Black-winged Myotis

About the Black-winged Myotis

The reddish-black myotis or black-winged myotis (Myotis rufoniger), colloquially known as the "red bat" or "golden bat" (not to be confused with Lasiurus species, also known as red bats, or Mimon bennettii, also known as the golden bat) in South Korea, is a species of vesper bat found throughout East Asia.

It was initially described as a distinct species by Robert Fisher Tomes in 1858, but later studies reclassified as conspecific with Hodgson's bat (M. formosus). However, a 2014 morphological study found major divergence between M. formosus and M. rufoniger, and thus split them from one another. Creating a phylogeny based on wing patterns, the study found M. rufoniger to be most closely related to Welwitsch's bat (M. welwitschii) of Africa, rather than to M. formosus. This has also been followed by the American Society of Mammalogists, the IUCN Red List, and the ITIS.

A 2017 genetic study found M. rufoniger to have a low effective population size, being the lowest of the four Myotis species sampled for the study. The study found its effective population size to have peaked during the late Pleistocene, about 50,000 years ago, and to have dramatically decreased since the... Wikipedia →