From CK Nayak
NEW DELHI: After a variety of libraries, there is now one for the calls of the bats, widely found in the Himalayan region, mainly in the caves of Meghalaya.
The library is based on a systematic survey of bat calls in Uttarakhand, which has unveiled a new species record for the Indian subcontinent and eight for the western Himalayan region.
Considered to be the first bat call library from the western Himalayas, it is engaged in research, monitoring and conservation of the mammals too.
In total, 35 species of bats have been captured and examined during the survey while echolocation calls of 32 of them were recorded. Calls of nine of them were recorded for the first time in the world.
The Nature Science Initiative (Dehradun), Indian Institute of Science (Bengaluru), and Natural History Museum of Geneva have collaborated to set up the novel library.
The survey unveiled a new species record for the Indian subcontinent and eight for the western Himalayan region spanning Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jammu, and Kashmir.
In India, a clutch of chiropterologists have set the ball rolling to create acoustic databases – a daunting task given the country’s bat diversity.
India has a vast diversity of bats with at least 128 species of bats belonging to nine families.
Uttam Saikia of the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) said that most of the bat species in India need urgent conservation action in view of continued destruction and degradation of habitats. Unfortunately, bats are not legally protected in India, except for two species.
This year itself, Saikia and collaborators, documenting bat diversity in Meghalaya that harbours half of the country’s recorded bat species, provided the echolocation call data of three species from the Northeastern state.
Researchers, who developed the “first nation?wide library” of bat echolocation, said in a recent paper that acoustic bat libraries can lend a helping hand to “address a range of ecological questions including the effects of human-caused activities on bat communities through the analysis of bat sound”.
It is not hard to put out bat detectors that work as a camera trap in the context of bats which can work night after night.
Though small, bats can signal environmental stress since they form the largest, most vulnerable aggregations of any mammal except homo sapiens, have similarly wide distribution, complex biotic and abiotic requirements, and traditional ecosystem dominance.
Mass die-offs of bats and other animals are early warnings of serious environmental stress. Bats are sensitive to environmental fluctuations because they depend on insects that are quick to respond to environmental perturbations.
Systematically cataloguing bats and creating a baseline dataset makes a lot of sense – the habitat diversity along the Himalayan gradient, bio-geographical positioning, and an enigma that goes back to bat surveys of the British colonial period.
The researchers strongly recommend that bat surveys conducted in such species-rich but poorly documented areas as the Himalayas should include a reasonable collection of voucher specimens.
These specimens must be deposited in public repositories such as those of the ZSI, to be accessed and properly identified by specialised taxonomists.