Look up, he says, where bats live

Thomas Kunz's office is cluttered with bat memorabilia. (Michele McDonald/Globe Staff)

Any school kid can tell you that bats live in caves. And if you push them to come up with another place that bats live, one might eventually blurt out what sounds like a wrong answer - the air. The air is not really anyplace, is it? Isn't it just a space between places? Tom Kunz thinks not.

After 40 years studying bats, Kunz has come to see the air as a separate habitat for flying organisms - birds, bats, and insects. And if he can get his scientific colleagues to see what he sees, then Kunz, a 70-year-old Boston University professor, may go down in history as the father of an entirely new scientific discipline: aeroecology.

Ecology is the study of the relationship between an organism and its environment, and up until now that study has been devoted almost exclusively to the marine and terrestrial worlds - the air was just the space above. But Kunz believes it's more than just an empty space; by defining it as a branch for study, Kunz hopes to bring a cross-disciplinary approach, drawing from fields as diverse as geography and computer science, to gain new insights into the lives of winged creatures.

Kunz, who is 70 and has the nonchalant manliness of a high school football coach (which he was for five years), said the idea to define the air as a third main ecological system started forming about three years ago, when he worked on a project to evaluate the impact of wind energy turbines on bats.

"What we learned," he said, "is that we don't know much about their life in the air." As he looked out the window of his fourth-floor office last week, he gave a quick guided tour of just some of the things this new field will have to consider, starting with what we can't see with the naked eye.

"The clouds are moving, so we know there's turbulence," he said as he gestured across the rooftops of Commonwealth Avenue toward the Charles River. "It could rain, and insects don't fly in the rain. There's atmospheric pressure, and there are changes in the magnetic field of the earth. All of these impact the aerosphere."

Then he moved on to what we can see - the man-made influences. "It's a totally altered environment than the one for which the organisms initially adapted," he said as he pointed to tall buildings, cellphone towers, airplanes, and the lights that would come on that evening and are thought to affect migration. "The question is: Can they adapt?"

Sharon Swartz, an associate professor at Brown University who specializes in the flight biomechanics of bats, said that Kunz's idea to define the air as an ecosystem is correcting what feels, in retrospect, like a "historical accident."

"The air is there all the time, yet we just don't think about it," she said. "This idea has made me realize I have to reframe my notion of what a flying animal has to accomplish to succeed. It doesn't just have to be able to fly. It has to fly in the real ecology of the air. The fact that it's not visible to the naked eye doesn't mean there's not structure out there. Tom's had an incredibly broad influence on what people in this field have studied for the last 25 years, and with this idea, I think he'll be influencing the next 25."

After four decades in the field, Kunz will tell you that being a bat biologist is its own thing. If you study flowers, people ask you about flowers. If you study bats - which Kunz decided to do because he was an amateur cave explorer as a young man in Missouri and was intrigued by their ability to navigate in the dark - then your world is a little quirkier. He's been called "Batman," of course, and his students look forward to his costume every Halloween; he's got an office and lab stuffed with all manner of fanged memorabilia (though he's quick to point out that he'd much rather be bitten by a bat than a human); and he's even been interviewed by the humorist Dave Barry, who was interested in finding out if it was OK for him to eat a bat.

While Kunz laughs at the idea of going down in history for pointing out something that now seems obvious, he hopes that by defining the air as an ecological system, he can inspire his scientific colleagues to take a big picture view of the space between.

"Words are just words," he said of "aeroecology." "They don't mean anything until they can draw people in to asking questions. No one science in any one discipline can answer a question without collaborating with people in other fields. That's when advances are made."

Hometown: Kansas City, Mo.; lives in Wellesley.

Education: At the University of Central Missouri, he earned a bachelor's degree in biology in 1961 and a master's in education in 1962; he got a second master's from Drake University in biology in 1968, and his PhD in systematics and ecology from the University of Kansas in 1971.

Family: Wife, Margaret, is a Realtor; daughter, Pamela, 36, is an oncologist at Stanford Medical Center; son, David, 33, works in finance in New York. He has two grandchildren.

Hobbies: "In another life, I'd be an architect," said Kunz, who has designed several houses and additions, and is passionate about woodworking. He also enjoys canoeing, fishing, hiking, and bicycling.

On the new "Batman" movie: "I didn't really like Batman, but I thought the Joker was terrific."