Foraging choices of vampire bats in diverse landscapes: potential implications for land-use change and disease transmission.

ABSTRACT: In Latin America, the common vampire bat Desmodus rotundus is the primary reservoir of rabies, a zoonotic virus that kills thousands of livestock annually and causes sporadic and lethal human rabies outbreaks. The proliferation of livestock provides an abundant food resource for this obligate blood-feeding species that could alter its foraging behaviour and rabies transmission, but poor understanding of the dietary plasticity of vampire bats limits understanding of how livestock influences rabies risk.We analysed individual- and population-level foraging behaviour by applying δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N stable isotope analysis to hair samples from 183 vampire bats captured from nine colonies in Peru. We also assessed the isotopic distributions of realized prey by analysing b

SUBMITTER: Streicker DG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4950014 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature