Environmental correlates and energetics of winter flight by bats in southern Alberta, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Winter activity of bats is common, yet poorly understood. Other studies suggest a relationship between winter activity and ambient temperature, particularly temperature at sunset. We recorded echolocation calls to determine correlates of hourly bat activity in Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, Canada. We documented bat activity in temperatures as low as −10.4 °C. We observed big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus (Palisot de Beauvois, 1796)) flying at colder temperatures than species of Myotis bats (genus Myotis Kaup, 1829). We show that temperature and wind are important predictors of winter activity by E. fuscus and Myotis, and that Myotis may also use changes in barometric pressure to cue activity. In the absence of foraging opportunity, we suggest these environmental factors relate to heat loss and thus the energetic cost of flight. To understand the energetic consequences of bat flight in cold temperatures, we estimated energy expenditure during winter flights of E. fuscus and little brown myotis (Myotis lucifugus (Le Conte, 1831)) using species-specific parameters. We estimated that winter flight uses considerable fat stores and that flight thermogenesis could mitigate energetic costs by 20% or more. We also show that temperature-dependent interspecific differences in winter activity likely stem from differences between species in heat loss and potential for activity–thermoregulatory heat substitution.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".