The Theban black bat is an African bat, difficult to spot. Now scientists have found it in Pantelleria.
It is truly a ghost in the night: it flies low to the ground, to capture insects and other prey, and “whispers”. That is, it emits very weak ultrasounds that are difficult to detect even using the bat detector (despite the name, it is not a Batman gadget: it is a device that reveals the presence of bats by recording their ultrasounds and converting them into audible sounds for us humans). This is the Theban nitride (Nycteris thebaica), a small bat found in Africa and the Middle East. And which has now also been found in Europe, by Danilo Russo, ecologist at the University of Naples Federico II, Mirjam Knörnschild of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin and colleagues: the team has in fact confirmed its presence in Pantelleria, managing to record several signals of this elusive flying mammal on the Sicilian island. You can listen to it above, in Piotr Naskrecki’s video. Discovering, published on Global Ecology and Conservationwe dedicate an in-depth look at Evidence Network n° 408.
“We recorded both the echolocation signals – which “bounce” off objects and return to the ears, allowing the bat to form an acoustic image of the world around it – and the social signals. And also two individuals at the same time, in flight. It is a sign that there are more animals present”, explains Danilo Russo. “We think there is a small island population, which has so far been ignored. But we don’t rule out that the Theban nitrite is present elsewhere, in Sicily, given how difficult it is to detect if it doesn’t pass very close to the microphones normally positioned for research: we had been researching the bats of Pantelleria for years and we had always missed it.” Pantelleria, a crossroads in the heart of the Mediterranean between Europe and North Africa, is moreover an ideal place for the search for African species at the extreme limit of their range: the Theban cypterid could have reached it by exploiting the emergence of other islands, between Tunisia and Pantelleria, in periods of lowering sea levels. The next step will be to try to make a sighting of this bat, define the size of the population, identify the places where it takes refuge during the day (it uses various cavities, natural and artificial, from caves to spaces under roads) and also any potential threats. “One of these”, concludes Russo, “could be cats, which in fact are among the predators of bats”.
