New bat species discovered in Uttarakhand
Dehradun: A new bat species, the Himalayan long-tailed myotis (Myotis himalaicus), has been discovered in the high-altitude forests of Uttarakhand, particularly in the Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary, in what experts are calling a "major breakthrough for Himalayan biodiversity research.
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The discovery, published in the latest edition of the peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa, was made by a five-member team led by Uttam Saikia of the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) and Rohit Chakravarty of the Nature Conservation Foundation, as part of a reassessment of bat fauna in the western Himalayas. The species, believed to be native to the southern Himalayan slopes, was found in cedar, deodar, and pine forests and is considered rare.
Other members of the research team include M A Laskar from St Anthony's College in Shillong, Gabor Csorba of the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, and Manuel Ruedi from the Natural History Museum of Geneva. The species was described based on specimens collected in Uttarakhand in 2021 and in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in 1998. Csorba had collected the Pakistan specimen 27 years ago but had not identified it as a new species.
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According to the study, the newly-described species belongs to the Myotis frater complex: a group of morphologically-similar species distributed across eastern China, Taiwan, Siberia, Korea, Japan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
DFO of Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary, Tarun S, told TOI, "This is the first time the Himalayan long-tailed myotis has been validated, which is a major discovery. Such findings highlight the need for more intensive sampling in the Himalayan region of India."
He added that local villagers will be involved in community-based programmes and trained for wildlife monitoring, as they are often the first to notice new species in the forest.
The study also led to the first confirmed presence in India of the East Asian free-tailed bat (Tadarida insignis), a globally data-deficient species previously mistaken for the European free-tailed bat (Tadarida teniotis) in Indian literature.
This species is distributed in the Himalayan region of India, as well as China, Taiwan, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula.
The study also provided the first specimen-based confirmation of a few other bat species in India including Savi's pipistrelle (Hypsugo savii) and the Japanese greater horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus nippon), which were previously reported from the country based on questionable records or zoogeographic assumptions.
ZSI director Dhriti Banerjee said that "this revisionary study brings the confirmed tally of Indian bat species to 135, a number expected to rise as research continues."
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