The Mortlock Islands flying fox's habitat is being affected by the increasing ocean temperatures, revealed a new study that sheds light on the world's least-studied bat.
The Mortlock Islands flying fox is known as the world's least-studied bat. Up until now, all that scientists knew about this species was that it was derived from one lonely specimen preserved in a jar of alcohol in the Natural History Museum, London. However, in a recent finding, researchers from the College of Micronesia uncovered a wealth of information that sheds great light on the bat species.
The specimen was collected from the Mortlock Islands in 1870. It was then studied by British biologist Oldfield Thomas in 1882 and named Pteropus phaeocephalus. However, the latest findings revealed that a German naturalist on a Russian expedition had observed and named the animal some 50 years earlier.
"We found a report written by F.H. Kittlitz in 1836 describing his expedition to the Pacific Islands in the late 1820s. In that report he describes the flying-foxes of the Mortlocks and names them Pteropus pelagicus," lead author Don Buden said. "This means the species was named long before Thomas's description in 1882."
According to previously established rules of naming animals, the earliest name give to an animal must be retained. Therefore, the Mortlock Islands flying fox has been renamed Pteropus pelagicus. According to Buden, not only does Kittlitz need to be credited for discovering the animal but also for its "new" original name.
The report not only revealed the animal's original name but also shed light on the animal's behavior, diet and conservation status. According to the report, the Mortlock Islands houses between 900 and 1,200 bats scattered across a land surface of only 4.6 square miles.
In a study conducted after the discovery of new information regarding the bat, researchers examined the skulls and skins of related flying fox species in 8 different museums on 3 different continents. They found that flying foxes from the nearby islands of Chuuk Lagoon, which are regarded as a separate species called Pteropus insularis are actually a subspecies of Pteropus pelagicus. This new discovery led researchers to conclude that the Mortlock flying fox has a wider geographic distribution than previously realized.
New legal rules have helped protect the species better as they were previously heavily hunted and exported for food. However, these are not the only two factors that threaten to make the species extinct. During the course of the study, researchers found that the low-lying atolls this bat calls home are likely to be increasingly affected by rising ocean waters brought on by climate change.
"When we think of climate change having an impact on a mammal species, what comes to mind most immediately is an Arctic animal like the polar bear, which depends on sea ice to survive," co-author Kristofer Helgen said. "But this flying fox may be the best example of a mammal species likely to be negatively impacted by warming global climates. Here is a tropical mammal that has survived and evolved for hundreds of millennia on little atolls near the equator. How much longer will it survive as sea levels continue to rise?"
This large, breadfruit-eating bat is native to a few remote and tiny Pacific islands. Findings of the study were published online in the journal ZooKeys.
