Dietary Composition, Resource Partitioning and Trophic Niche Overlap in Three Forest Foliage-Gleaning Bats in Central Europe ...

• Main Authors: Andreas, Michal, Reiter, Antonín, Benda, Petr
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2012
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Mammalia; Chiroptera; Chordata; Animalia; bats; bat; Barbastella barbastellus; Myotis nattereri
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13413162; https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.13413162

(Uploaded by Plazi for the Bat Literature Project) A diverse syntopic bat community was studied in Central Europe. The study was primarily aimed at forest bats utilizing a foliagegleaning foraging strategy (Myotis nattereri, M. bechsteinii and Plecotus auritus). The results indicated the foliage-gleaning foraging strategy and the effective resource partitioning. Once a certain diet item comprises an important food resource for one bat species, it is usually exploited much less by the other two bat species, and despite important seasonal dietary changes this pattern lasts throughout the entire season. Dietary composition varies more among the entire guild of forest foliage-gleaning bats than it does between these species and their morphological siblings or evolutionarily related species (e.g., Plecotus auritus vs. P. austriacus or Barbastella barbastellus, Myotis nattereri vs. M. emarginatus). The results are not fully consistent with the predictions of sensory ecology, which presume that bats with longer ...