What do bats reveal about hidden biodiversity in Africa? | The Royal Society

I am a Swisi as you will know or you would have found out from the little country of Eswatini and it is really truly humbling for me both as an individual but also as a Swisi to receive this prize and I am very grateful to the Royal Society for the recognition of the work that I've been doing. I'll get started right away with an image from Esatini. I'll start the story in my own country. This is a photograph taken in the lofeltini. It's stunningly beautiful rolling savannah landscape and it's also one of the best surveyed sites in Africa for bats. Not only this part of but neighboring Kruger National Park to the north, Guilan to the south. Most of what we know about African bats has its origins here. So with that in mind, how is it possible that we discovered a new species of bat to science that has its heart the heart of its distribution is the lowlying savas of a Swatini. And I will come back to this uh at the end of the talk. But what I'd like to do is to try and explain exactly what it is that we do in terms of uh documenting biodiversity. And I'll give you my takeaway message right now at the beginning so that you can leave if you're already bored. But we are still in an age of discovery in Africa. Very much at I wouldn't even say at the end of the age of discovery. And uh so therefore all the things that we need to do in order to document biodiversity still needs to be done in Africa. I'm going to focus the talk on bats because as you can see they are absolutely gorgeous animals. Each and every one of them beautiful. But bats are also very important ecologically. They play roles such as pollinators. They disperse the seeds of forest trees. They eat pest insects in agricultural landscapes. So these are really vitally important animals and yet we know very little about them. I've dedicated most of uh the last 20 25 years of my research on bats. I started working on rodents before then. I've also worked on birds. But it's really the bats that I'll focus on in this particular talk because we know so little about them. I've been very fortunate to be able to travel widely across Africa to do surveys. Each red dot there is a location where I have spent dedicated a good amount of time to surveying for bats. You can see it's not continuous across the continent. I don't think anybody can do that. But it's taken me, my research has taken me to some really amazing and remote places which I'm going to try and share with you in uh this talk. But I'd really like to start in West Africa in uh Liberia on probably my first expedition outside of a Satini. This was in 2005. It was just a few months after the peace accords had been signed. Uh Liberia had been uh in a bloody, terrible civil war that had raged on for several decades uh which was fueled ironically by the uh diamond fields uh in Sierra Leone, neighboring Sierra Leone. But it was an absolute uh nightmare in terms of human suffering. And when I landed, this is what uh I was greeted at the Roberts International Airport. It's changed a little bit since then, but there were tanks everywhere and we had to be flown around in UN helicopters because the roads were not serviceable and in fact they were not safe anyway even if we could have traveled. what few roads they were looked like this. And this was a very good bridge. There were some bridges we crossed that I wondered how on earth did the vehicles all manage to get across.

All of this so that we can spend time in the forest catching bats and birds which is uh somewhat uh glamorized in documentaries uh TV shows and so on made to look like this wonderful experience. It is a wonderful experience but it's a really tough life when you're out. It's tough for one night, let alone for 30 nights, which is uh very frequently how long an expedition runs for. There's very little to eat. I remember this particular expedition very well. It was immediately after the Civil War. There was no food. The Liberians themselves hadn't eaten for years. So, who were we to come and expect to eat? We were eating cassava leaves and boiled rice three times a day for the entire month to the extent that I could not hold my trousers up anymore because I'd lost 7 kilograms in that short period of time. I don't have much uh extra body weight. And you can see my expression on the right photo there. I probably didn't get my cup of cappuccino for breakfast. But I think what's really important is I look at this and think of it as suffering, but there are people in the world that live like this every single day of their lives. Bats are difficult animals to study because they are small. They fly around at night. They are not easy to observe. So most bat people, especially when you're doing primary surveys, you need to catch these animals. And there are a couple of techniques we use very widely. We use nets. Uh mostly this is a bird net. They're not very good for catching bats and I didn't have bat nets back then, but we use bat nets that look just like this, but much thinner mesh. And we use heart traps