Save articles for later
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.
A team of Australian and Fijian researchers has discovered thousands of Pacific Sheath-tailed bats, a species listed as endangered, living inside a cave in one of the most remote islands in the world.
Fourteen scientists discovered the tiny bats on the Lau Islands of Vanua Balavu, after spending two weeks island-hopping to reach their destination.
A Pacific Sheath-tailed bat on the Fijian Lau island in the Pacific.Credit: Kristofer M. Helgen
The Lau Islands, belonging to Fiji, are an archipelago comprising around 60 islands stretching across 487 square kilometres in the Southern Pacific Ocean.
Professor Kristofer Helgen from the Australian Museum said had been dreaming of the expedition for two decades, motivated by the possibility of finding new bat species.
“So while we were doing that, I said ‘let’s explore as many caves as we can find’,” he said about their expedition, that took place in April, but is being made public now.
He said researchers had to crawl down into the cave where they made their discovery, swimming through an underground pool until they saw “one bat hanging from the ceiling”.
The remote Lau island of Vanua Balavu.
Helgen said just discovering one Pacific Sheath-tailed bat would have been a notable find.
“And then we started to move into the next chamber, which is the size of a cathedral, and I look up with my torch and go ‘oooh’, and there are literally thousands and thousands of them, flying and swirling around, and they’re up on the ceiling,” he said.
“And this was where we said ‘this is a really important moment for this bat’.”
In 2019, experts feared the population of the Pacific Sheath-tailed bat had dwindled to just a few hundred. It previously lived in caves on Fiji as well as Samoa, Guam, Micronesia, Palau, Vanuatu and Tonga, but sightings have been rare.
“Even with this discovery, this bat is still considered endangered, but here’s a little stronghold,” Helgen said.
He said that if the bat, which has “smooth chocolatey fur”, “pig-nose” but is still “quite cute” became extinct, it would have a huge environmental cost because of its role in the food chain.
“This a really tiny animal, each one of them weighs about five to seven grams,” he said.
“But even though it’s quite tiny, this is the main insect-eater that comes out at night in the whole Pacific, or at least once it was, before it declined in so many places.
Vanua Balavu is home to the Pacific Sheath-tailed bat, which is listed as endangered.
“These things are eating the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of mosquito-like insects every night.”
Mere Lakeba, director of Conservation International’s Fiji Program blamed land clearing to plant crops for the bat’s decline.
“It’s an island which has people that has social needs, it has food security needs,” Lakeba said.
She said her job was to find a balance between the needs of the local people and the ecosystems. But she said the bats were the perfect protector for local farmers.
“They are ecosystem superheroes …. they act as natural pest controllers, they reduce the need for us to continue to use pesticides.”
She said it meant there could be more caves full of bats across the region. About 17 of the Lau islands are inhabited by a population of about 10,000, while Vanua Balavu has a population of about 1500 people.
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.
Most Viewed in World
From our partners
Source: Read Full Article
