Balancing food, activity and the dangers of sunlit nights

Abstract

Abstract: Living in northern latitudes poses challenges to the animals that live in those habitats. The harsh environment provides a short breeding season where the sunlit summer nights provide little reprieve from visibility to predators and increased risk. In this paper, we tested the activity and food choice patterns of bank voles Myodes glareolus in early spring season, categorized by 18 h of daylight and 6 h of dusk in every day cycle. We found that territorial females showed a less predictable pattern of activity than males that were most active during the hours of dusk. The voles also showed preference to forage on high carbohydrate foods at sunset, while switching over to a more protein and fat-based diet towards sunrise. This shift is suggestive of a diet that is a direct adaptation to day-long fasts. Our results suggest a sensitive mechanism between food choice and predator avoidance in a system where light summer nights increase the predation risk considerably. Significance statement: Bank voles, Myodes glareolus, are considered a model organism in ecological studies and have been used for studies of population cycles, predator-prey interactions and studies of territoriality with over a century of published records. In this study, we challenge two major preconceptions about these animals using behavioral bio-assays in a controlled environment. (1) We challenge the diurnal activity patterns of these rodents currently accepted to have a bi-modal distribution in summer months and show a unimodular activity pattern. And (2) we show that these animals are not opportunistic foragers but vary their diet to compensate for the stress of an extended daytime fast further supporting a nocturnal pattern of activity even in extreme sunlit nights where night lasts under an hour.