Consistent long-distance foraging flights across years and seasons at colony level in a neotropical bat.

All foraging animals face a trade-off: how much time should they invest in exploitation of known resources versus exploration to discover new resources? For group-living central place foragers, this balance is challenging. Due to the nature of their movement patterns, exploration and exploitation are often mutually exclusive, while the availability of social information may discourage individuals from exploring. To examine these trade-offs, we GPS-tracked groups of greater spear-nosed bats () from three colonies on Isla Colón, Panamá.

Time synchronisation for millisecond-precision on bio-loggers.

Time-synchronised data streams from bio-loggers are becoming increasingly important for analysing and interpreting intricate animal behaviour including split-second decision making, group dynamics, and collective responses to environmental conditions. With the increased use of AI-based approaches for behaviour classification, time synchronisation between recording systems is becoming an essential challenge. Current solutions in bio-logging rely on manually removing time errors during post processing, which is complex and typically does not achieve sub-second timing accuracies.

Heart rate monitoring reveals differential seasonal energetic trade-offs in male noctule bats.

Understanding how animals meet their daily energy requirements is critical in our rapidly changing world. Small organisms with high metabolic rates can conserve stored energy when food availability is low or increase energy intake when energetic requirements are high, but how they balance this in the wild remains largely unknown. Using miniaturized heart rate transmitters, we continuously quantified energy expenditure, torpor use and foraging behaviour of free-ranging male bats () in spring and summer.

Seasonal shifts in insect ephemerality drive bat foraging effort.

Animal foraging is fundamentally shaped by food distribution and availability. However, the quantification of spatiotemporal food distribution is rare but crucial to explain variation in foraging behavior among species, populations, or individuals. Clumped but ephemeral food sources enable rapid energy intake but require increased effort to find, can generate variable foraging success, and force animals to forage more efficiently.

High temporal resolution data reveal low bat and insect activity over managed meadows in central Europe.

Increasing agriculture and pesticide use have led to declines in insect populations and biodiversity worldwide. In addition to insect diversity, it is also important to consider insect abundance, due to the importance of insects as food for species at higher trophic levels such as bats. We monitored spatiotemporal variation in abundance of nocturnal flying insects over meadows, a common open landscape structure in central Europe, and correlated it with bat feeding activity.