DOI: 10.5061/dryad.6q573n6b0
title: Data from: Foraging flight strategy varies with species identity of co-occurring individuals in bats

description: Foraging is a key function in the animal kingdom. Foraging in group drives
 food patch discovery through social information transfer that maximizes an
 individual’s foraging success through either cooperation or competition in
 response to congener presence. Understanding how congener presence affects
 the foraging strategy is especially challenging as it requires close
 monitoring of animal movements, foraging success, and competitive
 interactions. The consequences of congener presence on foraging flight
 strategy of bats, a highly social taxa with strong behavioural plasticity
 in response to resource ephemerality, remains little tested. Through a
 three-dimensional acoustic tracking of individual echolocation calls, we
 assessed to which extent foraging flight strategy of bats varied in
 response to conspecific and heterospecific presence. We found that flight
 speed, the main lever for adjusting energy balance during foraging (i.e.
 slowing down to capture prey and speeding up to find new prey patches), is
 no longer used in presence of intra-guild heterospecifics. Also, the
 overall foraging level** increased regardless of co-occurring species,
 through a facilitation and/or a higher prey availability. The study shows
 that bats integrate species identity in making decisions about their
 foraging flight strategy, with a stronger tolerance towards conspecifics
 with which social relations are most important, e.g. because they share
 the same roost. This might have important implications in understanding
 consequences of interactions, especially in relation to anthropogenic
 pressures that rearrange bat communities and their prey in time and space,
 which could exacerbate natural competition.
description: #### GENERAL INFORMATION 1\. Paper Citation
 [https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/araf090](https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/araf090) 2\. Brief abstract The presence of individuals from a different species induces a change in bat’s flight strategy, that probably reflects an increase in competitiveness. Indeed, animals communicate and aggregate to optimize foraging success, and are therefore constantly facing a trade-off between access to food and interference from other individuals. To test to which extent an optimal foraging strategy in insectivorous bats varied in the presence of other individuals, we used a 3D acoustic tracking of echolocation calls. 3\. Originators Kévin Barré 4\. Contact information Kévin Barré, Station marine de Concarneau, 29900 Concarneau, France. [kevin.barre@mnhn.fr](mailto:kevin.barre@mnhn.fr) 5\. Date of data collection From September 21st to 30th 2022. 6\. Geographic location(s) of data collection Rhône Valley in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in France. 7\. Information about funding sources that supported the collection and curation of the data This work was supported by the Office Français de la Biodiversité (OFB), the Compagnie nationale du Rhône (CNR), and the Agence de la transition écologique (ADEME). The equipment was funded by the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN) through the Actions Thématiques du Muséum (ATM) and the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux (LPO) Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. ##### ACCESS INFORMATION 1\. Licenses/restrictions placed on the data CC0 license waiver 2\. Data derived from other sources Barré K., Baudouin A., Froidevaux J. S. P., Chartendrault V., & Kerbiriou C. (2023). Data from: Insectivorous bats alter their flight and feeding behaviour at ground-mounted solar farms. Journal of Applied Ecology. Zenodo [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10149959](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10149959). Barré K, Baudouin A, Froidevaux JSP, Chartendrault V, Kerbiriou C. 2024. Insectivorous bats alter their flight and feeding behaviour at ground-mounted solar farms. Journal of Applied Ecology. 