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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Formato: | Recurso digital |
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Zenodo
2023
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| Acceso en liña: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13527962 |
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Table of Contents:
- (Uploaded by Plazi for the Bat Literature Project) We studied the diet and the overlap of diet and spatial niches of three common insectivorous bats: Hipposideros fuliginosus, Rhinolophus landeri and Chaerephon pumilus in the West region of Cameroon from December 2016 to November 2018. Bats were captured using standard mist netting and fecal analyses carried out. Five fecal pellets were randomly chosen from each bat, moisten with water and separated into fine pieces and observed under a binocular microscope. The result reveals that these species fed mainly on coleopterans, lepidopterans and hemipterans. Diet of these bats exhibited a high level of overlap, with the highest value between C. pumilus and R. landeri, with an overlap percentage of 76.6%, followed by H. fuliginosus and R. landeri, with an overlap percentage of 69.2%. The lowest overlap, with a percentage of 28.2% is between C. pumilus and H. fuliginosus. Also, communities of the R. landeri are spatially distant from those of C. pumilus and H. fuliginosus with the lowest spatial overlap between the pair C. pumilus and R. landeri followed by R. landeri and H. fuliginosus. Our results show that these three species consume the similar types of insect prey, but they take different proportions. Moreover, resource partitioning by these insectivorous bats is likely to occur in accordance with the abundance and seasonal availability of insect prey. Furthermore, our results provide baseline data for several insectivorous bats in Cameroon whose dietary and spatial co-existence has never been studied.