Horseshoe bats, which have brown fur and tiny black eyes no bigger than mustard seeds, are sparrow-sized and named for the horseshoe-shaped structures on their faces that are used for echolocating – or sending out soundwaves – to help them to navigate or catch flying insects. The technique was used to catch the Namuli horseshoe bat that lives in threatened forests around Mount Namuli, Mozambique. Scientist and lead author of the bat study, Michael Curran, fires a line into the canopy of the forest to hoist up a mist net. To catch the bat, the scientists used traps and mist nets made of such fine material that they were able to evade detection by the bats’ sonar. “I think, even though it took so long to publish this paper, we got a much better paper,” Bayliss told RFI. It did in fact aid the team: over the same period, improvements in technology to assess the DNA of the new bat species helped the scientists obtain irrefutable proof that the specimens they had collected were new to science. In this case, the scientists studying the bat had to refer to specimens of its closest relatives in museum collections in South Africa, Malawi, Germany and Switzerland.īut the delay wasn’t all bad, said Julian Bayliss, one of the scientists behind the discovery. The 13-year delay after first collection shows the rigour of the scientific processes that have to be gone through before an announcement of a new species can be communicated publicly. The Namuli horseshoe bat lives in threatened forests around Mount Namuli – Mozambique’s second highest peak – in the northern Zambezia Province.
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