An expedition has discovered a remote Fijian cave with thousands of microbats thought to be nearly extinct
Guided by local villagers, the bat biologists descended into the mouth of a cave on Fiji’s remote island of Vanua Balavu. They slipped down a rock face, swam through an underground pool, clambered over piles of guano and emerged into a cathedral-sized cavern “absolutely chockablock-full” of Pacific sheath-tailed bats, says Kris Helgen, a mammal expert and chief scientist at the Australian Museum Research Institute in Sydney.
Pacific sheath-tailed bats have soft, chocolate-brown fur and reach just five grams—the weight of a nickel or a sheet of paper. A few million years before humans sailed across the Pacific and made their homes on island after island, these tiny bats undertook the same astonishing journeys—by air. The archipelagic nation of Fiji is the “last stronghold” of the sheath-tailed subspecies Emballonura semicaudata semicaudata, says expedition member Siteri Tikoca, a Fijian conservation biologist and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Adelaide in Australia. But in Fiji, too, the bat’s populations have been plummeting.
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