61(2):328–339. [https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14555](https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14555). ##### DATA FILES AND VARIABLES 1\. data.csv This file contains a dataset in which each line corresponds to a bat trajectory, and columns show information related to the trajectory characteristics and co-occurring bats. We used a comma as a decimal delimiter. NA cells are unavailable data for which the flight parameters could not be calculated because the trajectory does not contain enough positions to compute it (e.g., sinuosity and flight speed require at least three and two positions, respectively). • id_site: Site identifier. • IdTraj: Trajectory identifier. • Species_corrected: Bat species. • guild: Bat guild. • sinuosity: Sinuosity of the trajectory. • Imp3: Cumulated imprecision of the three dimensions. • meanBuzz: Average feeding buzz score value in the trajectory. • maxBuzz: Maximum:feeding buzz score value in the trajectory. • minBuzz Minimum: feeding buzz score value in the trajectory. • meanVfinal: Average flight speed of the trajectory. • maxVfinal: Maximum flight speed of the trajectory. • minVfinal: Minimum flight speed of the trajectory. • dist_Eau: Site distance to water body. • dist_Lisiere: Site distance to woody edges. • foret_100: Forest proportion in a 100 m radius around the site. • foret_500: Forest proportion in a 500 m radius around the site. • foret_1000: Forest proportion in a 1000 m radius around the site. • traj_length: Duration of the trajectory. • Pipkuh: Presence/absence of *Pipistrellus kuhlii* co-occurrence. • Pipnat: Presence/absence of *Pipistrellus nathusii* co-occurrence. • Nyclei: Presence/absence of *Nyctalus leisleiri* co-occurrence. • Pippyg: Presence/absence of *Pipistrellus pygmaeus* co-occurrence. • MyoGT: Presence/absence of *Myotis myotis* co-occurrence. • Eptser: Presence/absence of *Eptesicus serotinus* co-occurrence. • Rhifer: Presence/absence of *Rhinolophus ferrumequinum* co-occurrence. • Pippip: Presence/absence of *Pipistrellus pipistrellus* co-occurrence. • Myodau: Presence/absence of *Myotis daubentonii* co-occurrence. • Myocap: Presence/absence of *Myotis capaccinii* co-occurrence. • Nycnoc: Presence/absence of *Nyctalus noctula* co-occurrence. • Myonat: Presence/absence of *Myotis nattereri* co-occurrence. • Pleaus: Presence/absence of *Plecotus austriacus* co-occurrence. • Hypsav: Presence/absence of *Hypsugo savii* co-occurrence. • Barbar: Presence/absence of *Barbastellus barbastella* co-occurrence. • Conspecific_sp: Presence/absence of conspecifics co-occurrence. • Heterospecific_intraMRE: Presence/absence of intra-guild heterospecifics co-occurrence. • Heterospecific_inter_nonMRE: Presence/absence of inter-guild heterospecifics co-occurrence. • Heterospecific_tot: Presence/absence of heterospecifics co-occurrence. • tot_nb: Presence/absence of co-occurrence. ##### CODE SCRIPTS AND WORKFLOW 1\. R_file.R This R script contains all steps used to analyse data included in the data.csv file, from models to figures. ##### SOFTWARE VERSIONS All statistical analyses were performed with R loaded packages: • Matrix_1.6-5 • gtable_0.3.5 • dplyr_1.1.4 • compiler_4.3.3 • tidyselect_1.2.1 • Rcpp_1.0.12 • DHARMa_0.4.7 • splines_4.3.3 • scales_1.3.0 • boot_1.3-29 • lattice_0.22-5 • coda_0.19-4.1 • TH.data_1.1-2 • ggplot2_3.5.1 • R6_2.5.1 • generics_0.1.3 • MASS_7.3-60.0.1 • tibble_3.2.1 • nloptr_2.0.3 • munsell_0.5.1 • minqa_1.2.6 • pillar_1.9.0 • TMB_1.9.11 • rlang_1.1.3 • utf8_1.2.4 • multcomp_1.4-25 • estimability_1.5 • cli_3.6.2 • magrittr_2.0.3 • mgcv_1.9-1 • emmeans_1.10.1 • grid_4.3.3 • rstudioapi_0.16.0 • mvtnorm_1.2-4 • xtable_1.8-4 • sandwich_3.1-0 • lme4_1.1-35.3 • cowplot_1.1.3 • lifecycle_1.0.4 • nlme_3.1-164 • glmmTMB_1.1.9 • vctrs_0.6.5 • glue_1.7.0 • numDeriv_2016.8-1.1 • codetools_0.2-19 • zoo_1.8-12 • survival_3.5-8 • fansi_1.0.6 • colorspace_2.1-0 • pkgconfig_2.0.3 • tools_4.3.3 ##### REFERENCES NA