Mouse-eared bat

For the species sometimes known as the mouse-eared bat, see Greater mouse-eared bat.
Mouse-eared bats
Whiskered bat (Myotis mystacinus)
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Chiroptera
Family: Vespertilionidae
Subfamily: Myotinae
Tate, 1942
Genus: Myotis
Kaup, 1829
Type species
Vespertilio myotis
Borkhausen, 1797
Species

See text.

The mouse-eared bats (Myotis) are a diverse and widespread genus of bats within the family Vespertilionidae.

Relationships

Myotis has historically been included in the subfamily Vespertilioninae, but was classified in its own subfamily, Myotinae, by Nancy Simmons in 1998. In her 2005 classification in Mammal Species of the World, Simmons listed the genera Cistugo and Lasionycteris in Myotinae in addition to Myotis itself.[1] However, molecular data indicate that Cistugo is distantly related to all other Vespertilionidae, so that it was reclassified into its own family Cistugidae,[2] and that Lasionycteris belongs in Vespertilioninae.[3] Thus, Myotis is the only remaining genus within Myotinae.[3]

Characteristics

Ears are normally longer than they are wide, with a long and lance-shaped tragus, and thence the English and zoological names (in Greek, myotis and myosotis mean "mouse-ear"). The species within this genus vary in size from very large to very small, with a single pair of mammary glands.

Species

Wikispecies has information related to: Myotis
Myotis

Myotis latirostris

Most Old World species

Most Nearctic species

Myotis brandtii

Neotropical and some Nearctic species






Relationships among Myotis species according to molecular data[4]

Traditionally, Myotis has been divided into three large subgenera—Leuconoe, Myotis, and Selysius. However, molecular data indicate that these subgenera are not natural groups, but instead unnatural assemblages of convergently similar species.[5] Instead, Myotis species largely fall in two main clades, one containing Old World and the other New World species.[4] However, the Asian species Myotis latirostris falls outside the clade formed by these main groups, and may represent a separate genus,[6] and the Eurasian Myotis brandtii is related to New World species.[7]

Myotis is a highly species-rich genus, and the classification of many species remains unsettled. In the below list, all differences in taxonomy from the 2005 third edition of Mammal Species of the World,[8] are indicated in footnotes.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Split from M. mystacinus (Mayer et al., 2007).
  2. ↑ A new species (Happold, 2005).
  3. ↑ Split from M. nattereri (Ibáñez et al., 2006).
  4. ↑ Split from M. formosus (Jiang et al., 2010).
  5. ↑ Split from M. brandtii (Ohdachi et al., The Wild Mammals of Japan, 2009).
  6. ↑ Split from M. muricola (Stadelmann et al., 2007).
  7. ↑ Split from M. daubentonii (Matveev et al., 2005). Includes M. abei (Tsytsulina, 2004, as daubentonii).
  8. ↑ A new species (Borisenko et al., 2008).
  9. ↑ Split from M. adversus (Han et al., 2010).

References

  1. ↑ Simmons, 2005, p. 499
  2. ↑ Lack et al., 2010
  3. 1 2 Roehrs et al., 2010
  4. 1 2 Stadelmann et al., 2007, fig. 2; Lack et al., 2010, figs. 1, 2
  5. ↑ Simmons, 2005, p. 500
  6. ↑ Lack et al., 2010, p. 984
  7. ↑ Stadelmann et al., 2007, fig. 2
  8. ↑ Simmons, 2005, pp. 500–518

Literature cited

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Myotis.

Data related to Myotis at Wikispecies

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