Jenna Kohles is a NOMIS–STRI Fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama. She is conducting her postdoctoral research at STRI under the mentorship of Rachel Page at the Smithsonian Bat Lab, Meg Crofoot at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPIAB) in Germany, and Dina Dechmann, also at the MPIAB.

Kohles is a behavioral ecologist, born in the United States, where she completed a BSc in wildlife and fisheries biology at Clemson University in 2015. Fascinated by the secret social lives of bats, Kohles began researching bat behavior as an undergraduate and followed that passion to Germany to work on bat social communication and ecology with Dina Dechmann for her MSc in ecology, evolution and behavior at the University of Konstanz. She continued her research in Germany, earning her PhD in 2024 from the MPIAB and the University of Konstanz, in the International Max Planck Research School for Quantitative Behavior, Ecology and Evolution from lab to field (IMPRS-QBEE), while also a PhD Fellow at STRI. For her dissertation, Kohles used cutting-edge biologging technologies to investigate how resource distribution and the social environment influence the foraging behavior of insectivorous bats in Panama and of fruit bats on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.

Now, Kohles is leveraging her expertise in the behavior and ecology of bats and experience with various biologging technologies to ask: Does bat sociality mitigate the challenge of uncertainty in their lives? Uncertainty permeates the lives of both human and nonhuman animals, e.g., concerning economic stability, safety, health, and food availability, and has pervasive influence on how we and animals behave. Her research as a NOMIS–STRI Fellow will test whether the stability of bat social groups increases with increasing environmental uncertainty about food availability. She will quantify social behavior in wild bat populations using multisensory biologging technology, while simultaneously quantifying prey landscapes and measuring energetic stress using fecal biomarkers. As uncertainty for foraging animals is being exacerbated by rapid environmental and climatic change, and people across the globe experience increased uncertainty regarding societal and political landscapes, it is urgent that we understand how sociality mediates uncertainty-induced challenges and promotes resilience.

Feature image (right) by Christian Ziegler