which uh we plug gaps in the vegetation. And these two methods they capture most of the bats that we end up studying and they catch different types of bats. So we use them in complement to each other to get the best uh representation of the local fauna that one can have. Now, identifying bats in the field is always problematic, but it's even more problematic working in places like West Africa, especially back in 2005 where so little has been documented. And I'll show you in a moment the text that I had to work off. But here's a bat. It's got a nice big name, Epomopherusy. And I'm going to there's going to be a test at the end of this and I hope you all remember these names. But it's a beautiful bat. It's a fruit eatating bat. You can tell from those large eyes. But the way to tell it apart from its closest relative which is epomopherus franceti is to look at the palatal ridges. In butophery the third palatal ridge is broken. It's not continuous. Whereas in Franketi it's continuous. And these kinds of gems are not easy to find and certainly not in West Africa. When I started this work in 2005, this is the book that I had to work off. It's one of my favorite books on my shelf. I absolutely adore this book to the extent please note the author uh Donovan Roushapia the name will come up again later but the problem is that this book was published in 1965 and I was working in 2005 and again in 20 uh many expeditions starting in 2005. This book is absolutely hopelessly out of date. It was out of date in 2005. To this day, it remains the only textbook available specifically dedicated to the bats of West Africa. So what have we learned in terms of uh the bats of West Africa? I want to now move slightly. Well, I want to focus on one particular area, Mount Nimber. This is a very small

mountain, maybe 10 or 12 kilometers in length that runs across three countries. Liberia, uh, Ivory Coast, Cottovoir on the east, and Guinea to the north. This is one of the my favorite spots in West Africa. West Africa typically is pretty flat, continuous lowland rainforest, at least before the forest was cut down. But Mount Nimber is this beautiful mountain that rises up to the highest point in Liberia. I can't tell you how high that is because Mount Lima on the Liberian side was mined and the highest point was excavated. So that we don't know now how tall Mount Nimber was on the Liberian side. On the Guinea side, the highest point is 1,768 m, which is the second highest point in the whole of West Africa. So that's Mount Nimber on the bottom left there. uh the highest peak you can see there. The lower slopes are all rainforest with beautiful clear running uh water. The water is so great, so clear and clean that you can drink from it. If you're a local, I probably would not have survived two days with that. But seriously, the water is absolutely it's not what you imagine. um brown dirty water as you would imagine a tropical forest to be. Now in this particular remember this is a mountain that's just 10 or 12 kilometers in length from north to south. We I'm going to present just one aspect of the bats from Mount Nimber. These are the LBJs of the bat world. Those of you who are birders will know this term. LBJ is a little brown job. The larks, the pippets, the cicularas, the wobblers. The pipistralids are in the family vesperilion. Another name that will be in the test. They are little. They are brown. They have no characteristic features that you can say ah it's got a stripe or it has something else. There were 10 of these that uh that I recorded at Mount Nimber. That's a family tree that just shows the evolutionary relatedness between them. And what was striking was that there was a new species to science which uh I gave the name after the Rosapia that wrote the bats of West Africa. But there was also a second new species, Sudorus Msia Isabella. A third new species named after David and Mary Haphold who spent several decades working in Africa and training up Africans in small mammals. And then as if that was not enough, a fourth new species to science. Out of 10 pipistoids, four of them, 40% of them were new to science. That was not all. There was also another bat in a different family, a minopterus that was also new to science, uh, which I named after the mountain, Mount Nima itself. And based on two relatively short expeditions of one month each, the total for the bats of Mount Nimber, we increased it from 27 species, which is what we knew when I started this work, up to 60 species today. More than double. This is really amazing because in 1984, Andre Brous had this to say. I know the English can all speak French, but I will say it for the non-English people in the audience. I'll translate. The bats of Mount Nimber are amongst the best studied in Africa. So what are we going to do in what will we find in areas that are not the best studied in Africa? So all of this might sound very theoretical and very nice. Oh yes, it's great that you have discovered all these new species. You know, clap clap. Well done. But this has real implications for how we do conservation.

