QPeri

By Keya Acharya Reprint | | Print |

Keya Acharya

BANGALORE, India, Jun 25 1999 (IPS) - At last count there were only 40 members of an endangered family of bats that are in urgent need of attention but ignored by the preoccupation with tigers and elephants of India’s conservationists.

The entire world’s population of the unglamorous Otomops wroughtoni or Wroughton Free-tail, named after a British colonial naturalist, is to be found in one cave near Belgaum in the southern state of Karnataka.

Reckless commercial tree felling and limestone mining which have degraded the biodiverse forests of the area are responsible for the near demise of this bat family with which the Bombay Natural History Museum, founded in 1883, has a long association.

They were first brought to the notice of the BNHS, a venerable institution in India, in 1912 by a colonial bison-hunter who stumbled upon a large cave massed with these creatures and sent six specimens to Bombay.

The enormous, damp, natural limestone cave called Barapede is situated 800-metres above sea-level, on a remote plateau rising above a fore
valley ithe Bhimgad Reserve Forest in Karnataka.

Bhimgad is highly biodiverse, with 25 species of mammals, 15 of reptiles, 30 of butterflies and over 125 species of birds. It is the source of the river Mahadayi, the lifeline of coastal Goa.

In 1913, S.H. Prater, the highly-acclaimed curator of BNHS’s museum, located Barapede near Talewadi village, while on BNHS’s mammal-survey. Prater’s observations helped establish the resident bat’s rarity.

Thereafter Otomops wroughtoni was forgotten for the next 50 years till 1961, when French consular official cum amateur naturalist Andre 
et and BNough roads illegally cut through the forests.

Mining, also banned in forest areas, is the cause of the blasting of sizeable areas of earth and trees near Talewadi, the nearest point to the Barapede cave.

Private tracts within the forest, belonging to descendants of rs whose famous leader Shivaji #ese ercial mining interests.

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principstarted government proceedings to declare Bhimgad forest a sanctuary, but cannot say how long that will take.

“Bhimgad is only one of a million of my concerns, but I am aware of its need for protection,” he said defensively.

ignorance of their biology and behaviour adding to the concern. Fruit-bats in Australia are in serious trouble. In the South Pacific islands, they are killed for medicinal value. In Europe five species of 1 e
t famous example of “cleanliness”.

Researchers now say that the urine of bats repels insects such as silver-fishadamage rock-paintings. Archaeological chemist B.R.N. Sharma from Maharashtra state, home to numerous natural caves, says that the toxide gas used for fumigating bats has also aided in the decay in India’s rock and cave-paintings.

Prof M.K. Chandrashekharan of the Bangalore-based Jawaharlal g defeink in the food-chain of the ecosystem, besides propagating important tree-species and pollinating plants.

With 950 known species, second only to rodents, bats fall into two suborders: insect-eaters and fruit eaters.

Bangalore-researcher Riki Krishnan of the Centre for Ecological Sciences, has found that of the 24 species of bats identified in 1912 by G.C. Shortridge, only eight are still precariously surviving.