Photo: AMELIE BOTTOLLIER-DEPOIS / AFP / Getty Images
By: EFE Updated 08 Sea 2022, 17: 13 PM EST
The organization Bat Conservation International, dedicated to protecting bats, announced that a team of scientists from several countries rediscovered in Rwanda the species Rhinolophus hilli, which was believed to be extinct due to the absence of sightings during 40 years.
The Austin, Texas-based organization was also able to record location calls for the first time for the human ear emitted, while hunting insects, this species of bat known as “Hill’s horseshoe”.
BIG NEWS! Using Song Meter recorders, scientists led by @BatConIntl have rediscovered the Hill’s horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus hilli), a critically endangered, lost species, which has not been seen in 17 years! https://t.co/F1sSYRcOya
—Wildlife Acoustics (@WildlifeAcoust) March 8, 2022
The rediscovery of the lost species took place in the humid forest of the Nyungwe National Park, in Rwanda, during an expedition carried out in 2019.
However, BCI has now made it known through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), after scientifically verifying that the two specimens captured and then returned to the wild were indeed Rhinolophus hilli .
“We knew immediately that the bat we had captured was unusual and remarkable. Facial features were exaggerated to the point of comical. Horseshoe bats are easily distinguished from other bats by their characteristic horseshoe shape and specialized skin flaps on their noses,” said Winifried Frick, director of research at BCI.
Jon Flanders, in charge at BCI of endangered species interventions, said that at time begins the “real work” of this team of scientists who have been studying the rediscovered species since 2013: “how to protect it in the future”.
Expedition scientists collected data and made careful measurements of horseshoe bats from Hill before returning them to the wild.
Flanders then scoured the archives of museums in Europe to compare all that information with that of the only known specimens.
“Knowing the echolocation calls for this species is a game changer,” said Paul Webal a, full professor at Maasai Mara University and one of the team’s lead scientists.
Ever since they caught the pair of Hill’s horseshoe bats, Nyungwe rangers have been setting up detectors to listen for the bats during their night flights and recorded them for nine months, resulting in a quarter of a million sound files.
Bat Conservation International was founded in 1982 and its main objective is to put an end to the extinction of bat species.
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