The influence of a local temperature inversion on the foraging behaviour of big brown bats, Eptesicus fuscus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To maximise foraging efficiency, it is reasonable to expect animals to forage in the highest quality patches. Insectivorous bats should therefore travel to and forage at sites with the highest insect abundance. Since insects are ectothermic, their levels of activity should be higher in warmer areas, making these high quality patches for bats. A nightly temperature inversion occurring in the Cypress Hills (Saskatchewan, Canada) presented an opportunity to test our hypothesis that big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) select foraging sites based on temperature as a proxy for insect abundance. If temperature is an important determinant of the foraging behaviour of E. fuscus, we expect bats to forage in the warmest site closest to local night roosts. We tracked 18 bats for a total of 111 nights over two years and found that individuals often spent at least some of each foraging bout in an area where the temperature inversion was small or non-existent. Bats sometimes travelled up to 11 km to reach this site. Foraging in areas where the temperature inversion was small provides indirect evidence that local temperature fluctuations are not a major influence on the selection of foraging area by E. fuscus. Also, since there was little difference in the temperature between the nearby predicted foraging sites and actual foraging sites, we argue that the effect of temperature on insect activity cannot be used to predict foraging habitat selection by these bats. We found that the insect community of the foraging area was different than that of the roosting area, and that beetles were more abundant in the foraging site. Our data suggests that insect community composition is potentially a stronger direct influence on bat foraging behaviour than is temperature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".