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Scientists have discovered two new species of yellow-bellied bats, and say that there may be more.
While it's surprising to find new species with such an important feature, scientists point out that it's not so surprising that creatures are bats. With more than 1,200 species, bats make up one-fifth of all mammal species.
But it's not easy to understand how these bats are related, because in most cases their differences are subtle. And that's why the scientists at the Chicago Field Museum only came across the two new species when they looked for small genetic differences during the creation of an evolutionary family tree for bald ones. – African mouris. The details of their discovery are published Wednesday in the newspaper Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
The two new species belong to a group of bats known as Scotophilus. This group of bats, found in Africa and South Asia, averages five inches in length and wears bright yellow fur on the belly. Many species of Scotophilus live in urban areas and some, like the yellow bat, often rely on artificial structures.
More than half of these little bats have been discovered in the past 15 years and the relationships between them have long been a source of confusion for biologists. On the one hand, "they are pretty cryptic," which means they're hard to find in nature, said Terry Demos, a postdoctoral fellow at the Chicago Field Museum and senior author of the "Unusual". study. (Related: "6 Bat Myths Busted: Are They Really Blind?")
Wishing to map the disordered lineage of African bats, Demos and a team of researchers from the Maasai Mara University and National Museums from Kenya collected skin samples. from just over 100 yellow bats to Kenya, and extracted from each one's DNA. By comparing the genetic profiles of bats, Demos and his team were able to find differences between species and determine where they would fall on an evolutionary family tree.
But when Demos started building the tree, he noticed two distinct lineages until then unknown. to science. These lines are genetically dissimilar to other species in the genus, but before the lines can be considered a new species, Demos will need to identify "clearly diagnosed differences," such as physical traits or behaviors that differentiate new species. (Watch: "A rare look at the carnivorous bats of Mexico.")
Demos is confident that the two new species will withstand such scrutiny, and says that there could be even more because many of these populations have never
How bats learn to speak dialects
Scientists have recently studied whether fruit-eating bats learn to "talk" about their mothers or their colonies.
Although bats are the largest group of mammals notoriously unrecognized. The remote areas that they inhabit and the wide range of diseases that they carry make studying bats very difficult, even dangerous.
But thanks to recent advances in genetic sequencing technology, it is becoming much easier. Scientists can now "unlock DNA samples that could be several hundred years old, and that helps a lot, because we can identify species that may be in an inaccessible landscape," Susan Tsang explains. , a genetics. Research badociates the American Museum of Natural History in New York that was not involved in the study
Tsang and Demos believe that future genetic studies will discover dozens, if not hundreds, of Bats currently unidentified.
It is interesting to know what evolutionary forces have driven and maintained the current diversity of mammals in Africa, but more concretely, we need to have an accurate inventory of the number of species present in order to be able to identify the hot spots of the biodiversity and preserve them, "explains Demos. (Read: "Deadly Fungi of Bats Extending to the United States")
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