Newly described cave bat in Sri Lanka indicates presence of more species

Researchers say a new bat species found in Sri Lanka and South India and named Miniopterus phillipsi in honour of British naturalist W.W.A. Phillips is an indication to the presence of more yet to be identified species, said a report by the Mongabay.It said: Sri Lanka is home to 31 species of bats, but researchers say there could be more given that neighboring India has 132 bat species already described.

The number of identified species in the genus Miniopterus has doubled in Africa, but in Asia, M. phillipsi is the first new addition to this genus after a lapse of six decades.M. phillipsi is a small, insectivorous bat previously identified as Miniopterus fuliginosus; it inhabits caves and its population remains stable, although habitat loss may soon impact these bats.

The 18th and 19th centuries’ Sri Lanka saw many British naturalists studying the island’s rich biodiversity. They also contributed to profiling the same. One of them, W.W.A. Phillips, a tea planter who was particularly interested in mammals, published the Manual of the Mammals of Sri Lanka in 1932. One of the chapters in the book describes the island’s bat fauna, including the Sri Lankan woolly bat (Kerivoula malpasi), a species then new to science.

Now, after 90 years since Phillips’ discovery, young researcher Tharaka Kusuminda, a PhD candidate at the University of Ruhuna, and his team have described a new bat species from Sri Lanka, naming it Miniopterus phillipsi in honour of the British naturalist. Their findings are reported in the journal Acta Chiropterologica.

The new bat is a medium-sized cave-dwelling insectivorous species found in Sri Lanka and India. It was previously misidentified as the Eastern bent-winged bat (Miniopterus fuliginosus), but the new species is generally smaller than M. fuliginosus in both external and skull dimensions. The newly described species does not change the total number of bat species of Sri Lanka, which remains at 31 since the entire population of M. fuliginosus would now be identified as M. phillipsi, says Kusuminda.

“M. fuliginosus is described based on a type specimen collected from a colder region in Nepal, so I had doubts whether the species found in Sri Lanka could be the same”, Kusuminda tells Mongabay. The researchers analysed the available specimen and compared DNA barcoding, which provided conclusive results proving their finding to be of a new species.

The discovery of the new Miniopterus species again highlights the widespread existence of cryptic diversity in bats that needs to be explored using an array of modern techniques like DNA barcoding, among others, says Uttam Saikia of the Zoological Survey of India and an author of the same study.The discovery of the new bat increased the number of bat species in India to 132, as M. fuliginosus populations are also thought to inhabit the colder northern Himalayan range. “The exact geographic boundary of both the species in India is not clear yet, but the bats previously thought as M. fuliginosus in peninsular India would actually be M. phillipsi,” Saikia tells Mongabay.