Alcathoe bat
The Alcathoe bat is a European bat in the genus Myotis. Known only from Greece and Hungary when it was first described in 2001. Its known distribution has since expanded to Spain, England, Sweden, and Azerbaijan. Its brown fur is distinctive and it is clearly different in characters of its karyotype and DNA sequences.
About Alcathoe bat in brief
The Alcathoe bat is a European bat in the genus Myotis. Known only from Greece and Hungary when it was first described in 2001, its known distribution has since expanded to Spain, England, Sweden, and Azerbaijan. It is similar to the whiskered bat and other species and is difficult to distinguish from them. Its brown fur is distinctive and it is clearly different in characters of its karyotype and DNA sequences. M. alcathoe has a very high-pitched echolocation call, with a frequency that falls from 120 kHz at the beginning of the call to about 43 kHz at the end. Usually found in old-growth deciduous forest near water, it forages high in the canopy and above water and mostly eats flies. The animal roosts in cavities high in trees and may spend the winter in tree cavities. The IUCN Red List assesses myotis alcathoes as ‘data deficient’, but it is considered threatened in several areas because of its rarity and vulnerability to habitat loss. The species may have remained undetected in Germany for so long because bat researchers did not sample its preferred habitats and would dismiss abnormal-looking whiskered bats as being abnormal M.stacinus Mtii. On the basis of unusual-looking bats or habitats, the name caucasicus Tsytsulina, 2000, may prove to be applicable to M. alCathoe; in that case, the species would be renamed Myot is caucasica.
However, it is possible that an older name may be discovered, such as caucasicus or caucasus. It has a forearm length of 30. 8 to 34. 6 mm and a body mass of 3. 5 to 5. 5 g. The wings are brown and the baculum is short and broad. The fur is usually reddish-brown on the upperparts and brown below, but more grayish in juveniles. The tragus is short, as is the ear itself, and the inner side of the ear is pale at the base. It also differs from other whiskeredbats by morphological characters, including DNA sequences and the location of the nucleolus organizer regions. Two groups with slightly divergent DNA sequences are probably distinguishable within the species, which probably correspond to different glacial refugia. Two studies used microsatellite markers on European whiskered. bats: the first one used western European samples and recovered three well-defined species clusters for M. alcATHoe, M. brandtii and M. mystacinus. The other one, conducted in Poland, suggests a high level of hybridization with other whispered bats that would further complicate attempts to identify M.alcathlonoe morphologically. It could not place M alathoe securely at a specific position among Eurasian Myot Is species. One known group, the Hungarian M.Hungarian, survived the last glacial period.
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This page is based on the article Alcathoe bat published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 29, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
