Myotis mystacinus (Kuhl, 1817)

Vlaschenko, Anton, Kravchenko, Kseniia, Prylutska, Alona, Ivancheva, Elena, Sitnikova, Elena & Mishin, Alexander, 2016, Structure of summer bat assemblages in forests in European Russia, Turkish Journal of Zoology 40 (6), pp. 876-893 : 889

4.5. Status of M. mystacinus , P. pygmaeus and E. nilssonii Besides N. lasiopterus , we need more information on the distribution of 3 other species, M. mystacinus , P. pygmaeus , and E. nilssonii , in European Russia and Ukraine. Results of this study confirm that M. brandtii is a more common species in woodlands of European Russia than M. mystacinus , which is patchily distributed and less numerous ( Strelkov and Buntova, 1983; Il’in et al., 2002; Gukasova et al., 2011; Kruskop and Pozhidaeva, 2014).

The current data suggest that east of the Dnieper River (central Ukraine) P. pipistrellus s.l. is represented by P. pygmaeus (Kruskov, 2007; Vlaschenko and Gukasova, 2009, 2010; Vlaschenko et al., 2012; Gashchak et al., 2013). The absence of P. pipistrellus s.str. in this area is questionable. There are unidentified individuals that could be P. pipistrellus (Kruskov, 2007) and there are some records of echolocation calls at 44 kHz frequency. Individuals that could be positively identified as P. pipistrellus were recorded in the Ukrainian Crimea (unpublished) and were noted for the Caucasus only (Kruskov, 2007). Our conclusion is that the distribution of P. pipistrellus / pygmaeus is quite opposite to the species distribution on maps shown by Battersby (2010).

E. nilssonii is distributed widely in European Russia from the forest-steppe zone of the Volga River ( Il’in et al., 2002) or the Caucasus ( Il’in et al., 2002) in the south to the high latitudes in the north ( Bogdarina and Strelkov, 2003); in some locations, it is the most common species ( Smirnov et al., 2013). However, the species is distributed patchily and there are many regions ( Il’in et al., 2002) and areas ( Albov et al., 2009) in the mid-European Russia where E. nilssonii is absent or very rare (Gukasova et al., 2011). It is one more example of a misconception about the distribution of some bat species in European Russia ( Dietz et al., 2009; Battersby, 2010).