Hipposideros armiger Hodgson, 1835

Saikia, Uttam, Chakravarty, Rohit, Csorba, Gabor, Laskar, Mostaque Ahmed & Ruedi, Manuel, 2025, Taxonomic reassessment of bats from the Western Himalayas, India and description of a new species of the Myotis frater complex (Mammalia, Chiroptera, Vespertilionidae), Zootaxa 5644 (1), pp. 1-78 : 23-24

10. Hipposideros armiger Hodgson, 1835

(Great–Himalayan leaf–nosed bat)

New material: 1 M, 30.05.2017, Bank of river Narag, Devthal , Solan District , Himachal Pradesh, V /M/ERS/399. Morphological description of specimens: The lone male from Himachal Pardesh had a dense dark brown dorsal pelage with lighter hair bases. The ventral fur was grey brown. The noseleaf had four supplementary leaflets, the fourth one minute. Behind the posterior part of the noseleaf and above the eyes, there were prominent fleshy protuberances with scattered vibrissae, a characteristic feature of the adult males of this species ( Soisook 2019). There was a frontal depression with a tuft of dark hairs. The fifth metacarpal was about 6 percent shorter than the third and fourth which were subequal .

The bacula of our specimen was 1.73 mm in length. It had a bilobate base, a constricted shaft and the tip bifurcated to form two ventrally projecting processes.

DNA: The single COI sequences (705 bp) from the Himachal Pradesh (M 2201/V /M/ERS/ 399) was identical to a sequence of Hi. armiger from Uttarakhand (GB MN339181 ) and very similar (less than 2% divergence) to others from Indochina (e.g., from Vietnam, Francis et al. 2010), suggesting the existence of a single lineage throughout an extensive geographic area .

Locality records and ecological notes: Himachal Pradesh: Devthal (963 m), Mount Karol (2100 m) in Solan district ( Saikia et al. 2011; present study). Uttarakhand: Bagheswar (950 m) in Bagheswar district ( Wroughton 1914); Katarmal (1380 m) in Almora district ( Bhat 1974); Mussoorie in Dehradun district ( Jerdon 1874).

At Devthal, about 20 individuals of Hi. armiger were roosting along with a small number of Rh. affinis inside a small, abandoned mine. No sign of any breeding activity of the species was noted. In earlier studies in Himachal, this bat was recorded in the temple cave of Mount Karol sharing the roosting space with My. longipes (misidentified as My. mystacinus in Saikia et al. 2011) and Rh. affinis .