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Black-bearded Tomb Bat; Black-bearded Sheathtail-bat | |
Morphological description Life history Distribution Habitat Roost sites and roosting patterns Emergence and flight pattern Foraging behaviour Echolocation calls Status and protectionMorphological Description· Dorsal fur is russet brown to nearly black. Ventral fur is grey or paler. · Average forearm length 64.6 mm (range 60.0-68.0mm) (Bates & Harrison, 1997). The bats we caught in Guangdong and Guangxi had forearm lengths between 65.6-67.1 mm. · Generally, the black beard will appear at the age of approximately 6 months. · Weights of bats in China were 24.3-29.2 g (n = 3). . Life history· Young are 7-8 g at birth, and gestation is 120-125 days (in Bates & Harrison 1997). DistributionWidespread: found from Sri Lanka and India to southern China, Java, Borneo and Philippines (Bates & Harrison 1997). The Chinese distribution is shown by dots on the map (as given by Zhang et al. (1997)). Habitat· Bates and Harrison (1997) noted that on India this species lives in hill forests, with fresh water such as a lake, river or pond in the vicinity, at an altitude of 800 metres. Roost sites and roosting behaviour· Found in caves in Guangxi and Guangdong, sometimes in large numbers. Roosts containing up to 15000 bats have been found in India (in Bates & Harrison 1997). Also roosts in temples, ruins and other old buildings in India. Often shares roosts with other species. · The colony consists of males and females separately, or spatially segregated within the same colony (quoted from Bates & Harrison, 1997). Emergence and flight pattern· Narrow wings and a high wing loading and aspect ratio mean that this species flies rapidly and is not very manoeuvrable. Foraging behaviour· Nothing known. Echolocation calls. Bats emit long duration, multiharmonic calls with little change in bandwidth within each harmonic. The spectrogram below is from Indian bats recorded by Habersetzer (1986). Status and protection· There is no estimation of population size for China. · Black-bearded tomb bats are widespread and probably not endangered on a global scale. Listed at LR/lc, assessed by the Red List of Threatened Species (IUCN, 2006) and are not protected by the Law of the People's Republic of China on the Protection of Wildlife in 1989. · Caves and old buildings should be protected as their habitats. |