Landscape structure influences the use of social information in an insectivorous bat ...

• Main Authors: Roeleke, Manuel, Blohm, Torsten, Hoffmeister, Uwe, Marggraf, Lara, Schlägel, Ulrike E., Teige, Tobias, Voigt, Christian C.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2020
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Mammalia; Chiroptera; Chordata; Animalia; bats; bat; Nyctalus noctula
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13432303; https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.13432303

(Uploaded by Plazi for the Bat Literature Project) In anthropogenic landscapes, aerial insectivores are often confronted with variable habitat complexity, which may influence the distribution of prey. Yet, high mobility may allow aerial insectivores to adjust their foraging strategy to different prey distributions. We investigated whether aerial-hunting common noctules Nyctalus noctula adjust their foraging strategy to landscapes with different habitat complexity and assumingly different prey distribution. We hypothesized that the movement behaviour of hunting common noctules and changes of movement behaviour in reaction towards conspecifics would depend on whether they hunt in a structurally poor cropland dominated landscape or a structurally rich forest dominated landscape. We tracked flight paths of common noctules in northeastern Germany using GPS loggers equipped with an ultrasonic microphone that recorded foraging events and presence of conspecifics. Above cropland, common noctules hunted mainly during ...