Browsing by Author "Deeley, Sabrina"
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- DNA Metabarcoding-based Evaluation of the Diet of Big Brown Bats (Eptesicus fuscus) in the Mid-Atlantic RegionDeeley, Sabrina; Kang, Lin; Michalak, Pawel; Hallerman, Eric M.; Ford, W. Mark (Eagle Hill Institute, 2022-12)High-throughput DNA sequencing can generate large genetic datasets in a cost-effective manner. Although the diet of Eptesicus fuscus (Big Brown Bat) has been studied widely in natural and rural systems using visual identification of prey items in feces, our aim was to more completely assess diet using a metabarcoding approach across a wide urban-natural landscape gradient in the mid-Atlantic region. Concordant with our expectations and previous Big Brown Bat diet studies from visual identification, we observed a high abundance of Coleoptera (beetles) relative to other insect orders. Although a possible improvement over visual techniques for studying food habits, we suggest caution in interpreting metabarcoding results in diet studies. We noted observations of environmental or contaminant taxa within these data, and designed a stringent filtering method that we used to eliminate these taxa, but that also removed previously documented prey taxa from our dataset.
- Mid-Atlantic Big Brown and Eastern Red Bats: Relationships between Acoustic Activity and Reproductive PhenologyDeeley, Sabrina; Ford, W. Mark; Kalen, Nicholas J.; Freeze, Samuel R.; St. Germain, Michael; Muthersbaugh, Michael; Barr, Elaine; Kniowski, Andrew; Silvis, Alexander; De La Cruz, Jesse (MDPI, 2022-04-21)Acoustic data are often used to describe bat activity, including habitat use within the summer reproductive period. These data inform management activities that potentially impact bats, currently a taxa of high conservation concern. To understand the relationship between acoustic and reproductive timing, we sampled big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) and eastern red bats (Lasiurus borealis) on 482 mist-netting and 35,410 passive acoustic sampling nights within the District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia, 2015-2018. We documented the proportion of female, pregnant, lactating, and juvenile big brown and eastern red bats within each mist-net sampling event and calculated locally estimated non-parametric scatterplot smoothing (LOESS) lines for each reproductive and acoustic dataset. We compared the peak in acoustic activity with the peaks of each reproductive condition. We determined that the highest levels of acoustic activity within the maternity season were most associated with the period wherein we captured the highest proportions of lactating bats, not juvenile bats, as often assumed.