Diet analysis of bats killed at wind turbines suggests large‐scale losses of trophic interactions ...

• Main Authors: Scholz, Carolin, Voigt, Christian C.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2022
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Mammalia; Chiroptera; Chordata; Animalia; bats; bat; Nyctalus noctula
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13429607; https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.13429607

(Uploaded by Plazi for the Bat Literature Project) Agricultural practice has led to landscape simplification and biodiversity decline, yet recently, energy-producing infrastructures, such as wind turbines, have been added to these simplified agroecosystems, turning them into multifunctional energy-agroecosystems. Here, we studied the trophic interactions of bats killed at wind turbines using a DNA metabarcoding approach to shed light on how turbine-related bat fatalities may possibly affect local habitats. Specifically, we identified insect DNA in the stomachs of common noctule bats (Nyctalus noctula) killed by wind turbines in Germany to infer in which habitats these bats hunted. Common noctule bats consumed a wide variety of insects from different habitats, ranging from aquatic to terrestrial ecosystems (e.g., wetlands, farmland, forests, and grasslands). Agricultural and silvicultural pest insects made up about 20% of insect species consumed by the studied bats. Our study suggests that the potential ...