Short-term impacts of extreme environmental disturbance on the bats of Puerto Rico

The sensitivity of bat species to stochastic disturbance was investigated b y exploiting the natural experiment provided by Hurricane Georges, which st ruck the island of Puerto Rico (Caribbean) in September 1998. Six forest ha bitats and three cave most sites sampled fur bats prior to the hurricane we re sampled in the same way after the hurricane. Populations showed signific ant declines in abundance and species richness across all forest habitats s ampled. Species' sensitivity to disturbance were not equal: larger species were significantly more affected by disturbance than smaller species, once the effects of phylogenetic non-independence were removed. There was some e vidence that frugivorous and nectarivorous species an more affected by hurr icane disturbance than insectivorous species. These findings have important implications for maintaining viable populations of species in areas that e xperience a high degree of environmental fluctuation.