Data from: Foraging flight strategy varies with species identity of co-occurring individuals in bats
Data files
Abstract
Foraging is a key function in the animal kingdom. Foraging in group drives food patch discovery through social information transfer that maximizes an individual’s foraging success through either cooperation or competition in response to congener presence. Understanding how congener presence affects the foraging strategy is especially challenging as it requires close monitoring of animal movements, foraging success, and competitive interactions. The consequences of congener presence on foraging flight strategy of bats, a highly social taxa with strong behavioural plasticity in response to resource ephemerality, remains little tested. Through a three-dimensional acoustic tracking of individual echolocation calls, we assessed to which extent foraging flight strategy of bats varied in response to conspecific and heterospecific presence. We found that flight speed, the main lever for adjusting energy balance during foraging (i.e. slowing down to capture prey and speeding up to find new prey patches), is no longer used in presence of intra-guild heterospecifics. Also, the overall foraging level** increased regardless of co-occurring species, through a facilitation and/or a higher prey availability. The study shows that bats integrate species identity in making decisions about their foraging flight strategy, with a stronger tolerance towards conspecifics with which social relations are most important, e.g. because they share the same roost. This might have important implications in understanding consequences of interactions, especially in relation to anthropogenic pressures that rearrange bat communities and their prey in time and space, which could exacerbate natural competition.
GENERAL INFORMATION
1. Paper Citation
https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/araf090
2. Brief abstract
The presence of individuals from a different species induces a change in bat’s flight strategy, that probably reflects an increase in competitiveness. Indeed, animals communicate and aggregate to optimize foraging success, and are therefore constantly facing a trade-off between access to food and interference from other individuals. To test to which extent an optimal foraging strategy in insectivorous bats varied in the presence of other individuals, we used a 3D acoustic tracking of echolocation calls.
3. Originators
Kévin Barré
4. Contact information
Kévin Barré, Station marine de Concarneau, 29900 Concarneau, France. kevin.barre@mnhn.fr
5. Date of data collection
From September 21st to 30th 2022.
6. Geographic location(s) of data collection
Rhône Valley in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in France.
7. Information about funding sources that supported the collection and curation of the
data
This work was supported by the Office Français de la Biodiversité (OFB), the Compagnie nationale du Rhône (CNR), and the Agence de la transition écologique (ADEME). The equipment was funded by the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN) through the Actions Thématiques du Muséum (ATM) and the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux (LPO) Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.
ACCESS INFORMATION
1. Licenses/restrictions placed on the data
CC0 license waiver
2. Data derived from other sources
Barré K., Baudouin A., Froidevaux J. S. P., Chartendrault V., & Kerbiriou C. (2023). Data from: Insectivorous bats alter their flight and feeding behaviour at ground-mounted solar farms. Journal of Applied Ecology. Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10149959.
Barré K, Baudouin A, Froidevaux JSP, Chartendrault V, Kerbiriou C. 2024. Insectivorous bats alter their flight and feeding behaviour at ground-mounted solar farms. Journal of Applied Ecology. 61(2):328–339. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14555.
DATA FILES AND VARIABLES
1. data.csv
This file contains a dataset in which each line corresponds to a bat trajectory, and columns show information related to the trajectory characteristics and co-occurring bats. We used a comma as a decimal delimiter. NA cells are unavailable data for which the flight parameters could not be calculated because the trajectory does not contain enough positions to compute it (e.g., sinuosity and flight speed require at least three and two positions, respectively).
• id_site: Site identifier.
• IdTraj: Trajectory identifier.
• Species_corrected: Bat species.
• guild: Bat guild.
• sinuosity: Sinuosity of the trajectory.
• Imp3: Cumulated imprecision of the three dimensions.
• meanBuzz: Average feeding buzz score value in the trajectory.
• maxBuzz: Maximum:feeding buzz score value in the trajectory.
• minBuzz Minimum: feeding buzz score value in the trajectory.
