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.

Dirty habits: potential for spread of antibiotic-resistance by black-headed gulls from waste-water treatment plants.

Anthropogenic environments such as wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and landfills are sources of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Black-headed gulls (Chroicocephalus ridibundus) frequently use WWTPs and may be vectors for AMR. We used GPS tracking data for 39 gulls for up to 8 months, combined with a shedding curve, to study sources and dispersal distances of AMR in Iberia.

Migration distance affects how closely Eurasian wigeons follow spring phenology during migration.

Background: The timing of migration for herbivorous migratory birds is thought to coincide with spring phenology as emerging vegetation supplies them with the resources to fuel migration, and, in species with a capital breeding strategy also provides individuals with energy for use on the breeding grounds. Individuals with very long migration distances might however have to trade off between utilising optimal conditions en route and reaching the breeding grounds early, potentially leading to them overtaking spring on the way. Here, we investigate whether migration distance affects how closely individually tracked Eurasian wigeons follow spring phenology during spring migration.

Evidence for continental-scale dispersal of antimicrobial resistant bacteria by landfill-foraging gulls.

Anthropogenic inputs into the environment may serve as sources of antimicrobial resistant bacteria and alter the ecology and population dynamics of synanthropic wild animals by providing supplemental forage. In this study, we used a combination of phenotypic and genomic approaches to characterize antimicrobial resistant indicator bacteria, animal telemetry to describe host movement patterns, and a novel modeling approach to combine information from these diverse data streams to investigate the acquisition and long-distance dispersal of antimicrobial resistant bacteria by landfill-foraging gulls. Our results provide evidence that gulls acquire antimicrobial resistant bacteria from anthropogenic sources, which they may subsequently disperse across and between continents via migratory movements.

Linking colony size with quantitative estimates of ecosystem services of African fruit bats.

Animal-mediated seed dispersal is a pivotal component of functioning forest ecosystems all over the globe. Animals that disperse seeds away from their parental plants increase the seeds' chances of survival by releasing them from competition and specialised predators and so contribute to maintain the biodiversity of forests. Furthermore, seeds dispersed into deforested areas provide the opportunity for reforestation.

Flexibility of habitat use in novel environments: insights from a translocation experiment with lesser black-backed gulls.

Being faced with unknown environments is a concomitant challenge of species' range expansions. Strategies to cope with this challenge include the adaptation to local conditions and a flexibility in resource exploitation. The gulls of the group form a system in which ecological flexibility might have enabled them to expand their range considerably, and to colonize urban environments.

Flexibility of continental navigation and migration in European mallards.

The ontogeny of continent-wide navigation mechanisms of the individual organism, despite being crucial for the understanding of animal movement and migration, is still poorly understood. Several previous studies, mainly conducted on passerines, indicate that inexperienced, juvenile birds may not generally correct for displacement during fall migration. Waterbirds such as the mallard (Anas platyrhynchos, Linnaeus 1758) are more flexible in their migration behavior than most migratory songbirds, but previous experiments with waterbirds have not yet allowed clear conclusions about their navigation abilities.