New Species of Bats from Sulawesi

New bat species found in Sulawesi. The species was discovered by Dr. Ibn Maryanto and his team in when doing research in the north to the south of Sulawesi. The name of the species is Thoopterus suhaeniahi.
"I've discovered last year. Later in June will be published in journals in Australia," said Ibnu on the sidelines of the International Conference on Southeast Asian bats that took place Monday (06/06/2011) in Bogor.
Ibn said, bat species has several distinctive characteristics. "The body was dark gray and was instrumental in the pollination ironwood. Bat does not have a hole called the postorbital foramen," he explained.
According to Ibn, species identification can only be done by morphological observation.He denied that the discovery of new species must be done by molecular analysis. "If it looks different so that a new species," he explained.
Before finding this species, Ibn who has been researching bats since 1985 have also found several other species. He said Indonesia currently has 225 species of bats which totals 11 percent of species that exist in the world.
Ibn said, "If the exploration, we can still find 10 species of bats per year." He said that because Indonesia is very diverse environment. "New Guinea, Sulawesi and other regions were very different," he explained.
The discovery of new species is worthy of welcome and with concern. The reason, according to Ibn, species found there, but also many species are lost. Pressure due to habitat destruction bats are triggers the loss of certain species of bats.
According to Ibn, the protection of bats should be carried out, one of them by protecting the karst region. Ibn revealed, bats are the key species that play a role in the ecosystem balance. If the bat does not exist, fruit production could be disrupted because nobody can pollinate and malaria outbreak due to a lack of control over the population of insects such as mosquitoes.

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