Emballonuridae Gervais, 1855

Wiantoro, Sigit, Flannery, Tim F., Brown, Dan, Armstrong, Kyle N. & Helgen, Kristofer M., 2023, The mammal fauna of Kofiau Island, off western New Guinea, Records of the Australian Museum 75 (5), pp. 653-662 : 659

Emballonuridae Gervais, 1855

Emballonura alecto (Eydoux & Gervais, 1836) . This taxon has its centre of distribution on Borneo, the Philippines and Sulawesi. The nearest occurrences to Kofiau are on Gag Island and Seram ( Armstrong & Wiantoro, 2021a). Members of the genus Emballonura produce distinctively shaped calls that resemble the short tonal calls of Hipposideros with a dominant second harmonic, but at much lower frequencies. The most likely candidate for call type 35 i.fFM.d given the low frequency of the calls (relative to calls known from New Guinea and similar to E. dianae ) is the relatively largebodied E. alecto ( Armstrong & Wiantoro, 2021a) , to which we attribute these recorded calls.

Mosia nigrescens (Gray, 1843) . This small sheath-tailed bat is distributed from Sulawesi, through New Guinea and to the Solomon Islands ( Flannery, 1995). It roosts in the twilight zone of caves, as well as in vegetation and possibly in houses ( Flannery, 1995), and occurs on many smaller islands in this region including Salawati, Batanta and Waigeo in the Raja Ampat group ( Flannery, 1995). It was collected during the 2011 survey, and in 2019 was detected unambiguously on the basis of its distinctively shaped echolocation calls that have a characteristic frequency above 60 kHz (call type 63 i.fFM.d) ( Fig. 3 ).

Figures

Figure 3. Representative echolocation call sequence portions of the species identified (time between pulses has been compressed).20 bFM and 30 bFM: Myotis sp. cf. stalkeri; 53 st.cFM.d: Miniopterus sp. cf. australis; 16 fFM: Chaerephon jobensis; 35 i.fFM.d: Emballonura alecto; 63 i.fFM.d: Mosia nigrescens; 55 mCF: Hipposideros diadema; 55 lCF: Rhinolophus euryotis; 118 sCF: Aselliscus tricuspidatus.