Abstract
BackgroundImproved understanding of the foraging ecology of bats in the face of ongoing habitat loss and modification worldwide is essential to their conservation and maintaining the substantial ecosystem services they provide. It is also fundamental to assessing potential transmission risks of zoonotic pathogens in human-wildlife interfaces. We evaluated the influence of environmental and behavioral variables on the foraging patterns of Pteropus lylei (a reservoir of Nipah virus) in a heterogeneous landscape in Cambodia.MethodsWe employed an approach based on animal-movement modeling, which comprised a path-segmentation method (hidden Markov model) to identify individual foraging-behavior sequences in GPS data generated by eight P. lylei. We characterized foraging localities, foraging activity, and probability of returning to a given foraging locality over consecutive nights. Generalized linear mixed models were also applied to assess the influence of several variables including proxies for energetic costs and quality of foraging areas.ResultsBats performed few foraging bouts (area-restricted searches) during a given night, mainly in residential areas, and the duration of these decreased during the night. The probability of a bat revisiting a given foraging area within 48 h varied according to the duration previously spent there, its distance to the roost site, and the corresponding habitat type. We interpret these fine-scale patterns in relation to global habitat quality (including food-resource quality and predictability), habitat-familiarity and experience of each individual.ConclusionsOur study provides evidence that heterogeneous human-made environments may promote complex patterns of foraging-behavior and short-term re-visitation in fruit bat species that occur in such landscapes. This highlights the need for similarly detailed studies to understand the processes that maintain biodiversity in these environments and assess the potential for pathogen transmission in human-wildlife interfaces.
Highlights
Improved understanding of the foraging ecology of bats in the face of ongoing habitat loss and modification worldwide is essential to their conservation and maintaining the substantial ecosystem services they provide
The number of area-restricted search” (ARS) behaviors displayed by a bat during the night differed between habitat types (χ2 = 39.5, df = 2, p < 0.001, marginal R2 = 0.13, conditional R2 = 0.23; Fig. 2): it was significantly higher in residential areas (2.2 ± 0.29) compared to other habitats
Behavior and the roost site was dependent on the habitat type of the foraging area (χ2 = 15.8, df = 2, p < 0.001, marginal R2 = 0.07, conditional R2 = 0.25; Fig. 3): this distance was significantly higher for the residential areas (12.5 ± 2.4) compared to fruit plantations (7.0 ± 1.5), whereas it was intermediate for tree vegetation (10.1 ± 2.2)
Summary
Improved understanding of the foraging ecology of bats in the face of ongoing habitat loss and modification worldwide is essential to their conservation and maintaining the substantial ecosystem services they provide. Foraging patterns vary widely at inter- and intra-specific levels [5,6,7] and can be characterized by differences in foraging localities and fidelity [8, 9], as well as timing, duration and rate of foraging bouts [10, 11]. They are typically assumed to be a function of specific physiological needs, intrinsic individual features and particular environmental conditions. Because human activities are a major driver of rapid habitat modification [22], research on the foraging ecology of species at human-wildlife interfaces is crucial to understanding foraging patterns and predicting their evolution in a conservation framework [23,24,25]
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