Morphological Variations and New Species Description of Genus Rousettus Bat from Gunung Duasudara Sanctuary, North Sulawesi, Indonesia

Abstract

Bats belongs to Pteropodidae Family that spreaded evenly in Indonesia. Genus Rousettus have their morphological variances among its own species based on characteristics on each species. Among them there is fruit-feeding bats of from genus Rousettus (Chiroptera: Pteropodidae) that have many variances of morphology among its own species. This study was aimed to identify the morphological variations and its sex type influence of genus Rousettus bats from Gunung Duasudara Sanctuary, North Sulawesi. The locations were consisted 7 types of major vegetations at altitude range from 0 to 1351 m above sea level (asl). All habitat types were observed using Mist-net method at 1 and 3 m above the ground. There were found 452 individuals, including R. amplexicaudatus (224), R. celebensis (219) and R. tangkokoensis n. sp. (9). Nine individuals of Rousettus tangkokoensis n. sp. were newly found in lowland forest and coastal forest. These newly-found species were different from other Rousettus. There was discovered that sex type had influenced the skull and external body characters on R. amplexicaudatus, R. tangkokoensis n. sp. R. celebensis. However, most of other characters were statistically not-significant that indicated there was not any sexual dimorphism. According to the Discriminant Function Analysis (DFA), these morphological groups possess different specification. Therefore, the three species of genus Rousettus have statistically variation of skull and external body characters one to another.