So drawing on what we found in Mount Nimber, if we look at the main the main bio region in West Africa is the upper Guinea rainforest that at its peak would have stretched from Sierra Leone in the west all the way to eastern Ghana and Togo in the east. This would have been continuous rainforest 200 years ago. that forest has now been cut up and carved out and there's plenty of agricultural lands in that. But we're talking about an area of about 1,600 kilometers. Now, if we just zoom into the green highlighted area, the circle, that's the area what I call the uplands, the upper Guinea rainforest uplands, the Mount Nima, and the There's a ghost in my presentation. Mount Nima, Mount Sumandu, Wizyama, all these names that don't mean anything to anybody. But this very small area of about 100 by 100 kilometers, if you look at the species total at the bottom, there are 90 species of bats that are found in the upper Guinea rainforest. 70 of those are found in this upland zone. What's even more striking are the endemic species. The species that are found nowhere else in the world except uh in this area. 12 species are endemic to the upper guinea rainforest of West Africa, but nine of them are found in this very small upland area. So if we want to conserve the upper Guinea rainforest, our focus should be in this small upland area. But this upland area is not even recognized as an important area. It doesn't even have a name specifically to say that this is the area that we should be focusing on. And the reason is all these species that we've discovered have been done very recently. Before those studies, we would not have known that this upland area is of real importance. So baseline surveys, we need more of them. Even though they are very simplistic by nature compared to the big theoretical questions that are asked by other biologists, we need this foundational information. I want to touch on something else that is u a challenge and I don't want to really call it an obstacle but it's certainly a challenge that any African taxonomist that wants to study uh and describe new species in Africa is faced with and that is that museums are the absolutely critical repositories of the biological world. So if you want to describe a new species, you've got to refer to what are called type specimens. And the type specimen is the individual animal on which the species was described. on the right there, that's uh an image of uh the Natural History Museum in Paris that I had an opportunity to visit and examine their collections. Those are collections of rodents. Most of them collected 50 to 100 years ago, the Field Museum in the middle. I've also spent time there. Several museums in Germany. And of course, the Natural History Museum here in London. All of these have most of the type specimens of African bats reside in these European and North American institutions. So for an African to describe a new species, they have to somehow get to these institutions, not only are we talking about airfares, which are actually easy to find, but we need those visas that are so difficult for us Africans to get. I have been very fortunate in my life. I've never had any problems but many of my colleagues are not able to get visas for work to come and do this basic kind of work. I want to give you just one example, one story to highlight just how important it is for us to have access to

these type specimens. And this is the species Hippocidus Lamati that was described by the same Andre Bray working in the Ganaian side of Mount Nimbe. The only image we have of this bat is this hand drawing which is not really enough to be able to make a firm identification. So this is a bat that is thought to only occur on Mount Nimber. And so the mining company that wanted to mine mna approached me and said please can you tell us is there hippos lamati in our mining concession or not because this has implications for uh the mine. So I did surveys uh across the mountain and found six species of hippocerits in the family hippocer. The two at the top on the left there, there are two species of hippos that don't have names yet. There's a long story in that itself, but I will not touch on that. But they are different species. And then all the others have names I've put over there. And then I found this particular animal which I thought could be hippocidus lamati. But the problem is when I compared the measurements that I had from my individuals compared to what Andre Bray published there was a disconnect. So there are some measurements of uh typical measurements that bat biologists take. The length of the forearm, skull, the breadth lower jaw, etc., those were all fine. But if you look at the bottom there, the first and second falank of the third finger, the measurements that Andre Pay published are very different, much smaller than the measurements that I was getting on those specimens that I thought were hippos lamati. There's only one way to find out what's going on, and that's to get to the museum. It's a natural history museum in Paris. It's a beautiful lovely building. My first visit there, I walked through the Jaffa Dan Duplant, which is the photo I've taken here with that lovely building in the background and I come into that building thinking I'm going to find the mammal collection. Instead, they send me off on a side road. uh Sonang Hud de Buff and there is this building that looks like it's barely survived the Second World War, but don't judge a book by its cover because they are absolute it's an absolutely fantastic collection of uh small mammals. And uh the next photograph is a picture of a specimen which I hope does not horrify anyone. But this is the type specimen of hippocidus lamati that Andre B collected uh in the early 1980s. So I had the chance to examine this