The latest edition of the animal science journal Zookeys contains a wealth of new information on the world's least-studied species of bat.
Native to just a few remote, tiny Pacific islands, the Mortlock Island's flying fox is a large fruit-eating bat that has long been regarded as the least understood bat on Earth. For more than 140 years, the only evidence that the bat even existed was a lone specimen preserved in a jar of alcohol at the Natural History Museum in London.
But the new research on the "forgotten" bat, led by bat biologist Don Buden of the College of Micronesia, reveals more information than ever on the Mortlock Island's flying fox, including the first detailed observations of wild populations.
"Very little is known about many of the mammals that live on remote Pacific islands, including this beautiful flying fox," said study co-author Kristofer Helgen, of the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History. "This study gives us our first close look at a remarkable bat."
Helgen added that the research on the flying fox could not have come sooner, as the low-lying atolls where the bat makes its home are increasingly affected by rising ocean waters and climate change.
The specimen in a jar back in London dates back to 1870 when it was collected by British biologist Oldfield Thomas from the Mortlock Islands, a series of atolls that are part of the Federated States of Micronesia in the west-central Pacific Ocean. At the time it was the first record of the bat. But later research revealed that a German naturalist documented 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," Buden said. "This means the species was named long before Thomas's description in 1882."
Upon learning this, Buden sought to rename the bat to reflect its original finder, renaming it Pteropus pelagicus.
"New fieldwork on the Mortlock Islands revealed more than name changes," the Smithsonian said in a news release. "The article describes the first study of the behavior, diet and conservation status of this flying fox, finding that the Mortlock Islands support a small population of 900 to 1,200 bats scattered across a land surface of only 4.6 square miles. Legal rules have brought better protection to the species, which was once heavily hunted and exported for food."
But climate change and rising sea levels are a modern-day threat to the creature, and if sea levels continue to rise, the islands where the bats live may one day be inundated.
"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," 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?"