Echolocation activity of migratory bats at a wind energy facility: testing the feeding-attraction hypothesis to explain fatalities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As development of wind energy facilities continues, questions of why fatalities of migrating insectivorous bats occur at turbines still remain. Numerous hypotheses have been proposed, including a feeding-attraction hypothesis that suggests bats may be attracted to insects congregating near turbine nacelles. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed echolocation calls of hoary (Lasiurus cinereus) and silver-haired (Lasionycteris noctivagans) bats recorded over 72 nights at a wind energy facility in Southern Alberta, Canada. We recorded calls at 3 heights: 67 m at turbine nacelles, 30 m at meteorological towers, and ground level at turbines and meteorological towers. We used feeding buzzes as indicators of foraging behavior. We compared the occurrence of feeding buzzes across heights, and between turbines and meteorological towers to test the prediction that if bats are attracted to turbines for foraging, there will be a greater proportion of feeding buzzes at turbines, and in particular, at nacelle height. We found no significant evidence that foraging rates were higher at nacelle height compared to 30 m or ground level, or between turbines and meteorological towers for either species. For silver-haired bats, foraging activity was greater at meteorological towers, and in particular, at 30 m height. These results do not support the feeding-attraction hypothesis for silver-haired or hoary bats, and suggest that while some bats forage in the vicinity of wind turbines, they are not specifically attracted to turbines to feed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".