particular specimen and I rememeasured those measurements of Andre Bray's specimen and there's a big uh difference between his measurements and my measurements. But what's important is that my measurements are exactly the same across the type specimen and the new. So to this day, I don't know if it is me that can't measure or if it is Andre Bray, but the mystery has now been solved. The animal that we were looking for is we've now clarified exactly what we the characteristics of that animal are and we're able to identify it in the field and to document that it actually does occur at Mount Nimba and it occurs nowhere else in the world. This is the amazing thing. It is found literally just on top of Mount Nimbe. So the message here really is without access to these type specimens to these wonderful museums that you have, we cannot do the work that we should be doing. And it's sometimes uh there are there is some

fingerpointing occasionally that happens and we are told ah Africans don't know how to do taxonomy and whatever polite ways of telling us that leave it to the experts but the reason we can't do the taxonomy is because we don't have access to those type specimens and I know this is not something that anyone in this room can fix but at least if people are aware of the challenges that are facing us in Africa then it becomes uh better. So I've been describing discovering and describing new species of bats but I don't want you to think that this is the only I'm the only person that is doing this. Far from it. Uh this graph over here is showing the number of new bat species discovered in Africa going all the way back to Lanaeus uh by decade all the way to the recent times. And you can see that there's around 1900 there's a big spike over there. This is the work of old Field Thomas who was at the Natural History Museum here in London. I think in those days it was called the British Museum still, but he I haven't counted up but I suspect he described more species of African mammal than anybody else in the world. And he did a very good job of it. He had a really good eye. This is before modern genetic techniques. This is a hundred years But he was able to see the smallest little differences in morphology and he was very well very good at describing um and capturing that. But what I want you to notice is that from about the year 2000, we have been discovering loads and loads of new species across the continent. and that there's a definitely a second peak that uh we see now with discoveries. So the question is what do we do when we have this much knowledge that is coming in because how do we manage it? Where do we store this information so that it is available and useful for people? This is something that a group of African bat biologists combining with European and American bat biologists got together and we put together this massive database which now sits at about 20,000 specimens documenting every single bat record that we could and there's some very big names there. Paul Webbala from Kenya. He's a very famous bat biologist there. Eric Bakov from Cameroon, Aora Tanchi from Nigeria, but she works across the whole of West Africa. And then uh Peter Taylor from uh South Africa. And I also want to point out Cecilia Montaban because she's in the audience here. one of the young upand cominging and passionate bat biologists. If we plot all the records in that database, this is the map that we get and you can see that a lot of the continent has been well covered. You can't even see little asatini there because it is completely covered in these dots. But there's lots of gaps as well. lots of areas, vast areas of the continent, southwestern um Angola. Let me see if I can. So there, southwestern Angola, there's a massive gap there. It's an enormous area, but there's been hardly any work done. Uh and like this across the continent, but this is at least the start. So having a database like this database is online, it's open access, anybody who is interested, any anyone can do it. But what we really did it for is for those people that are interested in bats, interested in conservation. If you live in Chad and you want to know what bats have been recorded from Chad, you can extract that information very easily out of this database. If you want to plot the distribution of a species

you can extract that information out of here very easily. We also produced a species richness map that looks like this. Where are the hotspots in terms of bat species richness across the continent? The hotspots don't really matter. What matters is that the data is there to be used in these kinds of analyses. The darker the color, the more species there are. The sort of orangey red colors, that's where you get up to 80 species of bats in one location that compared to is it 17 or 18 species of bats or is there still a debate on that occur in the whole of the UK. So this allows us to pinpoint really where do we expect the diversity to be. A set of analyses that Cecilia did, Cecilia Montaban for her PhD was to overlay the locations of where the bats are, which are the blue dots here, on a map of the protected areas of Africa. That's the underlying lighter blue color underneath. And from this analysis, one can work out what species are protected in the protected areas, what species fall outside of them, uh which protected areas have the highest number of species of bats, etc., etc. And what she was able to show was that fully 28 species of African bats don't occur in any protected area at all. So if you're a conservationist and you're interested in uh finding ways to conserve species, this is the sort of information that you need. You need to know what species occur where and whether they also occur in a protected area or not. And the last thing I want to touch on is the