African Bats

My research on African bats began in 1982. It has entailed considerable fieldwork, and research on African collections in museums worldwide. Initially I focused on the foraging ecology and reproduction of selected central African species. I made important collections of bats from 1982 through to 2003. From 1999 through to 2004 I was fortunate to work on the important African material preserved in the mammal collections in Berlin, Cambridge (Boston and UK), London, Los Angeles, New York, Sevenoaks, Tervuren, Toronto and Washington DC; this research revealed many exciting discoveries.

My fieldwork has included detailed life history studies: notably the large insectivorous, leaf-nosed bat, Hipposideros vittatus (Cotterill and Fergusson 1999), two species of Rhinolophus (Cotterill 1998) and Miniopterus natalensis (Bernard et al. 1996). A fascinating discovery about the life history of high-flying crevice roosting molossids (Cotterill and Fergusson 1993) resides in the remarkable finding that lactation in female Tadarida fulminans occurs over the cool-dry season, a period when their insect prey are purportedly scarce. This and allied discoveries lead to research into the life history evolution of the African Molossidae - ultimately toward a Phd that never happened! In fact, there are has been lamentably little, if any, research to explain how the life histories of these high-flying African molossids relate to their ecology.

It has proved a sobering and humbling experience to reconcile with the distinctly inadequate knowledge of the diversity of Chiroptera; this state of affairs made it quite impracticable to carry out meaningful ecology, and especially biogeography (including any credible macroecology). Impacts of this Species Problem impinges on across all studies of any organisms; these challenges are magnified where one is dealing with cryptic species (as with the majority of African bats). Even though, today one might well be able to DNA bar-code captured and released bats, one has to be very careful how one goes about identifying one's study animals. Here, the responsible preservation of voucher specimens, in a reputable museum collection, remains a professional responsibility. Preserved vouchers ensure that one's data maintain their any future relevance to science and conservation. The core lesson of my research experience emphasizes, again and again, that access to, and familiarity with, comprehensive museum collections remains quintessential in any scientifically credible research on one's organisms of interest (the obvious option with bats, or any taxa, is to collaborate with experienced taxonomists).

These challenges relating to species characterization so hindering ecological - and allied - research on African bats were the main reason why I shifted research into the arena of systematics, and interfaced closely with the Species Problem. An important catalyst of this shift was the discovery, in October 1990, of the then undescribed Rhinolophus sakejiensis (Cotterill 2002). It has lead to an exhaustive taxonomic revision of Afrotropical horseshoe bats, of which key results are still to be published. Ultimately, this detailed taxonomic research lead to a reappraisal of the entire holdings of Chiroptera preserved in the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe (NMZB) in Bulawayo; these studies of specimens that have also extended to examinations of a great deal of other material worldwide, including relevant type specimens.

Suffice to say, an intimate exposure to the challenges of cryptic speciation in African bats has aided and abetted publications on Natural History and Natural Science Collections. All these experiences reinforced an appreciation for the critical role of the tentelic properties of voucher specimens in the epistemology of the life sciences. Subtle differences in the evolution of distributions of cryptic species has profound impacts on how one resolves not only biogeographical processes and patterns (exemplified in some Large Mammals), but more especially deciphers the palaeo-environmental context of speciation events. Aetiological links between a species' history and its palaeo-environments has a great deal to do with Landscape Evolution (cf Cotterill and de Wit 2011).

The greater portion of both my published material (collating much previously unpublished data, especially taxonomic and distributional data) is compiled into the book length synthesis - Bats of Southern and Central Africa. My bat research continues in collaborations on these and allied databases. Pan-African syntheses on over 20 species of bats (detailed species accounts) were published in 2013 in the Mammals of Africa, published by Bloomsbury Publishing after protracted delays caused by Elsevier's failures.