Abstract
Passive acoustic monitoring of bats allows for the long-term surveillance of activity, thereby often leading to large amounts of data. No peer-reviewed published studies exist estimating the number of nights needed to deploy passive acoustic monitors to determine the cave-exiting behavior of hibernating bats in temperate climate zones. We used acoustic data recorded from the two most prominent bat species in the caves we studied and predicted that an asymptotic relationship existed between relative precision in the cave-exiting behavior (i.e., mean number of acoustic files/night) and number of nights acoustic detectors were deployed. We set detectors from 2011 to 2018 at 9 cave entrances during hibernation. We used 5000 bootstrapped draws for each sampled night, at each cave, and for each year by species to determine the number of nights needed to acoustically sample. Detectors recorded 3045 files of Townsend’s big-eared bats (Corynorhinus townsendii) across 443 detector nights and 11,377 files of western small-footed myotis (Myotis ciliolabrum) across 736 detector nights. The number of nights needed to estimate the mean cave-exiting behavior of Townsend’s big-eared bats was 18 and 17 for western small-footed myotis. Our methods used in other areas can help researchers understand the number of nights needed to set acoustic detectors in inclement weather and inhospitable locations to quantify potential changes in the winter cave-exiting behavior of bats.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the employees of Wastren Advantage.
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This work was funded by the US Department of Energy, Idaho Operations Office at the INL Site (contract number DE-NE0008477).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Jericho Whiting, Bill Doering, and Ken Aho. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Jericho Whiting, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Entering caves to count hibernating bats was approved by the Idaho National Laboratory Site Cave Protection and Access Committee (permit number OS-ESD-16–108).
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The authors declare no competing interests.
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Communicated by: Jenna Kohles
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Whiting, J.C., Doering, B. & Aho, K. How many nights should acoustic detectors be set to estimate cave-exiting behavior of hibernating bats?. Mamm Res 68, 647–652 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13364-023-00709-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13364-023-00709-y