issue of training up African taxonomists, African biodiversity experts. Traditionally, if we look into the past, biodiversity surveys in Africa were done predominantly by Europeans, by North Americans. This is where the money was. capacity was and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Uh we at the end of the day, we all have the desire to document the biodiversity of this planet. But if you want to have action on the ground, you need locally trained biologists, conservationists, biodiversity experts. So this photograph isn't quite what it seems. Uh, two of us in this photo are Africans and the other three left good jobs in the US to come and work and volunteer their time in Mosmbique. And all of us have worked very hard to train up African biologists, specifically small mammal and u bats and shrews and so on. And the the next few slides I want to really speak to this message. So uh this is a photo I took on an expedition that um I will mention the leader in a moment. But in the front there anes concent's degrees with me. Anna Glades is doing a PhD now in Portugal. with me still working on small mammals. These kinds of uh expeditions that we set up were specifically to they were not just to document the biodiversity of an area but they were also to train up exactly these kinds of African biologists. So the area I want to focus now on is um is very different from the West African landscape. This is now looking in Mosmbique specifically at the mountains of Mosmbique. That is

pointing at Mount Mabu, the largest tropical forest in southern Africa that was discovered by Julian Bis. And I he's here in the audience. And uh on the right there, that's a photo of the top of Mount Gorangoza looking down into the lowlands around there. person that was instrumental in setting up these surveys and in training up Mozambique uh biologists is Peter Nuscraki. He's uh he's listening online. He's also one of those very slippery characters. This is the only photo I could find of Peter in my entire collection of photos. And I've been to the field with Peter at least a dozen times. So I don't know how. Anyway, I will rectify this on the next expedition with him and I'll make sure I have good photos of him. But Peter undoubtedly is one of the best allround biodiversity experts I've ever met. And his photographs, he's not a bat biologist as such. He's an entomologist, works on insects. But when you see his photographs of bats and his knowledge about bats, it's an absolute pleasure to have spent time with him. But if we talk about mountains in Africa, we have to u reference King Julian. Julian Bis has been up more mountains in Africa than anybody else I know. And uh he has also trained up a huge number of African u biologists in Mozambique, in Malawi, in Ethiopia, wherever you look, Julian has been there first to the extent that he described an entirely new eco region, bio region, which uh he called the Southeast African montaine archipelago and it covers nearly all of the mountains of northern Mosmbique as well as in southern Malawi. this is these are the sites that I've um explored and surveyed in this part of uh Africa. The areas in white are the mountains. And when you look at the rodent communities, and this is the only time I'm going to show any photos of rodents, I don't want to chase away those who are the typical fear of the next slide is going to show lots of rodents. I hope it doesn't cause constonnation for anyone. But when you look at the rodent communities in these mountains, there are those that occur in the forests high up on the mountain and then there are those that occur in the savas uh surrounding those mountains. The communities are completely distinct. The it's not even that they're different species. They even they're different genera. The rodents in the forests are the same in any forest patch you go to, but in between in the savannah, you will never find those forest species. And diagrammatically can be shown like this. If you've got a mountain, in this case I'm using Mount Mabu as an example, but it doesn't matter. Any of those mountains in northern Mosmbique show the same pattern. In the case of Mount Marble, there's six rodents that are found only on the mountain itself, so in green. And there are six that occur right on the edge of the mountain, but in the savas in the brown around. So, two very different communities. But when we look at the bats, the pattern is not there. Yes, there's two bats that occur up on the mountain. There's 12 bats that occur in the lowlands. But there's a whole lot of species that occur both on the mountains and in the savas surrounding the mountains. So is this because of what is the reason of for this? Is it because bats have wings and they can fly up and down mountains easily? Or is it because we haven't surveyed and described the diversity of bats as well as we have with the rodents. So this is an example now of uh one particular bat minopterus natalencis

