Researchers reviewing the diversity of bats in the Western Himalayas in India recently confirmed a new-to-science species from Uttarakhand state. Named the Himalayan long-tailed myotis (Myotis himalaicus) in a new study, the bat boasts a tail nearly as long as its body.
Rohit Chakravarty, a bat researcher and conservationist with the nonprofit Nature Conservation Foundation, told Mongabay he first caught individuals of this bat in Uttarakhand during fieldwork for his Ph.D. in 2016 and 2017. He collected blood samples for DNA analysis before releasing the bats.
While the individuals did seem a bit different from other bats Chakravarty had seen, he didn’t suspect at the time that they were an undescribed species, he told contributor Nikhil Sreekandan for Mongabay India.
The subsequent DNA analysis showed that these bats had considerable genetic differences from other similar Myotis species. But the team couldn’t describe it as a new-to-science species based on genetics alone. For confirmation, they needed to study the morphology and anatomy of an entire individual in detail.
Five years later, in 2021, Chakravarty said he finally managed to catch an individual for the analysis, and “put all the pieces of the puzzle together.”
By then, Chakravarty had handled numerous Myotis species, and he could tell the individual he’d caught was different: it had a distinctive bare patch around the eye and weighed about 7 grams (0.25 ounces), some 2-3 grams (0.07-0.1 oz) heavier than the other similar Myotis species in the area.
A detailed examination of the external and anatomical features of the bat confirmed that it was indeed a new-to-science species. “As we investigated the specimen closely, we found a suite of morphological, cranial, dental, and baculum (a bone in the penis found in certain mammals) characteristics unique to the species,” Uttam Saikia, study co-author and a bat researcher with the Zoological Society of India, told Mongabay India.
The researchers then stumbled upon a second specimen that turned out to be from the same species. It was an adult female bat collected by researchers on July 22, 1998, from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in neighboring Pakistan, about 700 kilometers (435 miles) west of Uttarakhand. The specimen was found in the Hungarian Natural History Museum’s collections.
Both the Indian and Pakistani specimens were nearly identical externally, and had been collected from a similar type of montane forest in the Himalayas.
M. himalaicus, the authors write, is the only species within a group of bats called the Myotis frater complex that’s known to inhabit the Indian subcontinent. All other Myotis frater complex species are known from eastern Asia, including parts of China, Japan and Russia, and Central Asia.
Apart from the newly described Himalayan long-tailed myotis, the taxonomic review of bats in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh states also confirmed the presence of the East Asian free-tailed bat (Tadarida insignis) in India for the first time.
Read the full story by Nikhil Sreekandan here.
Banner image: The newly described Himalayan long-tailed myotis. Image courtesy of Rohit Chakravarty.
