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26 September 2019 Temperature, rainfall, and moonlight intensity effects on activity of tropical insectivorous bats
Giulliana Appel, Adrià López-Baucells, William Ernest Magnusson, Paulo Estefano D. Bobrowiec
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Abstract

The extrinsic factors that most influence animal activity are weather and light conditions, which can be assessed at hourly, monthly, and even lunar-cycle timescales. We evaluated the responses of tropical aerial-insectivorous bats to temperature, rainfall, and moonlight intensity within and among nights. Temperature positively affected the activity of two species (Cormura brevirostris and Saccopteryx bilineata). Moonlight reduced Myotis riparius activity and increased the activity of Pteronotus rubiginosus and S. leptura. Rainfall can promote an irregular activity peak during the night compared to nights without rainfall, but the bats in our study were not active for a longer time after a rainfall event. Our findings indicate that moonlight and temperature are the variables with the highest impact on the activity of tropical insectivorous bat species and that some species are sensitive to small variations in rainfall among and within nights.

© 2019 American Society of Mammalogists, www.mammalogy.org
Giulliana Appel, Adrià López-Baucells, William Ernest Magnusson, and Paulo Estefano D. Bobrowiec "Temperature, rainfall, and moonlight intensity effects on activity of tropical insectivorous bats," Journal of Mammalogy 100(6), 1889-1900, (26 September 2019). https://doi.org/10.1093/jmammal/gyz140
Received: 8 March 2019; Accepted: 15 August 2019; Published: 26 September 2019
KEYWORDS
acoustic monitoring
activity pattern
AMAZON
Chiroptera
lunar cycle
rainfall
temperature
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