which if we go back to 2005 it was called minoptrus shriberi which was shown to occur across southern Africa. In fact, not only was it occurring in southern Africa, but if we plotted, this is the map I took from around that time to show the distribution of the species. And you can see that it's found in Africa. It's found in Europe, in the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the islands of Indonesia, Papa New Guinea, all the way into Australia and into Japan as well. This is just 20 years ago. Then it was discovered that in fact there's about a dozen species of minoptrus that occur outside of Africa. But all of the populations in Africa were called minopterrus natalences. All the green dots in Africa on mainland Africa were given one name. So this the next couple of slides just show the serendipity of science. I was on an expedition to Mosmbique Island, which is a little island off the coast of northern Mosmbique, where the Portuguese first set themselves up uh 400 years ago by building a fort and driving out the um the Arab traders who were in that part of the world so that they could have access to the gold and slaves themselves. But that's not the story here. The story is that on the return trip from this we were flying out of Nula which is in northern Mosmbique and the flight was cancelled which often happens with Air Mosmbique. Uh you never know if you're going to fly or not. We didn't fly that day. So we put up in a little hotel which had a swimming pool. We put a, as bat biologists do, we put up a net across the swimming pool and we describe the new species. So, by the way, this now is absolutely impossible today. This was about 15 16 years ago. The number of permits we need to do this today means that this would have been absolutely illegal if we had done it today. And that shows you the ridiculousness of how we've pushed permitting to the absolute extreme. We can no long for this survey. We had a blanket permit that allowed us to catch bats between this date and this date across the whole of northern Mosmbique. Those permits, those days are gone. Now we need to justify every single location. And if you have a cancellation, a cancelled flight, you cannot just go and put up a net. But anyway, this new species we named after Mosmbique, Minoptous Mosmbicus. And it occurs or at least we thought it occurred widely in central and northern Mosmbique until another expedition on Mount Gorangoza. This was again with Peter Nuscraki. This is near the top of Mount Gorang Goza and absolutely stunning beautiful landscape. Uh but we had to negotiate with the rebel soldiers to allow us to do a survey on a piece of land that supposedly is managed by the national parks of Mosmbique who hasn't stepped foot on that mountain in 20 years. Anyway, there's minoptrus mozzambikas, which is what we described in the swimming pool at Nula. From our work in Mount Gorangoza, we found that the little animals that are in Mount Gorang Goza are in fact completely different from the ones in the swimming pool. And we named that minoptrus wony after eio Wilson. And in fact there's two other species of minoptrus in Mosmb beek as well. So what we thought was one species occurring throughout the continent. We now know that there's at least four species. One of which the minotus at the very top minotus woni only occurs at the highest elevations on these uh mountains in Mosmbique. So taxonomy and interpreting the identification of animals properly also has real implications for how we view

ecology. Then to come back full circle to the where I started on this little bat that we discovered in Eswatini. It is a bet that for those of you who are uh Susati speakers or Zulu speakers here will recognize the name here. Shanzeni loosely can be translated as Loelt Savannah in a Swatini. So any Swazi who hears this name immediately can uh relate to it. And uh it was named by a big team of South Africans and Swazis myself included and two of my students that worked on this project. And I wanted to give this bat a Suzi name because it comes from S Swisiland. What I didn't realize is just how proud S Swazis become or became because of this name. I had people stopping me on the middle of the street to approach me about I went to a hardware store to buy some cement. The guy that loaded my cement onto my car said, "Ah, you're the fellow that described our new bat in Switzerland, Swatini. " So names can be very powerful tools and we relate to names that we understand. Swazis will understand Shanzeni and they become proud of it because they recognize what it stands for. So we must never forget that the power of communicating in people's first tongues. any of you if any of you have become interested even slightly by bats please go and buy the bats of southern and central Africa you will find a wealth of uh it's like 700 pages or so long full of detail of every bat that occurs in the southern half of Africa I'd like to end off by saying I have so many people to thank I don't I can't do a proper job of it. Uh my wife Sarah is here. I've got a brother and sister, three boys and a mother that are listening online. And there's so many people that have supported me through uh my pursuit of childish pleasures. But I'd really like to say a big thank you to the students that have uh suffered through my uh dictatorial supervisory role leading them into the field and making them work overtime with no food and no pay. And of course the small mammals that have brought me so much joy and happiness in my career. They I just don't understand why people have such negative views either of rodents or bats. They are absolutely wonderful creatures and I hope that at least you share a little bit of this interest with me. But finally, I also want to dedicate this talk to the colleagues that I work with that have not had the same opportunities that I've had. These are uh six people, two of them. Sorry, I don't have photographs for so I took it off their uh LinkedIn profiles. But here are six African uh colleagues of mine that I have worked directly with that were denied visas to go either to conferences or to workshops or whatever to I don't want to mention the countries because that's not important but they were not able to uh to complete their work because of something as silly as a visa And with that, thank you very much for your attention. Well, thank you so much, Professor Manin, for a wonderful lecture. Um, I have to say you've made me regret having spent my career as a molecular biologist. There are all sorts of other things. We now have time for questions, but I have one just to start us off.

