New bat species found in Cambodia

Tube-nosed bat named after Wildlife Conservation Society scientist October 2011. Scientists discovered the small brown-and-white bat during surveys in the Van Sai Protected Forests in north-eastern Cambodia. Little is known about Southeast Asia's tube-nosed bats, so named for their extraordinary nostrils. Several new species have been described in recent years.


To honour of Joe Walston, The Wildlife Conservation Society's Executive Director for Asia Programs and to highlight Walston's work to save bats and other wildlife in Southeast Asia, a group of scientists have dubbed the newly discovered bat species Murina walstoni, or Walston's tube-nosed bat.

Joe Walston began studying bats in Vietnam in 1994. In 2000, he found a critically endangered bat species in Cambodia that had only been caught once before - in 1912 from a cave in India nearly 2,000 miles away. He has been director for WCS's Asia programs since 2010.

The researchers, Csorba Gabor of the Hungarian Natural History Museum, Nguyen Truong Son of the Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources, Ith Saveng of the Royal University of Phnom Penh, and Neil Furey of Flora and Fauna International described the new species, along with two other new bats, in a recent issue of the Journal of Mammology.

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/cambodia-bats.html