A new species of small Eptesicus Rafinesque (Chiroptera: Vespertilionidae) from northern South America

Abstract

Eptesicus diminutus Osgood, 1915 is the smallest species of the subgenus Eptesicus found in South America. It has a discontinuous distribution, with northern populations in Colombia and Venezuela, and southern populations in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. We reviewed specimens assigned to the northern populations of E. diminutus and compared them to these from the southern populations. Based on morphologic, morphometric, and molecular analyses, we support the recognition of the northern populations of E. diminutus as a new species. This new species is distributed in the Llanos of the Orinoco region in Colombia and Venezuela (and likely in Guyana). Eptesicus sp. nov. is morphologically similar to E. diminutus and E. furinalis, from which it can be distinguished by its intermediate size. This taxon increases to 11 the number of species of bats of the subgenus Eptesicus in South America.

Confirming the presence of Lasiurus frantzii (Peters, 1870) (Chiroptera, Vespertilionidae) in South America: more questions than answers

“…Finally, the taxonomy of vespertilionid bats has been assessed recently for all the Neotropical genera ( Baird et al 2008 , 2021 ; Larsen et al 2012 ; Carrión-Bonilla and Cook 2020 ). However, most of studies do not include information from Colombia despite this country’s biogeographical complexity (but see Ramírez-Chaves et al 2021 , 2023 ; Rodríguez-Posada et al 2021 ); this makes the delimitation of species’ distribution, the identification of the populations of both sides of the Andes, and the formulation of biogeographical hypothesis challenging. For example, several reviews of the widespread genus such as Myotis included no genetic samples from Colombia (e.g.…”

“…DNA was extracted with a Wizard Genomic DNA Purification kit (Promega Corporation) following the manufacturer’s protocol. We obtained a sequence of the mitochondrial cytochrome-b ( cyt-b ) gene (896 bp) using the primers LGL765F ( Bickham et al 1995 ) and LGL766R ( Bickham et al 2004 ), and the concentrations and the reaction conditions as in Ramírez-Chaves et al (2021) . To complete the data set for comparisons, we gathered 68 homologous sequences of 16 species of Lasiurus from GenBank (Suppl.…”

Eptesicus innoxius (Chiroptera: Vespertilionidae)

“…Other South American Eptesicus similar in size to E. innoxius are E. orinocensis (Orinoco serotine) and E. diminutus (diminutive serotine), but these species differ from E. innoxius by the following combinations of external morphologic characters. Eptesicus orinocensis presents a forearm length ≤ 38 mm, greatest length of skull ≤ 15.3 mm, maxillary toothrow length between 5.1 and 5.7 mm; dorsal pelage is light brown, with lighter tips and ≤6 mm in length (Ramírez-Chaves et al 2021). Eptesicus diminutus presents a forearm length = 30-37 mm, greatest length of skull ≤ 15.2, maxillary toothrow length ≤ 5.4; dorsal hairs are short (≤6.3 mm) and bicolored with dark brown bases, and brown to yellowish brown tips (Davis and Gardner 2008;Cláudio 2019d;Acosta et al 2021).…”

“…innoxius . Eptesicus orinocensis is restricted to the Orinoco basin in Colombia and Venezuela (Ramírez-Chaves et al 2021), and E. diminutus occurs to the southeast in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina (Davis and Gardner 2008; Cláudio 2019d).…”