In Taiwan, a Zoologist Posts Only the Third Golden-haired Tube-nosed Bat (金芒管鼻蝠) to iNat! - Observation of the Week, 6/14/20

Our Observation of the Week is this Golden-haired Tube-nosed Bat (金芒管鼻蝠 in Traditional Chinese), seen in Taiwan by @manuel_ruedi!

“Basically, I was born with a love of animals,” says Manuel Ruedi. And throughout his life, Manuel has got from being a fan of big cats, then eagles. He eventually got into birdwatching, then moving on to studying bats and mammals in general. “I graduated in biology,” he tells me,

then did my master on the speciation of bats, then a PhD on the biogeography of shrews (all the University of Lausanne, Switzerland), then went for a postdoc at Berkeley to research on pocket gophers with Jim Patton and Peg Smith,[and]  finally came back to lead a big research projects on bats, before ending as a curator at the Natural History Museum of Geneva.

In 2016, Manuel was researching bats in Taiwan with his colleagues, zoologists L.K. Lin and Gabor Csorba. They described two new species and one new genus of bats, and Manuel also had his first chance to see the Golden-haired Tube-nosed Bat shown above.

I never saw Harpiola isodon before,...[but] I immediately understood why this bat got its name: isodon = all teeth equal in size! No larger canines, etc. quite strange for a Murina-like bat. And golden was also clearly appropriate to describe its incredible colour.

Described in 2006, this bat species is native to the uplands of Taiwan (it’s been seen between about 1,000 - 2,400 meters above sea level) and is an insectivore, relying on vocal sonar to navigate in the dark. To give you a sense of scale, the ears of this species average about 13mm in length.

Manuel (above, in Quebec, Canada) says he only heard about iNaturalist a few weeks ago,

But [I] was immediately struck by the power of the community interaction, to ID any living thing…I have about 70,000 pictures of plants and animals worldwide, and dream of finding the time to submit all my observations to iNaturalist… eventually!

- by Tony Iwane.

- This video from the Smithsonian slows down bat echolocation calls so we humans can hear them.

Publicado el junio 14, 2020 07:23 TARDE por tiwane