In the paper
published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, the team highlighted the need
for further work to describe species across the region and better understand
their cryptic diversity, and underscoring the unappreciated cryptic diversity
in the group
Beijing: There are nearly 40 per cent unknown species
of horseshoe bats in south-east Asia and China, according to a study.
The study, led by researchers
at Chinese Academy of Sciences and University of Hong Kong, identified 44
potential cryptic Horseshoe bats (Rhinolophidae) species within 11 species of
Rhinolophus sensu lato in Southeast Asia and south China.
In the paper published in
Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, the team highlighted the need for further
work to describe species across the region and better understand their cryptic
diversity, and underscoring the unappreciated cryptic diversity in the group.
Horseshoe bats (Rhinolophidae)
are considered the reservoir of many zoonotic viruses - which jump from animals
to people - including the close relatives of the viruses that caused severe
acute respiratory syndrome and Covid-19.
Identifying bat species
correctly might help pinpoint geographical hotspots with a high risk of
zoonotic disease, Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
in China, was quoted as saying to Nature.
Better identification of
unknown bat species could also support the search for the origins of SARS-CoV-2
by narrowing down where to look for bats that may harbour close relatives of
the virus, added study co-author Alice Hughes, a conservation biologist at the
University of Hong Kong.
The closest known relatives of
SARS-CoV-2 have been found in Rhinolophus affinis bats in Yunnan province, in
southwestern China, and in three species of horseshoe bats in Laos, the report
said.
To better understand the
diversity of bats in south-east Asia and find standardised ways of identifying
them, Hughes and her team captured bats in southern China and southeast Asia
between 2015 and 2020.
They took measurements and
photographs of the bats' wings and noseleaf - "the funky set of tissue
around their nose", as Hughes describes it - and recorded their
echolocation calls. They also collected a tiny bit of tissue from the bats'
wings to extract genetic data.
To map the bats' genetic
diversity, the team used mitochondrial DNA sequences from 205 of their captured
animals, and another 655 sequences from online databases - representing a total
of 11 species of Rhinolophidae.
The researchers found that
each of the 11 species were probably actually multiple species, possibly
including dozens of hidden species across the whole sample.
Hidden, or "cryptic",
species are animals that seem to belong to the same species but are actually
genetically distinct. For example, the genetic diversity of Rhinolophus sinicus
suggests that the group could be six separate species, the report said.
The findings corroborate other genetic research suggesting that there are many cryptic species in south-east Asia, the report said.
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