Hipposideros fuliginosus (Temminck, 1853)

Decher, Jan, Hoffmann, Anke, Schaer, Juliane, N Orris, Ryan W., Kadjo, Blaise, Astrin, Jonas, Monadjem, Ara & Hutterer, Rainer, 2015, Bat diversity in the Simandou Mountain Range of Guinea, with the description of a new white-winged vespertilionid, Acta Chiropterologica 17 (2), pp. 255-282 : 265

Hipposideros fuliginosus (Temminck, 1853)

New material

ZFMK 2008.0284, ♀, W1, 3 March 2008.

Only one female was caught in the ravine forest at W1. However, during the 2002 RAP, this was the most abundant species caught with 99 individuals at the high elevation site (W2) and 17 individuals at the low elevation site (BK) (Fahr and Ebigbo, 2004). During the 2003 RAP this species was not recorded from the potential offset sites at Simandou ( Fahr et al., 2006). In Liberia H. fuliginosus was recorded from North Lorma National Forest and characterized as a “rarely recorded and forest-dependent species” (Monadjem and Fahr, 2007: 54). Its habitat extends along riverine forest belts into drier mosaic habitats both altitudinally and latitudinally: it lives in small colonies in hollow trees, sometimes associated with H. cf. ruber ( Fahr, 2013 a) . The female caught on 3 March 2008 carried an embryo of 22 mm crown-rump length.

Conservation status: Least Concern. Population trend is decreasing. A major threat is habitat loss, as this species does not seem to occur in degraded forest ( IUCN, 2015). The species is known from about 25 disjunct localities between Sierra Leone and western Uganda ( Fahr, 2013 a). Given the numbers recorded during the 2002 RAP, the Simandou Range is an important stronghold for this species.