The energetics of mosquito feeding by insectivorous bats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dietary studies have long shown that insectivorous bats do not often consume mosquitoes, despite cosmopolitan distribution and occasional ubiquity of mosquitoes (Culicidae). The apparent avoidance of mosquitoes relative to availability may relate to their small size, as bats may have difficulties detecting and capturing mosquitoes or they may not return sufficient energy per unit effort of capture. We used bomb calorimetry to determine the energetic content of mosquitoes from Alaska and Illinois, USA, and compared resulting estimates to daily energy expenditure of several bat species. On a per gram basis, mosquitoes were energetically comparable with other insects (26.82 ± 2.40 kJ/g dry mass); however, an individual mosquito contains little energy. Some small insectivorous bats could theoretically meet daily energy needs by foraging exclusively on mosquitoes for <2 h, assuming maximal estimates of the rate of successful capture of mosquitoes. Larger, omnivorous bats may require >25 h of foraging on mosquitoes to meet daily energy needs. Wet mass of the mosquitoes required to balance energy budgets represent 18%–92% of body mass of bats and tends to be higher for smaller species. Thus, it appears that a mosquito-based diet may be constrained by different factors in small and large bat species.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".