Biotope, 22 bd Maréchal Foch, Mèze, France.
Centre d'Ecologie et des Sciences de la Conservation (CESCO), Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Sorbonne Université, CP 135, 57 rue Cuvier 75005 Paris, France.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2019 May;145(5):3242. doi: 10.1121/1.5102166.
The use of echolocation allows insectivorous bats to access unique foraging niches by locating obstacles and prey with ultrasounds in complete darkness. To avoid interspecific competition, it is likely that sonar features and wing morphology co-evolved with species vertical distribution, but due to the technical difficulties of studying flight in the vertical dimension, this has never been demonstrated with empirical measurements. The authors equipped 48 wind masts with arrays of two microphones and located the vertical distribution of a community of 19 bat species and two species groups over their annual activity period (>8000 nights). The authors tested the correlation between the proportion of flights at height and the acoustic features of bat calls as well as their wing morphology. The authors found that call peak frequency and bandwidth are good predictors of bat use of the vertical space regardless of their acoustic strategies (i.e., gleaning, hawking, or detecting prey flutter). High wing aspect ratios and high wing loadings were associated with high proportions of time spent at height, confirming hypotheses from the literature.
回声定位的使用使食虫蝙蝠能够在完全黑暗中利用超声波定位障碍物和猎物，从而进入独特的觅食生态位。为了避免种间竞争，声纳特征和翅膀形态很可能与物种的垂直分布共同进化，但由于在垂直维度上研究飞行的技术难度，这从未通过实证测量得到证明。作者在 48 个风塔上配备了两个麦克风的阵列，并在其年度活动期间（>8000 个夜晚）确定了 19 种蝙蝠物种和两个物种组的垂直分布。作者测试了在高处飞行的比例与蝙蝠叫声的声学特征及其翅膀形态之间的相关性。作者发现，无论它们的声学策略（即掠食、捕食或探测猎物振翅）如何，叫声的峰值频率和带宽都是蝙蝠利用垂直空间的良好预测指标。高展弦比和高翼载荷与在高处度过的时间比例较高有关，这证实了文献中的假设。
