifications below) and importantly the ability to potentially work for a whole night with no sleep (this can be even tougher then it sounds 🙂 )
The normal qualifications are Science degree, Master of Science degree and then a PhD after this qualifications depend on whether you want an Academic position or to work for a private company.
The qualification steps in a bit more detail:
1) University Degree in either Zoology, Biology or a similar degree, it is usually best to find a degree that has units you are interested in. So it’s good to get an up-to-date prospectus or booklet about the degree course from the Uni (mostly these are online and its sometimes good to check out the professors too, if any of them are doing research you might be interested in then there will be potentially chances for you to get involved in this and learn more about it). Also at this point remember that no matter where you go for your degree the results are down to you even if you don’t end up in your first choice university it still gives you lots of opportunities to kick on with whatever you want to do next (in academia especially).
2) Once you have a primary degree many people then go on to complete an MSc (Master of Science) in a more specialised area. I did this, but I also know quite a few people that did not so really this depends on the student. Some people find an MSc a good way to make the jump from undergraduate (when you are at Uni getting your degree) to postgraduate (when you are at Uni getting an MSc or PhD etc.) and an MSc is also sometimes a good way learn specialised skills, in my case I learned a lot of bioinformatics (basically this is computer programming for biology) during my first MSc and this has helped me a lot. However people that really know what they want to do often jump straight into a PhD from their degree.
3) By the time a person starts on a PhD they should have a very clear path for what they want to work on, you don’t need to know what you’ll do day-to-day or even how you’ll do it but at this stage you will need to know “I want to look at bat viruses” or “I want to look at the evolution of sonar in bats” or something along those lines. PhD are mostly projects that an agency has funded because they think the project is potentially useful research or will give us valuable new data. So at this stage you are really a professional researcher…but you’re also a student so your job is to both do research and also to learn as much as you can about your subject.
After you have gathered all these qualifications most bat biologists work in either academia as researchers and lecturers or they work for some of the environmental impact assessment companies conducting surveys and writing reports on bat populations for planning authorities mostly this is continuing the work they learned during their PhD’s. In the last few years as more and more disease outbreaks were linked to bats a number of vets and doctors began to make a switch to looking into bat biology. There are now quite a few bat biologists with qualifications in veterinary medicine.
One thing that almost all bat biologists have in common is that they have been involved with local bat groups from early on, often people decide to start this degree>>>PhD path because they really like bats and wanted to turn the hobby into their job. So I would recommend checking out bat groups in your local area and also the bat conservation trust (http://www.bats.org.uk) these groups often run workshops were you can learn important skills like how to handle bats and get an idea of the kind of work involved in working with them. The people involved are often a lot of fun too 🙂