Progress on the project
The JRS Biodiversity Foundation provided core funding for "The Bats of Kenya" project with a $90,000 award 2012-2015: Bats of Kenya: distribution, status, ecology and public health, led by Paul W. Webala, David Waldien (of Bat Conservation International), and me. This support has been supplemented by funding from the Field Museum's Barbara E. Brown Fund for Mammal Research, Council on Africa, and by the IRS/Field Museum African Training fund to enable fieldwork in Kenya and work on collections in Chicago and throughout North America. Western Kentucky University has also committed time and resources to the project through the participation of Carl Dick and student Jake Fose, as have the National Museums of Kenya (Ruth Makena, Aziza Zuhura, and Michael Bartonjo) and the Kenya Wildlife Service. We have hosted two summer interns who worked under the aegis of Field Museum's REU Centers grant from the National Science Foundation.
A first step was to compile information on existing collections of Kenyan bats, available from MaNIS or VertNet , supplemented as necessary by information requests to the curators-in-charge. Compiling this information with recently collected information on Kenyan bats produced 15,316 Kenyan bat records. Vouchers are maintained by 21 institutions, 5 of which hold 87% of the records. These institutions are: Royal Ontario Museum (6000), Field Museum and National Museums of Kenya (3092), Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History (2373), and Smithsonian Institution (1953). Study visits to curate these collections using the newly published Keys to the bats (Mammalia: Chiroptera) of East Africa will bring all of these records under a uniform nomenclature, permitting species-by-species analyses of distribution, status, and relationship (if any) to public health and agriculture.
These collections are largely the result of historic sampling effort. This graph shows the accumulation of information over the last century of biological explorations in Kenya.
The collections have covered a large percentage of the national territory, although there are obvious geographic biases to the sampling accomplished to date. The northern and eastern sections of the country are much more poorly sampled, but bat faunas there are likely to be relatively impoverished owing to habitat and drought. Compared to similar analyses in other parts of the world (e.g., Latin America), geographic sampling within Kenya has been reasonably uniform and comprehensive for bats.
Most of the existing collections from Kenya belong to two of the largest and most widely distributed bat families, Molossidae and Vespertilionidae. The 10 bat families documented from Kenya exceed the number of bat families in the entire Western Hemisphere.
All but one of these bat families (i.e., Pteropodidae) are predominantly insectivorous and use echolocation to find their food. A primary goal of this project is to develop a call library for Kenyan bats. This will enable Paul Webala and his students and associates to study the ecology and behavior of bats without the need to net or trap them. Using ultrasonic recorders, field biologists can more efficiently and effectively monitor bat activity and status. As bats represent more than a quarter of all Kenya's mammal species, this will be a remarkable step forward for natural resource management in Kenya.
By the end of 2015, we had sampled throughout the southern half of Kenya, at 78 different localities, involving 56 different species in nine of the ten bat families. These new records provided detailed information on roosting habits, parasite faunas, echolocation calls, as well as morphology and genetics. In January 2014, this work continued in the Rift Valley (Nakuru, Naivasha, and Elmenteita lakes) and in Masai Mara (both the National Game Reserve and the Mara Conservancy). These points and the additional species we encountered (e.g., Tadarida ventralis) are not included in the foregoing counts and accompanying map (left).
Future goals include visiting the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History (LACM), where more than 8000 Kenyan bat specimens are housed. These include a number of unique specimens for Kenyan endemics (e.g., Glauconycteris kenyacola in ROM). Visits to those museums will also permit significantly expanding the scope of the photographic plates of bat skulls to accompany species accounts in our monograph. Currently, 59 species have completed skull plates, developed from FMNH materials. Work at the ROM alone will add 40 bat species to the number of completed plates. We are currently tallying the number of bats with one or more sonographs and those with determined parasite faunas.