Climate sensitivity effects on tropical bat ecology

Information from the abstract

Tropical ecosystems are highly sensitive to climatic variation, yet biological responses to climate fluctuations often emerge after substantial temporal lags. Insectivorous bats are useful sentinels of climatic dynamics due to their high metabolic demands and reliance on weather-sensitive insect prey. We quantified the extent to which weather variation correlated with the short-term behavioral and long-term foraging responses of a large wrinkle-lipped free-tailed bat ( Mops plicatus ) colony in Thailand. As response variables, we used a nine-year dataset of daily bat evening emergence times and a 21-year dataset (1998-2019) of monthly guano yields. As predictor variables, we used ERA5-Land reanalysis estimates of temperature and precipitation extracted across 10-, 20-, and 30-km buffers around the bat colony. Sliding-window analysis showed that bat evening emergence time tracked sub-seasonal weather variation at lags of a few days to about three months. Preceding temperature and precipitation were associated with shifts in bat evening emergence timing. Monthly guano yield declined with elevated temperatures at lags of up to three months. Guano yield showed a sustained long-term decline of 56.62% over two decades (seasonal Mann-Kendall Z=-11.585, p

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Related topics: Bat Biology and Ecology Studies · Wildlife Ecology and Conservation · Species Distribution and Climate Change