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After Halloween, people tend to forget about bats. But for farmers, Kenyan residents and scientists, bats are part of everyday life. While North America has 44 species, Kenya, a country the size of Texas, has 110 species of bats. Many of these species also contain subspecies and other divisions that can make the genealogical tree of bats look like an entangled disorder. The researchers undertook to cut the clutter by sorting out bat lines and found two new species.
The bats of Scotophilus vary in size and other characteristics, but, in general, "They are cute, they look very much like the bats you see in Chicago, but they are yellow in color, "says Terry Demos, a postdoctoral fellow at the Field Museum in Chicago and senior author of a recent article in the newspaper Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution . These fur creatures can perch in the nooks and crannies of houses in Kenya. "These are bats that live with people – they do not call them bats for nothing," adds Bruce Patterson, MacArthur's mammal curator at the Field Museum and co-author of the study. Bats do not usually fly too far to find a house either. Despite their wings, bats prefer to stay in a specific area, resulting in huge amounts of diversity across Africa.
Before understanding how these bat species related, it was difficult to study them. "We used three different names for these bats in the field," says Patterson. This kind of evolutionary confusion is enough to make someone batty. As Demos and Patterson explain, bats that look a lot like could have very different genetic information. This means that new species could hide because of their physical similarities with other species. The only way to solve this mystery is to use advanced genetic badysis techniques.
Field skin samples from Kenya, combined with information from an online genetic database, helped to clarify species confusion. Comparison of all the DNA sequences of the samples showed the amount of similarity. The more similar DNA is, the more species come closer to each other in terms of evolution. This information was then used to make a painting that looks like a tree, with branches coming from a point. The tree is similar to a family tree, but instead of showing relationships between different members of the family, it shows the relationships between species. The results reached the goal of finding the limits of the species but also showed unexpected results. In addition to sorting out known species, the tree predicted at least two new species of bats. "These new species are unknown to science," explains Demos. "There was no reason to expect that we would find two new species there." When Patterson saw these two undescribed species, he excited: "It's cool because it says that there's a chapter of evolution that no one's going to do." has never known before. "
These discoveries are not only interesting for scientists but for the local agricultural industry. The organic groceries at Trader Joe would be almost impossible without the bats. They act as a natural pesticide, eating insects that threaten crops. In addition to farmers, local health officials also rely on bat research because bats can be vectors of diseases that threaten public health. Being able to understand bats means that scientists can protect public health and food plates.
This unexpected discovery bears witness to the diversity of life in Kenya and other tropical regions of Africa. The variety of species in these areas is not described because "Africa is underestimated, and its biodiversity is underestimated, and it is critical because there is threats to its biodiversity, "says Demos. This research provides a framework for future scientists to clbadify bat species and describe new species.
In the United States, because our bats are well documented, there is an application that can recognize bat calls, much like Shazam for bats. Patterson plays bat sounds on his phone, "I've recorded this in my driveway and an app could identify the bat, that's what we want to be able to do on the field one day. " The next step in this research is the use of genetic badysis of bats Scotophilus as a framework for scientists to categorize and possibly recognize species based on observable characteristics, such as chirps and sounds.
Demos notes that it is important to better understand these mysterious flying mammals to help conservation and local farm efforts. This Kenya study paves the way for exploration of other regions using the same methods. Science has brought us closer to understanding how bat species relate to each other, but Patterson says that there is still much to discover: "No interesting biological issues are ever fully elucidated and the progress to answer it invariably open up a variety of others.
Learn more:
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