Initially, the staff lost access to the more than 1,000 animals hibernating in Feldman Ecopark, though they were able to place bats requiring more attention in private homes. In March, however, during the shelling of Kharkiv, the staff ventured back to the bat-collider to release the bats waking up from hibernation. “We cannot provide details about our journey,” the center posted on its Facebook page, but it was “close to the frontline.” Most of animals were in good condition, and they were able to free some 1,000 bats into the wild. Until this year, the frozen carcasses of those bats too sick or injured beyond recovery were used for scientific research into areas like sexual dimorphism (the anatomical differences between males and females), skull shapes, pollution, and parasites. “They truly had a group of people who knew how to help bats, including those sick or injured,” said Ewa Komar, a bat scientist from Mammal Research Institute Polish Academy of Sciences in Białowieża, Poland, who was unable to find local veterinarians specializing in bats and turned to the Ukrainian team for guidance. “They developed very effective animal rehabilitation methods and shared them through a series of scientific publications and lectures at international conferences.” They risk their lives to save bats and scientific collections Ryszard Laskowski, an ecotoxicologist from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, said Vlaschenko approached him a few years ago to offer to share his collection of frozen bats. “We have an excellent Ph.D. student from his group,” he said. “She studies contamination of bats checked if external tissues can be used to predict internal pollution with lead, copper, zinc, and cadmium.” The student, Olha Timofieieva, published a study in 2021 that showed the usefulness of bats as a “bioindicator species,” in which the level of pollution in their systems can reflect environmental conditions. She also discovered that the fur and wing membrane in one bat species could be used to check the accumulation of lead inside the animal, allowing for non-invasive methods to measure their inner organs’ contamination. “I admire these people,” said Laskowski. “After all, they risk their lives to save bats and scientific collections.”