Journal
JOURNAL OF MAMMALOGY
Volume 99, Issue 2, Pages 306-311Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/jmammal/gyy016
Keywords
fluorescent powder; Leptonycteris; lesser long-nosed bat; nightly movements; Sonoran Desert
Categories
Funding
- Arizona Game and Fish Department
- Whitley Fund for Nature
- CONACYT
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
- SEMARNAT-CONANP
- Bat Conservation International
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Nightly movements of bats have been described for only a handful of species around the world. The lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae) is a migratory pollinator recently delisted from threatened status in Mexico and proposed in early 2017 to be delisted from endangered status in the United States. Documenting the nightly movements of these bats and how they use the desert ecosystem when they spend the summer in Sonora, Mexico, is critical for protection of their habitat and to understand food availability and landscape use. We used inert fluorescent powder to mark thousands of bats emerging from a cave used as a day roost, then examined bats captured at known foraging sites for this marker. We also marked individuals captured at foraging sites with different colors of powder that enabled us to search for dyed feces in the cave. Our results demonstrate that these bats made round trips of ca. 100 km flying from their roost cave to their nightly foraging grounds, which exceeds all distances known from other phyllostomid or nectar-feeding bats in the world.
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