Tonatia maresi Williams et al., 1995

Velazco, Paúl M., Voss, Robert S., Fleck, David W. & Simmons, Nancy B., 2021, Mammalian Diversity And Matses Ethnomammalogy In Amazonian Peru Part 4: Bats, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2021 (451), pp. 1-201 : 81-83

Tonatia maresi Williams et al., 1995

Figure 20A

VOUCHER MATERIAL (TOTAL = 8): Jenaro Herrera (AMNH 278467, 278484; CEBIOMAS 110, 111; MUSM 5549), Nuevo San Juan (AMNH 272812; MUSM 13270, 13271); see table 36 for measurements.

UNVOUCHERED OBSERVATIONS: One individual of Tonatia maresi (identified as T. saurophila ) was captured and released at Divisor during the

Sierra del Divisor Rapid Biological Inventory (Jorge and Velazco, 2006). Another individual was captured at Frog Valley on 17 February 2019.

IDENTIFICATION: The genus Tonatia has a complex taxonomic history. Up until 2002, this genus was thought to include six or seven species, but Lee et al. (2002) demonstrated that these did not comprise a monophyletic group and transferred most of them to the genus Lophostoma , restricting Tonatia to just the type species ( T. bidens ) and its close relative, T. saurophila . Previously, the name bidens had been applied to all living members of the latter group, but Williams et al. (1995) had shown that it includes two species, with T. bidens restricted to the Atlantic Forest (southeastern Brazil, north- eastern Argentina, and eastern Paraguay), whereas the name T. saurophila (originally based on Jamaican fossil material) applied to populations in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and northern South America. Tonatia saurophila thus conceived included three subspecies: T. s. bakeri , T. s. maresi , and T. s. saurophila (see Williams et al., 1995; Williams and Genoways, 2008). Most recently, Basantes et al. (2020) conducted thorough morphological, morphometric, and molecular analyses of this group and concluded that T. saurophila as defined by Williams et al. (1995) is a complex that includes three valid species: Tonatia saurophila appears to be an extinct island form, whereas living populations formerly referred to that species represent either T. maresi (east of the Andes) or T. bakeri (from southeastern Mexico southward into northern Colombia, northwestern Venezuela, and northwestern Ecuador).

Tonatia maresi can be distinguished from other species in the genus by the following combination of traits: small size (forearm 53–60 mm, condylocanine length 22–25 mm); skin around the mouth, noseleaf, and warts of the lower lip darkly pigmented; posterior edge of the cranium with a blunt vertex due to a weakly developed sagittal crest; slender mandibular condyles; canine and first lower premolar separated by a diastema; and clinoid process poorly developed or absent. In the field, living individuals of Tonatia maresi can be distinguished from Lophostoma silvicolum (which they resemble in size and external morphology) by the “ear test”: touching the ears in Lophostoma will cause the bat to fold them down over the top of the head, a behavior that is not observed in Tonatia . Descriptions and measurements of T. maresi (usually identified as T. bidens or T. saurophila ) have been provided by Goodwin and Greenhall (1961), Genoways and Williams (1980), Genoways and Williams (1984), Brosset and Charles-Dominique (1990), Williams et al. (1995), Simmons and Voss (1998), and Lim et al. (2005). No subspecies are currently recognized (Basantes et al., 2020).

Ascorra et al. (1993) erroneously identified one specimen (MUSM 5549) from Jenaro Herrera as Tonatia silvicola (= Lophostoma silvicolum ), but Fleck et al. (2002) correctly identified their specimens from Nuevo San Juan as T. saurophila . The voucher material we examined from the Yavarí-Ucayali interfluve conforms to previous descriptions of T. maresi , with measurements that fall within the range of size variation previously documented for the species.

REMARKS: All nocturnal captures of Tonatia maresi accompanied by ecological data from our region (N = 10) were in ground-level mistnets. Of these, 7 were in primary forest, 1 was in secondary vegetation, 1 was in a swampy mineral lick (collpa), and 1 was in a palm swamp (aguajal). No roosting groups of Tonatia maresi were encountered during our study.

Figures

FIG. 20. Photographs of A, an adult male (ROM 122096) Tonatia maresi and B, an adult Trachops cirrhosus, both captured at Jenaro Herrera. Photographs by Burton Lim (A) and Marco Tschapka (B).