• meanVfinal: Average flight speed of the trajectory.
• maxVfinal: Maximum flight speed of the trajectory.
• minVfinal: Minimum flight speed of the trajectory.
• dist_Eau: Site distance to water body.
• dist_Lisiere: Site distance to woody edges.
• foret_100: Forest proportion in a 100 m radius around the site.
• foret_500: Forest proportion in a 500 m radius around the site.
• foret_1000: Forest proportion in a 1000 m radius around the site.
• traj_length: Duration of the trajectory.
• Pipkuh: Presence/absence of Pipistrellus kuhlii co-occurrence.
• Pipnat: Presence/absence of Pipistrellus nathusii co-occurrence.
• Nyclei: Presence/absence of Nyctalus leisleiri co-occurrence.
• Pippyg: Presence/absence of Pipistrellus pygmaeus co-occurrence.
• MyoGT: Presence/absence of Myotis myotis co-occurrence.
• Eptser: Presence/absence of Eptesicus serotinus co-occurrence.
• Rhifer: Presence/absence of Rhinolophus ferrumequinum co-occurrence.
• Pippip: Presence/absence of Pipistrellus pipistrellus co-occurrence.
• Myodau: Presence/absence of Myotis daubentonii co-occurrence.
• Myocap: Presence/absence of Myotis capaccinii co-occurrence.
• Nycnoc: Presence/absence of Nyctalus noctula co-occurrence.
• Myonat: Presence/absence of Myotis nattereri co-occurrence.
• Pleaus: Presence/absence of Plecotus austriacus co-occurrence.
• Hypsav: Presence/absence of Hypsugo savii co-occurrence.
• Barbar: Presence/absence of Barbastellus barbastella co-occurrence.
• Conspecific_sp: Presence/absence of conspecifics co-occurrence.
• Heterospecific_intraMRE: Presence/absence of intra-guild heterospecifics co-occurrence.
• Heterospecific_inter_nonMRE: Presence/absence of inter-guild heterospecifics co-occurrence.
• Heterospecific_tot: Presence/absence of heterospecifics co-occurrence.
• tot_nb: Presence/absence of co-occurrence.
CODE SCRIPTS AND WORKFLOW
1. R_file.R
This R script contains all steps used to analyse data included in the data.csv file, from models to figures.
SOFTWARE VERSIONS
All statistical analyses were performed with R
loaded packages:
• Matrix_1.6-5
• gtable_0.3.5
• dplyr_1.1.4
• compiler_4.3.3
• tidyselect_1.2.1
• Rcpp_1.0.12
• DHARMa_0.4.7
• splines_4.3.3
• scales_1.3.0
• boot_1.3-29
• lattice_0.22-5
• coda_0.19-4.1
• TH.data_1.1-2
• ggplot2_3.5.1
• R6_2.5.1
• generics_0.1.3
• MASS_7.3-60.0.1
• tibble_3.2.1
• nloptr_2.0.3
• munsell_0.5.1
• minqa_1.2.6
• pillar_1.9.0
• TMB_1.9.11
• rlang_1.1.3
• utf8_1.2.4
• multcomp_1.4-25
• estimability_1.5
• cli_3.6.2
• magrittr_2.0.3
• mgcv_1.9-1
• emmeans_1.10.1
• grid_4.3.3
• rstudioapi_0.16.0
• mvtnorm_1.2-4
• xtable_1.8-4
• sandwich_3.1-0
• lme4_1.1-35.3
• cowplot_1.1.3
• lifecycle_1.0.4
• nlme_3.1-164
• glmmTMB_1.1.9
• vctrs_0.6.5
• glue_1.7.0
• numDeriv_2016.8-1.1
• codetools_0.2-19
• zoo_1.8-12
• survival_3.5-8
• fansi_1.0.6
• colorspace_2.1-0
• pkgconfig_2.0.3
• tools_4.3.3
REFERENCES
NA