So, you described, if I've got the name correctly, Hippocidrus Lamachier. Is that almost correct? — The bat you described on the mountain of Guinea. — Yeah. — Where you were sponsored by a mining company. I hope that your discovery of this bat over which I've got the name completely wrong um uh that you were somehow able to restrict the activity of the mining company so that the bat survived. — So um I unfortunately I didn't describe that bat. It was described by Andre Br. — Okay. — But I redescribed it in terms that people could now identify it. Um the mine is still operating. They haven't started full-blown mining operations, but what they have promised to do is to build artificial roosts to hold these bats to ensure that while they're mining those that population of bat is u preserved or conserved. Whether they will actually see that through or not, I don't know. But we hope that our work has had some sort of useful impact. — Thank you so much. Um, other questions? — Yeah. All right, I'll let you choose the question. So, thank you for a very interested in beyond the tax population sizes. So you were able to say you've discovered a new bat species, but how do you tell how big the populations are in those particular environments? And then what are the threats to those bats? What happens if bats disappear to the environment? So for most bats, we know practically nothing about their numbers. Some bats make it a bit easier because they congregate in roosts where we can go in and count them. And uh hipposidas lamati for example, it roosts in mine shafts deep down these edits. And if you go into those mine shafts, which we were forbidden from doing, I was told they want to know how many of these bats there are, but we were not allowed to go into the edit to check. So I gave them very precise numbers of bats and refused to tell them how I got the numbers until after I was paid. And then I was asked on the side, how did you get such precise numbers? And I said, I went into the edits and I counted the bats that you asked me to uh give you precise numbers on. So where bats roost in congregations, you can get relatively good numbers as long as you know where all of their roosting caves are. For other bats, it's really just guesswork. You just look at a map and see how wide is the distribution. Then you make some random guesses at how many bats per hectare and then multiply some things together and come up with some something that we have no idea whether it is even close to the reality or not. — Yeah. So one of the we don't know the answer to that question. What uh but if you want a functioning forest and you need there are some plants that are pollinated only by bats. have their seeds dispersed by bats. So if you want the forest to remain healthy, you got to have healthy numbers of these bats. But we can't tell you. In my case, all I'm doing is scrambling to try and describe all the species before they are wiped out. We need a lot more bat biologists, others that focus in exactly the sort of things that you're talking about. The Europe has been many decades ahead of Africa in terms of describing its diversity. It's been able to spend the last 40 years, 50 years doing ecological studies like that. We've not had the there's just a few places where we know a little bit more than the basics that I've talked about here. Sorry. — Question the far back on the left. I'm another molecular biologist and I'm just curious to know about the role that molecular biology can play in distinguishing different species and giving any ideas about when these

species actually diverged. — Yeah. So I was really lucky that my career over overlapped the development of molecular biology at least the easy use of molecular techniques. I am not a molecular biologist. I can't do anything in the lab but I've worked very closely with molecular biologists. In fact Sara here has done a number of U sequences for me. So genetics can tell us a lot of things, but if you're a molecular biologist, you also know if you take one gene and sequence it, it can tell you a different story to another gene and another. So, uh, what the genetics has done is it's allowed us to look at two bats that look morphologically exactly the same and ask the question, are these bats interbreeding or not? And molecular biology has been a really powerful tool. all of the uh phoggenetic trees I showed you, they were based on molecular relatedness. But genetics by itself is not the complete story. You've got to also bring in the morphology. You've got to bring in the echolocation calls etc etc. So it's what's called the