Dr. Vida Stout

Hi, David.

It's great to be here.

So I guess this is the lore of the paper is all of us on the paper are bat researchers.

And so we were at the International Bat Research Conference in Austin, Texas, you know, so many years ago.

And I should have been there.

being good, taking notes on the bat science.

But I started to get a little sleepy, a little bored.

And I had just taken like a ethnographic field methods class.

And I was like, I'm going to try out my new methods.

And I start taking copious notes on the keynote speakers jokes instead of the bat science.

And I'm evaluating them very like sassily and rude in the margins, like that did not land.

And I'm like writing these direct quotes.

And Stefano, the collaborator on this paper, happened coincidentally to be sitting next to me.

We'd never met before.

Read over my shoulders and saw the notes I was taking.

He was like, what are you doing?

And that is the conversation that sparked this paper.

And so all of us on the paper were at that conference that day or that week.

And so we spent the next week kind of flushing out these ideas.

I continued my insane qualitative notes and we kind of created this data sheet and this paper was born.