Gerry Carter has been successful in securing a number of small grants—from the likes of Sigma Xi and the Cosmos Club Foundation—to fuel his graduate research on vampire bats. But funding is still hard to come by. “I actually took a leave of absence as a student to go into the field because I didn’t want to pay tuition at the school,” he says. When Carter heard about a new website called Petridish (www.petridish.org), which solicits donations for research through the Internet, he decided to give it a whirl.
He produced a three-and-a-half minute video explaining his project. In it, vampire bats cuddle in groups as a successful hunter shares her meal by regurgitating blood, which the others drink from her mouth. In his narration, Carter explains that he’d like to explore this system of reciprocal altruism, in which bats share with each other, relatives and non-relatives alike. Carter’s goal: ...
