Studying foraging behaviour unlocks access to the strategies used by organisms to optimize to the environment within the limits of constraints, and thus adapt to their environment. It uncovers information from an individual level to higher orders of organizations; how to optimally use the landscape and how energy flows across in its ecosystem. I intend to explore the foraging ecology of the tropical bat, Megaderma spasma from multiple perspectives; viz. the hunting behaviour, the energetics; and the encounter with its prominent prey species, Onomarchus uninonatus.

In my first chapter, I try to decode the animal behaviour from movement data, and characterise the bat hunting strategy. The high resolution data from bat-borne biologgers include IMU sensor, GPS and audio recorder. We intend to use the multimodality of the data to cross-check the behaviour signals across the data types. From the GPS data, I intend to understand the bat preference for forest patches.

In the second chapter, I explore the bat energy loss and gain in its active duration, and intend to put it in a theoretical perspective for better syntax to understand the energy efficiency for a bat. Understanding the bat strategies is our key to understand how evolution solved the problem of high energy demands. Instead of delving into the physiological aspect, I try to understand the bat foraging behaviour in the context of energetics, from the data collected from the biologgers.

In the third chapter, I aim to combine the database collected over the years about Megaderma spasma and Onomarchus uninonatus to computationally estimate the encounter rate in the wild.