ArticleeLife2023
Echolocating bats prefer a high risk-high gain foraging strategy to increase prey profitability.
Article in eLife, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 19 citations in OpenAlex.
- Greater Mouse-Tailed Bats Glide During Approximately 50% of Their Flight.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- What Factors Shape the Flyability in Bats?-The Perspective from Bat's Wing Development.Biology · 2025Review
- Fast vocal-motor tracking of escaping prey in echolocating bats.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Trait responses, nonconsumptive effects, and the physiological basis of Helicoverpa armigera to bat predation risk.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Calibrated microphone array recordings reveal that a gleaning bat emits low-intensity echolocation calls even in open-space habitat.The Journal of experimental biology · 2023Article
- Echolocating bats prefer a high risk-high gain foraging strategy to increase prey profitability.eLife · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Predators that target multiple prey types are predicted to switch foraging modes according to prey profitability to increase energy returns in dynamic environments. Here, we use bat-borne tags and DNA metabarcoding of feces to test the hypothesis that greater mouse-eared bats make immediate foraging decisions based on prey profitability and changes in the environment. We show that these bats use two foraging strategies with similar average nightly captures of 25 small, aerial insects and 29 large, ground-dwelling insects per bat, but with much higher capture success in the air (76%) vs ground (30%). However, owing to the 3-20 times larger ground prey, 85% of the nightly food acquisition comes from ground prey despite the 2.5 times higher failure rates. We find that most bats use the same foraging strategy on a given night suggesting that bats adapt their hunting behavior to weather and ground conditions. We conclude that these bats use high risk-high gain gleaning of ground prey as a primary foraging tactic, but switch to aerial hunting when environmental changes reduce the profitability of ground prey, showing that prey switching matched to environmental dynamics plays a key role in covering the energy intake even in specialized predators.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.