Microclimate and Ammonia Production of an Unusual Littoral Maternity Roost for Mormoopid Bats, Pteronotus spp., in Pacific Coastal Costa Rica
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The metabolism of large numbers of bats roosting in confined cave spaces is expected to produce extreme microclimatic conditions (such as extreme heat, CO2 concentrations, ammonia levels). Here, we report a quantitative estimate of 12,661 ± 1,686 Pteronotus (Mormoopidae) individuals in Costa Rica's largest subterranean bat roost. This small cave has a roost area of only ca. 30 m2, equivalent to an average density of 426 bats/m2. Metabolic products of this dense accumulation of bats were expected to produce extreme concentrations of gaseous ammonia. However, atmospheric ammonia concentration in the cave was shown to fall well below modelled expectations, reaching a maximum of 145 ug/m3. We show that most of the ammonia derived from the breakdown of urinary nitrogen must dissolve into guano pore water and wall condensation rather than be released as gaseous ammonia as would occur under drier conditions. Air temperature in the center of the roost rises to ca. 34°C, consistent with our observations in a wide range of bat caves where roost ambient temperature never equals or exceeds bat body temperature. Moreover, the cave microclimate exhibits a circadian rhythm which we attribute to bat movement.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".