Barbastella darjelingensis (Hodgson, 1855)

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 : 24-25

11. Barbastella darjelingensis (Hodgson, 1855)

(Eastern Barbastelle)

New material: 3 F, 08.06.2019, forest near Narkanda , Himachal Pradesh ; 1 M, 08.04.2018, Khalla village , 1 M , 25.04.2019, Chopta village, Chamoli district , Uttarakhand ; released after measurements.

Morphological description of specimens: The forearm lengths of the animals were measured at 41.8–42.9 mm. The pelage was long and silky, dark brown dorso–ventrally with silvery tips, the overall appearance looked dark. The ears were large, hairy, and joined over the forehead. Tragus was longish, narrowed gradually with slightly roundish tip. Face and wing membranes were dark brownThe interfemoral membrane was naked. Feet were small and devoid of hairs.

DNA: The COI sequence (705 bp) and CYTB (1140 bp) from one Himachal Pradesh barbastelle (M2230 released) was identical to a sequence of Ba. darjelingensis from Uttarakhand ( GB MN339178 ; COI). No other record from the GenBank or BOLD matched these sequences (>6.3% K2P distance), stressing the distinctiveness of this taxon compared to other Asian species of this genus ( Figs 4 and 6). Sequences considered by Kruskop et al. (2019) as Ba. cf. darjelingensis from Vietnam ( ABBSI 270–11) or from Taiwan ( GB LC456144 ) were the closest relative (at about 6% sequence divergence for both markers). Another COI sequence from Nepal ( GB JF442795 ) and labelled as Ba. darjelingensis by the same authors was much more divergent from any other Barbastella haplotype (13–20% K2P divergence), including from Indian Ba. darjelingensis . As this sequence (available in BOLD) had low quality trace files and many unique mutations compared to other sequences, it might represent a pseudogene and is disregarded here.

Locality records and ecological notes: Uttarakhand: Kapkot (1140 m) in Almora district ( Bhat 1974); Khalla village (1667 m) and Chopta (2800 m) in Chamoli district (present study) . Himachal Pradesh: Shimla (c. 2200 m), Narkanda (2700 m) in Shimla district (Blanford 1888–1891; Ghosh 2008; present study) .

Three adult females were caught in a flap trap early in the morning around a pond inside a temperate coniferous forest dominated by Cedrus deodara in Narkanda in early June. The lactating individuals indicated the presence of a maternity colony nearby and were released soon after being measured . One male animal was caught in mist net set across a pool of water in secondary oak forest near Khalla village and another female (non parous) was caught over a slow–flowing brook close to an open meadow in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand in April 2018 .

As is usual in Barbastella bats,we recorded two types of echolocation calls that are emitted orally and nasally( Seibert et al. 2015). The oral calls are soft and narrowband (bandwidth=17 kHz) with a peak frequency of 26 kHz. Nasal calls differ from oral calls in having a convex shape with a slightly higher bandwidth (24 kHz) and peak frequency (31 kHz).

Taxonomic note: According to the most recent review of the genus Barbastella conducted with an integrative approach ( Kruskop et al. 2019) and the current genetic results ( Figs 4 and 6), the Himalayan species Ba. darjelingensis (type locality West Bengal, India) is distinct from both the Central Asian Ba. caspica and the Indochinese Ba. cf. darjelingensis . The later taxon is of uncertain taxonomic affinity because morphologically it is undistinguishable from genuine darjelingensis , but genetically differs from other taxa ( Kruskop et al. 2019). Previous accounts based on morphology (e.g., Bates & Harrison 1997) used to classify all these Asian forms under Ba. leucomelas , which has now been shown to be endemic to the Sinai Peninsula ( Benda & Mlikovsky 2008).

Figures

FIGURE 4: Neighbor-joining tree reconstruction of examined vespertilionids, miniopterids and molossids COI sequences and based on the K2P matrix in Table S2. Branches are proportional to the number of mutational steps. Sequence names are composed of the first two letters of the genus, followed by the species name, the GenBank number (or field number for newly sequenced samples), and the region of origin. Samples from India are highlighted in bold face.