ArticlePloS one2012
The foraging ecology of the mountain long-eared bat Plecotus macrobullaris revealed with DNA mini-barcodes.
Article in PloS one, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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22 citing papers in PubMed, 64 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Food for everyone: Differential feeding habits of cryptic bat species inferred from DNA metabarcoding.Molecular ecology · 2021Article
- DNA traces the origin of honey by identifying plants, bacteria and fungi.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Gaining ecological insight on dietary allocation among horseshoe bats through molecular primer combination.PloS one · 2019Article
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- Porous barriers? Assessment of gene flow within and among sympatric long-eared bat species.Ecology and evolution · 2018Article
- Table for five, please: Dietary partitioning in boreal bats.Ecology and evolution · 2018Article
- Determining diet from faeces: Selection of metabarcoding primers for the insectivore Pyrenean desman (Galemys pyrenaicus).PloS one · 2018Article
- Pellets of proof: First glimpse of the dietary composition of adult odonates as revealed by metabarcoding of feces.Ecology and evolution · 2017Article
- A single mini-barcode test to screen for Australian mammalian predators from environmental samples.GigaScience · 2017Article
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- Unveiling the factors shaping the distribution of widely distributed alpine vertebrates, using multi-scale ecological niche modelling of the bat Plecotus macrobullaris.Frontiers in zoology · 2014Article
- Second generation sequencing and morphological faecal analysis reveal unexpected foraging behaviour by Myotis nattereri (Chiroptera, Vespertilionidae) in winter.Frontiers in zoology · 2014Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Molecular analysis of diet overcomes the considerable limitations of traditional techniques for identifying prey remains in bat faeces. We collected faeces from individual Mountain Long-eared Bats Plecotus macrobullaris trapped using mist nets during the summers of 2009 and 2010 in the Pyrenees. We analysed their diet using DNA mini-barcodes to identify prey species. In addition, we inferred some basic features of the bat's foraging ecology that had not yet been addressed. P. macrobullaris fed almost exclusively on moths (97.8%). As prey we detected one dipteran genus (Tipulidae) and 29 moth taxa: 28 were identified at species level (23 Noctuidae, 1 Crambidae, 1 Geometridae, 1 Pyralidae, 1 Sphingidae, 1 Tortricidae), and one at genus level (Rhyacia sp., Noctuidae). Known ecological information about the prey species allowed us to determine that bats had foraged at elevations between 1,500 and 2,500 m amsl (above mean sea level), mostly in subalpine meadows, followed by other open habitats such as orophilous grasslands and alpine meadows. No forest prey species were identified in the diet. As 96.4% of identified prey species were tympanate moths and no evidence of gleaning behaviour was revealed, we suggest P. macrobullaris probably forages by aerial hawking using faint echolocation pulses to avoid detection by hearing moths. As we could identify 87.8% of the analysed sequences (64.1% of the MOTUs, Molecular Operational Taxonomic Units) at species level, we conclude that DNA mini-barcodes are a very useful tool to analyse the diet of moth-specialist bats.
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