Ephemeral Resource Adaptations

Resources fluctuate in their availability daily, seasonally and sometimes unpredictably. We are interested in how animals reduce this uncertainty, across seasons, or even in a single day, and how this can be optimised by social information transfer or with alternative strategies in animals that cannot follow resources through movement behavior, such as migration or size changes.

Ongoing projects

Migration as an adaptation to seasonal change

Seasons cause a major change in resource availability and this is likely what has led to the evolution of migration. Seasonal migration affects all aspects of the migrants’ lives, imposing risk, energetic cost and, hopefully, benefits. Novel tag technology now lets us follow the migration of bats as they move across Europe and link it to observation of the bats across their yearly cycle.

Energetic compensation for resource ephemerality: Hibernation and climate change

Hibernation allows bats and other small mammals to survive winter, when food resources are very scarce. What happens, though, as winters become increasingly milder? Are animals “waking up” from hibernation? How does that affect their energy consumption and survival? We address this in the common noctule, a bat that is shifting and expanding its hibernation range.

Ephemeral resources and social information sharing

Resource availability can vary dramatically over the course of a single day. How bats, which are specialized on ephemeral, patchy resources, use social information to make sure they always know how to find food is a major research focus, currently mostly in Panama.

The challenge of being small - alternative wintering strategies in high-metabolic non-hibernating terrestrial mammals

Most of our work focuses on bats, but what about small mammals in the temperate zones that cannot escape harsh conditions? In a project focusing on the common shrew we study Dehnel's Phenomenon - a reversible individual size change that includes mass, size, the skull, several major organs and especially our focal one: the brain.

Impacts of tagging and captivity on behavior

When we study animals we affect them and this can in turn affect our results. These effects are largely unknown and we dedicate a large amount of effort to describing and quantifying them and find the best solution for everyone with the animals staying healthy and performing naturally as we tag and track them or keep them for behavioral observations.