An article written by the workers of the Bat Rehabilitation Center of Feldman Ecopark Anton Vlashchenko, Viktor Kovalev, Vitalii Hukov, Kseniia Kravchenko and Olena Rodenko An Example of Ecological Traps for Bats in the Urban Environment was published in the European Journal of Wildlife Research.
According to the head of the Centre Anton Vlashchenko, the group of authors worked on this material for three years. “The fact that our material was published in the really competent scientific journal is a serious result. European Journal of Wildlife Research is the most top-rated journal among those ones, which published our works before. This release makes the Bat Rehabilitation Center and Feldman Ecopark recognizable in global science,” he emphasized.
The article is devoted to one of the existing ecological traps for bats in the urban environment: their killing by half-wild cats on the example of the situation in the Derzhprom building in Kharkiv (one of the traditional locations, where hundreds of red list bats spend winter in the city).
“The material for this article was collected in winter 2014-2015, when we found the remains of 157 bats. According to our estimates, it is only a small part of the killed animals. There were more females among them, and in general, those were the animals with good weight and high chances to meet spring. Noctule bats take the Derzhprom building as a rock with cracks, where they may spend winter successfully. However, they do not even expect that in addition to people, which are often aggressive towards bats, and the air, which is too dry and warm for their fatty subcutaneous layer, the building conceals several cat families as well. In fact, it is exactly the essence of ecological traps: wild animals do not see difference between the natural habitats and the ones created by humans. And their death rates in these traps may be much higher than in natural environment,” Anton Vlashchenko noted.
The research was carried out within the frameworks of the activities of the Bat Rehabilitation Center of Feldman Ecopark under the support of the International Charitable Foundation “Alexander Feldman Foundation,” and partly within the frameworks of the EUROBATS Project Initiative “Kharkiv Bat Education Program 2013-2014.”
Reference. European Journal of Wildlife Research is one of the journals of Springer Science+Business Media, second largest publishing house in the field of science. Springer publishes academic journals and books in natural sciences since 1842 and currently releases nearly 1,500 journals and 5,000 books every year.
