Fruit bats adjust their foraging strategies to urban environments to diversify their diet.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Urbanization is one of the most influential processes on our globe, putting a great number of species under threat. Some species learn to cope with urbanization, and a few even benefit from it, but we are only starting to understand how they do so. In this study, we GPS tracked Egyptian fruit bats from urban and rural populations to compare their movement and foraging in urban and rural environments. Because fruit trees are distributed differently in these two environments, with a higher diversity in urban environments, we hypothesized that foraging strategies will differ too.

Results

When foraging in urban environments, bats were much more exploratory than when foraging in rural environments, visiting more sites per hour and switching foraging sites more often on

SUBMITTER: Egert-Berg K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8210355 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature