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Habitat aridity as a determinant of the trade-off between water conservation and evaporative heat loss in bats

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Abstract

The maintenance of water balance in arid environments might represent a formidable challenge for Chiroptera, since they have high surface-to-volume ratios. In deserts, bats conserve water, for example, using daily torpor, but they also might experience episodic heat bouts, when they may need to increase total evaporative water loss (TEWL) to thermoregulate. We hypothesized that in bats, habitat aridity and its variability determine a trade-off between water conservation and thermoregulation via evaporative means. To test this hypothesis, we collated data from the literature of 22 species of bats on TEWL, body temperature and resting metabolic rate, in torpor and euthermy. We also collected data on ambient temperature (Ta) and precipitation of the locations where bats were captured, calculated an aridity index, and built an index of variability of the environment. After correcting for phylogeny, we found that, as aridity and variability of the environment increased, bats had lower values of TEWL, but the rate at which TEWL increases with Ta was higher, supporting our hypothesis. These results suggest that at high Ta there is a trade-off between water conservation and evaporative heat loss in bats. The evolution of physiological mechanisms that allow water conservation and tolerance to conditions of high Ta without access to free water might thus be crucial to explain the distribution of desert bats.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Catalina Manrique-Correa for her invaluable help with data collection and analyses. We also thank Prof. Berry Pinshow and several anonymous reviewers for useful comments in the preparation of the manuscript. This is paper number 1110 of the Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology.

Funding

This research was supported by grant number 2008469 of the US-Israel Binational National Science Foundation to CK and JBW, and a Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellowship and a VATAT fellowship from the Council of Higher Education, awarded to AMG.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, Ohio State University at Mansfield, 1730 University Dr., Mansfield, OH, 44906, USA

    Agustí Muñoz-Garcia

  2. Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology, Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 84990, Midreshet Ben-Gurion, Israel

    Miriam Ben-Hamo, Shai Pilosof & Carmi Korine

  3. Aronoff Laboratory, Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, Ohio State University, 318 W 12th Ave., Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Joseph B. Williams

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  1. Agustí Muñoz-Garcia
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  2. Miriam Ben-Hamo
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  4. Joseph B. Williams
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  5. Carmi Korine
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Contributions

AMG and JBW conceived the project, all authors have participated in data collection, AMG and KC designed the analysis, AMG did the analysis and prepared the figures. AMG and KC wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed with critical feedback on several revisions of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Agustí Muñoz-Garcia.

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Communicated by Philip Withers.

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Muñoz-Garcia, A., Ben-Hamo, M., Pilosof, S. et al. Habitat aridity as a determinant of the trade-off between water conservation and evaporative heat loss in bats. J Comp Physiol B 192, 325–333 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00360-021-01425-2

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