Museums hold most of the world's most valuable biological specimens and tissues collected, including type material that is often decades or even centu

Karst landscapes are biologically diverse and unique ecosystems that are especially important to bats. As in other parts of Southeast Asia, cave roosting bats in the Philippines have suffered extensive human disturbance, and as a result, may be declining. Here we contributed to a region-wide effort to assess the status of cave bats by surveying bats in well-known caves and forest on limestone on Bohol Island in the central Philippines. We also assessed cave disturbance through physical signs and interviews. We observed and acoustically detected bats representing a total of 14 taxa in 23 of the 25 caves surveyed. Few species were present in most caves (median = 2 spp.) and only three caves had large numbers of bats (> 1,000). However, of the 29 bat species captured in forest, 19 are known to roost in caves, including the poorly known Philippine endemic, Hipposideros coronatus. Most surveyed caves experienced either current or historical human disturbance (88%), primarily by collectors of edible bird's nest...

High-flying insectivorous bats, as wide-ranging generalist insectivores, are valuable consumers of high-altitude migrating pests of rice in Southeast Asia. Here, we documented the behavior of relatively low-flying bats over irrigated rice to elucidate their potential role as predators of rice-associated pest insects in the Philippines. Specifically, we tested the local-scale effects of rice stage, particularly seedling and late vegetative stages, and time of night on acoustic activity of bats foraging near ground level within three functional guilds (based on foraging distance from background clutter). We also monitored bat activity from two 50 m-high towers to assess the vertical extent of relatively low-flying guilds, as well as document high-flying bat guild presence and temporal behavior. At ground level, the most active guild biased their activity and feeding over early growth stage fields, but also foraged at tower level. Activity of the bat guild adept at foraging closest to vegetation did not vary with time of night or rice stage and was absent from tower recordings. High-flying bats were predictably rare at rice level, but exhibited high foraging intensity at 50 m. Given the well-documented, sequential arrival of insect guilds with growth stage, these data suggest that at ground level edge-space bats may be important consumers of detritivores (e.g., mosquitoes). Moreover, our data suggest that just as habitat heterogeneity enhances the services of arthropod predators, these management practices also enhance bat activity and, presumably, their contribution to pest suppression.

Molecular tools have confirmed the presence of morphologically cryptic bat species initially detected by divergent echolocation calls. Here we document the presence of two sympatric, genetically distinct populations of bats whose echolocation calls were similar in peak frequency. They differed only slightly with respect to size, skull and wing morphology, and noseleaf shape, but the individuals, all initially identified as Rhinolophus arcuatus, fell into two groups exhibiting 3–4% sequence divergence in the cytochrome b gene. The coexistence of cryptic bats with only modest echolocation and physical differences challenges our understanding of niche partitioning in rhinolophid bats and suggests the possibility that a novel mode of niche partitioning may be used. Alternatively, their distributions may have only recently intersected as a result of forest loss, especially in the lowlands.