Impacts of inter-annual climate variability on reproductive phenology and postnatal development of morphological features of three sympatric bat species

Inter-annual variation in weather conditions has been shown to affect the reproductive phenological patterns of many organisms. Because of their relatively small body size and dependence on ectothermic prey, temperate-zone insectivorous bats are particularly sensitive to adverse spring environmental...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2023-05, Vol.13 (1), p.8716-8716, Article 8716
Main Authors: Eghbali, Hojjat, Sharifi, Mozafar
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
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Animals
Annual variations
Bats
Births
Body mass
Body size
Chiroptera
Climate Change
Climate variability
Colonies
Echinodermata
Environmental conditions
Female
Foraging behavior
Forearm
Growth rate
Humanities and Social Sciences
Morphology
multidisciplinary
Myotis emarginatus
Niche overlap
Nursing
Parturition
Pregnancy
Prey
Reproduction
Rhinolophus euryale
Rhinolophus ferrumequinum
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Seasonal variations
Seasons
Sympatric populations
Weather
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Summary:Inter-annual variation in weather conditions has been shown to affect the reproductive phenological patterns of many organisms. Because of their relatively small body size and dependence on ectothermic prey, temperate-zone insectivorous bats are particularly sensitive to adverse spring environmental conditions that affect the duration of gestation and timing of parturition in these animals. This study aimed to compare phenological recruitment, birth seasonality and synchrony and morphological changes during postnatal growth in Rhinolophus euryale , Rhinolophus ferrumequinum and Myotis emarginatus in two consecutive years representing a typical dry (2015) and an extremely wet climatic event (2016) in a nursing colony in Kerend cave, western Iran. Females of these three bat species arrived from their wintering cave to the nursing colony in late April to mid-May each year. Synchrony of parturition as defined by amount clustering of births within a year assessed by circular statistics showed that for R . euryale and R . ferrumequinum the angular variance in dry year were significantly (P  0.05). Generalized estimating equation (GEE) for R . euryale indicated that for body mass and forearm length tests of parallelism (interaction term or growth rate) and tests for equal intercepts (y-intercepts or group term) were significant (P  0.05) different between the 2 years, but the tests for parallelism showed a significant decrease in growth rates of body mass and forearm length in the wet year (P 
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-023-35781-6