Patterns of foraging activity and fidelity in a southeast Asian flying fox

Abstract

Background 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. 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. Methods We 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. Results Bats 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. Conclusions Our 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.

Foraging and mating behaviors of Hypsignathus monstrosus at the bat‐human interface in a central African rainforest

“…Following Schloesing et al ( 2020 ), we characterized the foraging areas used by each monitored bat (FAs; zones including one or several food patches where individuals actively search food, consume fruits, or rest), based on the concept of “area‐restricted search” (ARS; Kareiva & Odell, 1987 ). For a given bat, an ARS behavior includes a varying sequence of short flights and stationary bout locations (or a unique location when no sequence occurred) recorded outside the lek site and separated by at least one commuting flight.…”

“…Among them, fruit bats are important hosts of emerging viruses (Calisher et al, 2006), some of which were involved in severe and recent outbreaks in human populations (Cappelle et al, 2020; Sharma et al, 2019). Fruit bat species display highly diversified daily foraging activity patterns (e.g., visiting one or several foraging areas with varying duration and re‐visitation rates; McEvoy et al, 2021; Schloesing et al, 2020) and mating systems (mainly polygamous using a central place such as harems and leks; Crichton & Krutzsch, 2000). These movements within human‐modified ecosystems must be better understood from an ecological and epidemiological perspective.…”

Temporal mismatches in flight activity patterns between Pipistrellus kuhlii and Prays oleae in olive farms: Implications for biocontrol services potential

“…HIGH olive farms). In fact, the availability of suitable roosts is expected to be particularly relevant for activity timing in spring, mainly because during this season bats tend to restrict their movements to areas close to maternity sites or nursery colonies (Schloesing et al., 2020). In close agreement with this hypothesis, previous studies in the same study region suggest that olive farms support low levels of bat activity (including P. kuhlii ), regardless of their structural complexity (Herrera et al., 2015).…”

The Critical Importance of Old World Fruit Bats for Healthy Ecosystems and Economies

“…Variation among individuals is important for maintaining diverse seed dispersal and pollination roles at the population level (Zwolak, 2018;Schupp et al, 2019). To our knowledge, intra-specific or intra-population variation in pteropodids has only been described for movement distances, although the independent movement trajectories that individuals from a single roost display (e.g., Tsoar, 2011;Harten et al, 2020;Toledo et al, 2020;Welbergen et al, 2020) could mean considerable variation in foraging choices as well (e.g., Scholesing et al, 2020). Future studies might reveal broad variation in food choice, seed dispersal, and pollination among individuals.…”