Home ranges, feeding sites, and daily movement behavior of the highly threatened Livingstone's fruit bat revealed through GPS tracking

Journal article

The highly threatened Livingstone's fruit bat, Pteropus livingstonii, is endemic to only two islands of the Union of the Comoros, a country with some of the highest deforestation rates worldwide. The majority of the bat population is found on Anjouan, where only 10% of the island surface still has intact forest cover. Classed as a “forest‐dependent” species, our aim was to understand the landscape use of the bats in order to focus conservation efforts on important bat resources. For this we retrieved movement data from 17 individuals fitted with GPS trackers between May 2022 and October 2023, in both the dry and the wet seasons. We identified home ranges, potential feeding sites, and daily movement behavior. Potential feeding sites were found mainly in forest and agroforest habitats, the two landcover classes with high tree cover. The tagged bats traveled similar distances during the day as during the night, indicating increased diurnal movement compared to closely related species, possibly due to a combination of lack of predation and having to meet nutritional needs in a highly degraded landscape. The results of this research will be integrated into a landscape‐wide conservation programme implemented by a local conservation organization together with communities.

Authors: Mandl, I; Abdou, BBA; Said, I; O'Mara, T; Flanders, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: Conservation Science and Practice
• Article number: e70208
• Publication date: 2025-12-12
• Acceptance date: 2025-10-26
• DOI: 10.1111/csp2.70208
• EISSN: 2578-4854
• ISSN: 2578-4854
• Language: English
• Keywords: habitat loss; flying fox; habitat use; forest‐dependent; island conservation; Indian Ocean