Active season body mass patterns of Little Brown Bats and Northern Myotis: Raw and fitted mass values, environmental conditions and inflection point estimates ...
Animals are expected to adjust their behavioural patterns to improve fitness outcomes, such as fecundity or offspring survival. For long-lived hibernators, decisions made in each annual cycle may reflect considerations not just for concurrent survival and reproduction, but also the pressure to maxim...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Dataset |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Dryad
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.pc866t1rq https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.pc866t1rq |
| Summary: | Animals are expected to adjust their behavioural patterns to improve fitness outcomes, such as fecundity or offspring survival. For long-lived hibernators, decisions made in each annual cycle may reflect considerations not just for concurrent survival and reproduction, but also the pressure to maximize overwinter survival and future reproductive success. We examined how these elements manifest themselves in the body mass variation patterns of North American northern latitude temperate bats, whose size and roosting habits present considerable monitoring challenges. We characterized and compared the summer and fall mass variation patterns of little brown myotis (Myotis lucifugus) and northern myotis (M. septentrionalis) from a historic dataset. In summer, the estimated date of parturition was strongly associated with spring foraging conditions (low wind, low precipitation, warm temperatures), and mass gain associated with female reproduction conferred considerable differentiation between the mass variation ... : These data include bat capture records spanning capture surveys between 2000 and 2019 and weather data provided by Environment and Climate Change Canada. The capture data used in this project are the body mass values of bats captured by independent research teams in the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, and the island of Newfoundland. In these projects, bats were captured with mist nets (Avinet, Dryden, New York, USA) and harp traps (Austbat Research Equipment, Lower Plenty, Victoria, Australia) by different research groups and assessed for standard morphometric and diagnostic criteria, including sex, age class (adult or juvenile per Kunz and Anthony 1982), and mass (g) to two decimal places. Upon initial screening of the dataset, we chose to proceed with little brown myotis and northern myotis because they were the two species with sufficient data for an informative comparison. The capture dates were recorded as Julian Date (1-365), and individual observations ... |
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