Rare species of bat discovered in Shillong

SHILLONG: Shillong is one of the few places in the entire South East Asia that houses a rare species of bat, a science publication has said.
In a report published in the recent edition of the Swiss journal, Revue suisse de Zoologie, the bat, Hypsugo joffrei, commonly known as Joffre’s Pipistrelle, was reported for the first time from India and Nepal.
The study was led by Dr Uttam Saikia, a scientist from the Zoological Survey of India in Shillong, who collected a single specimen of the bat from Risa Colony of the city. The specimen was later found to be a new India record.
Dr Saikia, along with Dr Gaber Csorba of Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, and Dr Manuel Ruedi of Natural History Museum of Geneva in Switzerland, have reported the occurrence of this bat for the first time from the South East Asia.
Earlier, it was known to be found only in Myanmar and Vietnam.
In a statement, Dr Saikia said Meghalaya, to its credit, is home to over 60 species of bats out of a total of 124 found in India. This is impressive considering the fact that the geographic area of Meghalaya is less than 1 per cent of the total area of the country. The presence of such interesting bat species in Meghalaya underscores the diversity and uniqueness of the bat fauna of the State.
In the same publication, the researchers have also found that the earlier records of another bat species, Philetor brachyopterus, from India and Nepal are in fact based on misidentification as the distribution of Philetor is essentially confined to Sundaic zoogeographic sub-region, including the Philippines, New Guinea, and other places.
This justifies the omission of this bat from the Indian faunal list.