New Species of Plants and Animals Discovered

Meghalaya records India’s first bat with sticky disks

Note4Students

From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :

Prelims level: Species of bats

Mains level: Paper 3- Disk-footed bat recorded for first time in India

About the species

  • A team of scientists from the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) and a few European natural history museums stumbled upon very specialised small bat with “disk-like pads in the thumb and bright orange colouration”.
  • The flattened skull and sticky pads enabled the bats to roost inside cramped spaces, clinging to smooth surfaces such as bamboo internodes.
  • The disk-footed bat was also found to be genetically very different from all other known bats bearing disk-like pads.

Significance

  • Meghalaya has yielded India’s first bamboo-dwelling bat with sticky disks, taking the species count of the flying mammal in the country to 130.
  • The disk-footed bat has raised Meghalaya’s bat count to 66, the most for any State in India.
  • It has also helped add a genus and species to the bat fauna of India.
  • There are a couple of other bamboo-dwelling bats in India.
  • But the extent of adaptation for bamboo habitat in this species is not seen in the others.

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