By Our Reporter
SHILLONG, June 7: Two Shillong-based scientists are among a team of five researchers to discovered a new species of bat from the Himalayan region of India and Pakistan.
The new species, Himalayan long-tailed myotis (Myotis himalaicus), was recorded during an extensive reassessment of the bat fauna of the Western Himalayas, specifically Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
The five scientists are Uttam Saikia from the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) in Shillong, M.A. Laskar from St Anthony’s College in Shillong, Rohit Chakravarty from the Mysuru-based Nature Conservation Foundation, Gabor Csorba from Budapest’s Hungarian Natural History Museum, and Manuel Ruedi from the Natural History Museum of Geneva.
Their study was published in the latest edition of Zootaxa, a zoological mega-journal Zootaxa. The new bat was described based on specimens collected from higher-elevation areas of Uttarakhand in 2021 and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan in 1998.
Csorba had collected the specimen from Pakistan 27 years ago but did not define it.
According to the study, the new species belongs to a group of morphologically similar species called Myotis frater complex which have a wide distribution from eastern China, Taiwan, central and south-eastern Siberia, Korea, Japan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
“Apparently a native of the southern slopes of the Himalayas, the newly described bat species was thus far encountered in the deodar, pine or cedar forest and appears uncommon,” it said.
Saikia and Chakravarty, leading bat experts in the country and lead authors of the study, noted that such discoveries highlight the need to sample the Himalayan region of India more intensively. “It gives us another reason to go back to the mountains,” they said.
The study also resulted in a new addition to the bat fauna of India, the globally data-deficient East Asian free-tailed bat (Tadarida insignis), which was mistaken for the European free-tailed bat (Tadarida teniotis) in all existing literature in India.
Based on detailed study of the specimen collected from Uttarakhand and genetic analysis, the researchers concluded that this species is distributed in the Himalayan region of India besides China, Taiwan, Japan and the Korean Peninsula and constitute a very significant eastward extension of range by about 2,500 km.
Another significant highlight of the study was the validation of species status of another poorly understood species named Babu’s pipistrelle (Pipistrellus babu). This species was discovered over a century ago from the Muree hills in Pakistan and is common in the western and central Himalayas.
Due to morphological similarities, subsequent researchers considered it as a synonym of another species called Javan pipistrelle (Pipistrellus javanicus) found in Southeast Asia.
The new study conclusively proved that Babu’s pipistrelle is a species distinct from the Javan pipistrelle and is distributed in Pakistan, and the Western Himalayas of India and Nepal.
The study also provided the first specimen-based confirmation of the presence of a few other bat species in India – Savi’s pipistrelle (Hypsugo savii) and Japanese greater horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus nippon), which were earlier mentioned from India based on either doubtful specimens or on zoogeographic ground.
Dhriti Banerjee, the Director of ZSI, said the study is expected to have significant implications in the documentation and conservation of small mammalian fauna of India and also boost further studies in the Indian Himalayas.
“With this revisionary study, the confirmed tally of Indian bat species currently stands at 135, which is likely to go up as studies continue,” she said.