By Justine Sanchez, October 13, 2026
Cal Poly Pomona’s Bat Advocacy and Tracking Society club welcomed the Halloween season with its biannual Bat Night Oct. 1.
The B.A.T.S club, founded in fall 2024, holds this event every semester as a way to invite students and the community to learn more about bats.
“The more people understand, the more help these animals get, especially because they are threatened with severe population decline,” said B.A.T.S President Olivia Garcia. “Conservation is one of those things that you don’t have to be a bio major in. You can just be passionate about wildlife or the environment.”
At the Bat Walk, attendees got to explore a variety of different tables set up to help teach people about conservation, echolocations, bat anatomy and what the club is doing to help bats. Activities also included arts and crafts, bat specimen demonstrations, a bat rehabilitation feeding and the chance to use listening devices to pick up on nearby bat calls.
Bat boxes club members created were also on display. According to Garcia, the best way to think about bat boxes is like a birdhouse for bats.
The club recruited engineering and architecture students to help build these boxes to get the bats out of human spaces and into wildlife spaces. According to Garcia, the club’s goal is to start a “little colony” in partnership with the Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies.
Garcia said B.A.T.S chose the Lyle Center because there have been four different species of bats found on campus, including the Mexican free tailed bat, Yuma myotis, California myotis and the big brown bat. Of these four, B.A.T.S discovered two of the species at Biotech, Lyle Center and the Japanese garden, which include a Mexican Free-tailed and a Yuma Myotis.
The boxes will be set up with surveillance devices such as bat call recorders, audible call recorders, cameras and bat detectors in order to teach individuals who are interested about bats and learn about their findings on campus such as the four bats they’ve discovered so far, according to club adviser Rachel Blakey.
Garcia also shared one of the most rewarding parts of her position is getting people to learn more about bats, giving her the opportunity to share what she’s learned within this club. Her favorite part of the club is the Bat Prep event, which takes place twice every Thursday from 12-1 p.m. and 6-7 p.m.
The Bat Prep gives students an opportunity at hands-on learning by providing them with a frozen bat specimen to examine and dissect. In this process, attendees take a variety of different measurements, such as the age and gender of the species, do a biopsy of the chest muscle and finish off by tying a string to the specimen which is then kept on records, giving students a chance to “become a part of science,” according to Garcia.
The Bat Prep started when Blakey put the club in contact with a curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who suggested the idea of having the club help dissect and process the bats. This partnership started last semester, and Garcia estimated the club has helped process and dissect about 150 bats so far.
“We teach you everything you need to know,” Garcia said. “You don’t have to show up with any prior knowledge or experience. We’ll give you everything you need to know as well, and then we’ll walk through step by step, so you’re not confused. We have a couple different people as well running it, so there’s always somebody to help.”
Garcia said the key focus of the B.A.T.S club is to get people to change their minds about bats, move away from the negative stigma, which is usually in connection to the assumption that bats carry rabies.
Both Garcia and Blakey also emphasized the role bats provide to the ecosystem, and how they help service humans by serving as pest control in agricultural areas and as pollinators.
Blakey shared bats are estimated to save farmers millions of dollars every year in pesticides and pest control by eating insects. More specifically, they are responsible for agave existing and persisting as the only pollinators for this plant.
“If you really want to take the time to look at and understand bats, then B.A.T.S club is here to help do that, or you could look up so many articles that talk about how beneficial they really are,” said Robert Lopez, a science, technology and society studentand secretary of the club. “I mean, I get it, bats are not everybody’s favorite mammal or animal in general, but they definitely do deserve some more flowers.”
Lopez shared his first experience with the club, stating he too didn’t know how to go about his interest in conservation and protecting species. According to Lopez, the club helped him learn how to take care of them, conserve them, make sure they aren’tin danger and encouraged other to do try the same.
Members of the B.A.T.S club emphasize this club is open to everyone, and they encourage people to come out if interested. Their next general meeting is Oct. 14 at 12 p.m. in Building 8, room 5.