integrated approach. So using genetics, using morphology, using whatever tools we have to build up a biogeographic story that makes sense. We've got two species that were split up by the mountains, blah blah blah, and now they can be distinguished because they have genetic differences, and because morphologically they can be separated. I'm sorry, I've missed the second half of the question. I was just wondering what information you have about when the different species diverged. — So that's a far more tricky question to answer because um to get for most mammal studies or if we want to know genetic relationships, we can use one single gene. A cytochrome B is usually enough to tell you because it works across most texts. fine. But to get a proper estimate of when the species diverged, we need a lot more information, including we fossils to calibrate everything. And we've got that level of detail for the rodents. African rodents have been very well um detailed in terms of how old are the species, how um and for most African rodents, you'll be surprised, most of the species were formed just in the last million years since uh during the last set of ice ages basically. And uh we sometimes think that evolution needs tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years to operate. But most of the rodent diversity on this planet has come up in the last one or so million years. The little bit that we know about bats seems to support that. Most bat species that are closely related are about 1 to two million years uh since the last common ancestor. Thanks very much. A couple of questions at the front here. So, — yeah. — Can we bring the microphone over? Yeah. — Yeah. So, really enjoyed your talk. I just wanted to ask and I'm curious about the species that you discovered. Uh there are museums in Europe. that have their specimens. Have you thought about having a specimen of them in terms of their genomics sequences back home? Yes. So, one of the things that I have worked towards and set up at the University of Vatini is a small museum that has specimens of local uh small mammals from Mosmbique, from Esatini, and a few other places that my students use to be able to familiarize themselves with those species. in terms of genetics and that's very easy to do now because there's a thing called Genbank and anything that we publish on new species we put those sequences onto Genbank and

it's freely available for anybody. It's a reference that is open access and anyone can access those. — Thank you. — Yeah. — Hello. Thanks for an excellent talk. Um, I'm just wondering over your 30 years or so studying bats, have you seen um a change in public perception and public receptiveness to bats? I'm thinking in this country in recent years there's been far more knowledge and interest and perhaps enthusiasm among amateur wildlife enthusiasts and far more is known. I'm wondering if that's reflected in your research in Africa and elsewhere. So I one thing that I've found interesting and um very obvious but that has taken me by surprise but I shouldn't have been surprised by it is that most African communities that are living in the forest or in the bush or whatever they already know a lot of the things that um if I show them a photo of a bat or even a handheld animal, they say, "Ah, this is the one that lives in the cave over there. " So, the basic knowledge hasn't been completely lost in Africa where the communities are still living uh same sort of rural life that they had in the past. But the problem is that overwhelmingly Africans are now becoming urbanized and there is no connection with that natural history part and then it's there's no difference European African whatever it's like ah bat it's going to get caught in my hair or whatever. Yeah. And I so yes, you see that reverse, but you also see very quickly how people you just need to show somebody a bat in the hand and they are overnight uh converted. Which again makes me it makes me so mad that we're bringing in more and more regulations, increasing the distance between us and nature. I cannot do that in South Africa. I cannot hold a bat in my hand in my classroom where I teach. I would be arrested and biodiversity whatever. But anywhere else in Africa, the best way to you just need to catch a bat, show it to people and release it. That's it. But the good it does in terms of education, it changes people's attitudes. But I'm afraid that those chances are disappearing very quickly because biodiversity laws across the continent are making it impossible for us to have that one-on-one connection with nature that we used to have.