Data for Low foraging rates drive large insectivorous bats away from urban areas
Description
We tagged common noctule bats in northern Germany over three seasons. The data in this repository is used for our paper: "Low foraging rates drive large insectivorous bats away from urban areas" . Figure 1: We hypothesized that the bats tagged outside of Rostock would rely on natural habitats to a higher degree than bats tagged in Berlin. Our data show that the Rostock bats can be termed rural, and the Berlin bats urban bats. The two r-scripts MCP_berlin and MCP_rostock incklude the code for extracting the habitat use using MCP. Figure 2: We hypothesized that the bats would hunt for similar-sized prey in in our rural and urban habitats. We used four variables to describe the prey between the two sites: Prey target strength, bat-prey approach speed, buzz duration of the bat, and the max tortuosity index of the bats during the last 2 seconds before prey capture. In the four scripts in the folder "Figure02" is shown the comparison between rural and urban bats for each of the four variables. Figure 3: We hypothesized that urban bats would spend more time foraging due to fewer or more distributed resources in the city. We used four foraging-related parameters to investigate the foraging intake and instantaneous energy expenditure between the study sites. In the folder "Figure03" is four R-scripts that show our results for each of the four variables. Figure 4: We lastly hypothesized that due to fewer, but more predictably distributed resources, the urban bats would rely less on conspecifics to find their prey in the city. By identifying prey capture attempts with conspecifics absent or present, we could measure the % presence of conspecifics around hunting bats for both rural and urban bats. The results are found in the last folder: "Figure04".