Bougainville monkey-faced bat

Appearance

Their chests have a white or yellow patch. The fur is long, with individual hairs approximately 20 mm (0.79 in) Unlike the Guadalcanal monkey-faced bat, the tibia is fully furred. It is thought that their eyes are red or orange in color like other members of their genus.

Range and habitat

The majority of museum specimens were collected from cloud forests at 1,100 metres (3,600 ft) or higher above sea level. It is not thought to occur in coastal forests. It had not been seen on Bougainville Island since 1968, until they were again sighted in 2016.

The Bougainville monkey-faced bat or Bougainville flying monkey is a megabat endemic to Bougainville Island of Papua New Guinea and Choiseul Island of the Solomon Islands in Melanesia.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

In crisis

In 1992, this species was feared extinct because it had not been seen despite research expeditions in the area. Even so, a research expedition in 1995 documented six individuals over the course of six months. In 1992, captive breeding was recommended for this species, as its population was thought to be in drastic decline.

The species is on the IUCN Red List as an Endangered species. Threats to this species include habitat destruction from agriculture.

Bougainville monkey-faced bat is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Bougainville monkey-faced bat, Wikidata item Q720525. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.