You don't have to start a research career with the aim of saving the world and winning Nobel Prizes. It can be enough to follow your own curiosity, and you might get the chance to do something no one has done before. Rune Sørås used his PhD in biology to measure body temperature in bats.

Position: Researcher

Highest Education: ​​​Doctoral degree in biology from NTNU. ​​​​Title: «Energy management of heterothermic bats at northern latitudes: Understanding the physiological flexibility of bats and how this enables them to live in the northern edge of their distribution»​​​

Join the alumni network!

What did you do in your PhD?

- In my PhD, I studied how bats manage to survive the winter in Norway. The method involved going out and catching bats and bringing them back to the lab. We caught bats right in the middle of Trondheim! Amazingly, you can see them quite often if you are out late in the evening or at night during the summer and pay attention. We then placed the bats in a temperature-controlled chamber where we could measure how much oxygen they used at different temperatures. This way, we calculated how much energy they need to maintain their body temperature under various conditions.

Why is your research important?

- Ever more research outside of Norway shows the important role bats play in nature. Among others they play a role in regulating insect populations, which can help, for example, reduce crop damage in agriculture.

- With climate change, more bats are expected to spread northwards. But we know little about how those living furthest north actually survive, and whether a warmer climate will make it harder for them to thrive.

What did you find?

- We found that bats do not just hibernate in winter, as most people think, but also go into torpor during the summer from day to day to save energy. We also learned that they lower their body temperature and reduce their energy consumption when exposed to cold temperatures, which tells us something about how they survive the cold Norwegian winter. In other words, the extent to which a bat chooses to go into torpor depends on how much energy they have available.

What motivated you to pursue a PhD?

- Curiosity is very important in PhD work. Here you get the opportunity to work on something quite narrow, which perhaps has never been done before. Like when we measured the energy consumption of a bat species that no one ever had measured before. It doesn't necessarily have to be things that save the world tomorrow, but our research has helped start a new phase of bat research in Norway.