Development and integration of technology into the monitoring of bats

Abstract

Interdisciplinary collaborations have facilitated many advancements in ecology. Using frameworks and tools from other disciplines, researchers have been able to generate ideas and explore questions that would be otherwise difficult to pursue. Animals that have cryptic lifestyles or live in environments difficult to observe, such as bats, can be explored in greater detail by implementing various technologies. While aspects of the life histories of bats have been well documented, information on some basic behaviour pertaining to distributions and foraging tendencies of some species remain unknown due the difficulty of monitoring sympatric nocturnal species at the landscape scale. We explored methods of tracking individual tropical bats using RFID technology to quantify their movement in a Neotropical landscape. We found that species differed in their detection rates and area overlap with conspecifics within a forest patch. We also found sex differences that may be a result of seasonal behaviour. Additionally, we used current applications of RFID technology at roosting locations to motivate the development of a method for estimating the mass of climbing Eptesicus fuscus. We explored the use of machine learning techniques as well as a linear model to estimate the mass of E. fuscus climbing vertically using collected data of their applied weight. Our results suggest that it is possible to discern differences in mass within the expected range of wild E. fuscus. These results add to our ability to understand and observe animal behaviour and highlight the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations in exploring new ways to collect observations about ecological processes.