Seasonal intake responses in the nectar-feeding bat Glossophaga soricina

Food intake in nectar-feeding animals is affected by food quality, their energetic demands, and the environmental conditions they face. These animals increase their food intake in response to a decrease in food quality, a behavior named intake response. However, their capacity to achieve compensatory feeding, in which they maintain a constant flux of energy, could be constrained by physiological processes. Here we evaluated how both a seasonal change in environmental conditions and physiological constraints affected the food ingestion in the bat Glossophaga soricina. We measured food intake rate during both the wet/warm and dry/cool seasons at sucrose solutions ranging from 146 to 1,022 mmol L-1. We expected that food intake and metabolic demands would be greater during the dry/cool season. Bats ingested similar to 20% more food in the dry/cool than in the wet/warm season. Regardless of season, bats were unable to achieve a constant flux of energy when facing the different sugar concentrations that we used in our experiments. This suggests that the rate of food intake is physiologically constrained in G. soricina. Using the digestive capacity of bats we modeled their food intake. The analytic model we used predicts that digestive limitations to ingest energy should have an important effect on the ecology of this species.