Update of the distribution of Lonchorhina aurita ( Chiroptera ) , a vulnerable cave-dwelling bat in Brazil 1

Lonchorhina aurita is an insectivorous cave-dwelling bat, which roosts primarily in caves, and has been reported from three (Cave Pedra Branca, Cave Janela, and Cave Raposa) of the 94 natural caves registered in Sergipe by the National Register of Speleological Information/National Center for Cave Research and Conservation.The subfamily Lonchorhininae encompasses bats that can be distinguished from other phyllostomids by the presence of an extremely well-developed nasal leaf, which is as long as the ears. This study provides an update on the distribution of this species and reports its first record in the Caatinga for the state of Sergipe, northeastern Brazil. An adult female and an adult male with no evidence of reproductive activity were captured by mist nets in the surroundings of the Xingo Hydroelectric Reservoir, a region dominated by shrubby hyper xerophilous Caatinga vegetation, at the height of the dry season. The morphometric and morphological data were consistent with those recorded for the species in other South American countries. It is important to prioritize the investigation of these sites in order to better understand the abundance and distribution of the species in Sergipe, which is classified as threatened in Brazil.Keywords: bats, caves, distribution, Lonchorhininae, Tomes’s sword-nosed bat, threatened species.

The bats lonchorhinines can be distinguished from other phyllostomids by the presence of an extremely welldeveloped nasal leaf, which is as long as the ears (Reis et al., 2007).The tragus is also well developed, the calcaneum is longer than the hind foot and the tail extends beyond the posterior margin of the long interfemoral membrane (Gardner, 2008;Nogueira et al., 2007).
Uncommon and broadly distributed, L. aurita has records in several localities of 16 countries throughout North America, Central America and South America.Its type locality is Trinidad and Tobago (Muñoz-Arango, 2001).The species was registered accidentally in the Bahamas, where is known only from a single specimen collected on the island of Nassau Harbor (Lassieur and Wilson, 1989).Although it is also housed in tunnels and mines this species may be geographically limited to areas with caves or rocks (Emmons and Feer, 1997) and can be locally abundant near caves (Lassieur and Wilson, 1989).These bats usually form colonies of 12 to 25, and sometimes more than 500 individuals (Goodwin and Greenhall, 1961;Lassieur and Wilson, 1989;Reid, 1997;Eisenberg and Redford, 1999).
Data on the distribution of wild populations are fundamentally important for the assessment of the conservation status of a species (IUCN, 2001) and one of the primarily problems for this issue in Brazil is the lack of data at both local and regional levels.In this context, we provide the first confirmed record, based on voucher specimens, of the occurrence of L. aurita in the Caatinga scrublands of the Brazilian state of Sergipe extending its known range and highlighting factors that may influence the conservation of bats in Brazil (Bernard et al., 2012).
The specimens of L. aurita were captured during a survey of the mammalian fauna in surroundings of the Xingó Hydroelectric Reservoir, specifically in the Fazenda Miramar (9º33'30" S, 37º49'21" W), a farm located in the Southern Backlands Depression of northeastern Brazil, a region dominated by shrubby hyperxerophilous Caatinga vegetation (Velloso et al., 2002).The climate is hot and semi-arid, corresponding to the Bsh type in the Köppen classification, with temperatures ranging from 21ºC to 27ºC and a rainy season typically occurring between October and April (Velloso et al., 2002).
During the surveys, which were conducted between 2007 and 2008, bats were captured in mist-nets set at a standard height of 1 m above the ground.Specimens of L. aurita were found in the vicinity of an intermittent water course which crosses a garbage tip on the access road to the Fazenda Miramar (9º33'S, 37º49'W), located on the right margin of the São Francisco River.
The specimens were taxidermized following the procedure described by Monteiro (1993), and the cranium was removed.External and craniodental measurements (Díaz et al., 2016) were taken (in millimeters) using a calliper with a precision of 0.001 mm, while body mass was determined using a spring balance with a scale of 1 g.The specimens were deposited in the Mammal Collection of the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) in Recife and their morphology was compared with published data (Polaco et al., 1992;Aguirre et al., 2010;Lessieur and Wilson, 1989).Eight external and sixteen cranial measurements were taken and compared with data available in the literature for the study specie (Table 1).
To expand the known geographic distribution of L. aurita, the existing records were compiled from the literature, such as published papers, books, theses and dissertations, available in the main Brazilian libraries and international databases, as well as SpeciesLink and Ministério do Meio Ambiente (Biodiversidade/ICMBio/MMA).The localities were plotted on a map generated in ArcGis, version 10.3, para melhor entender a abundância e a distribuição da espécie em Sergipe, a qual é classificada como ameaçada de extinção no Brasil.
and whenever necessary, the coordinates were converted into decimal values.
Two specimens were collected in Sergipe, being an adult female (UFPE 2519) and an adult male (UFPE 2523) with no evidence of reproductive activity in any case.These specimens were collected on February 12 th 2007, at the height of the dry season, at 19h37min and 21h16min, respectively.
The specimens were identified as L. aurita based on the diagnostic morphological traits described by Gardner (2008) and Handley and Ochoa (1997) for the differentiation of the species of the genus Lonchorhina.These traits include narrow, elongated ears almost as long as the head, tragus larger than half the length of the ear, with an indented base, reduced second lower premolar, trilobate lower incisors, broad palate, proportionally smaller than the tympanic bulla, short, narrow and low face, hind foot shorter than the calcaneum, and the presence of hairs of approximately 9 mm in length on the ventral surface of the ear and forearm, as well as the proximal portion of the nasal leaf.The morphometric data were compared with those available in Lassieur and Wilson (1989), Polaco et al. (1992) and Aguirre et al. (2010) (Table 1).
In the case of the craniodental data, both the specimens showed smaller total length of the cranium, condylobasal length, width of the postorbital constriction and breadth of the cranium than the specimens from Mexico, while the lower tooth row was longer (Polaco et al., 1992).The zygomatic breadth was greater than the value recorded by Lassieur and Wilson (1989), while the braincase was narrower.All other craniodental parameters were within the range of published data (Table 1).
The forearm of the specimen ♀ UFPE 2519 collected in the present study was shorter than that described by Polaco et al. (1992) for specimens of L. aurita from Mexico.By contrast, the specimen ♂ UFPE 2523 had a longer tail than that described by Polaco et al. (1992) and a longer foot than that recorded by Aguirre et al. (2010).
The present record of L. aurita from the Caatinga represents the first formal evidence of occurrence of the species in the state of Sergipe, based on the collection, identification, and deposit of voucher specimens in scientific collections.In addition to increasing the number of localities L. aurita is known from, the record presented here represents the first confirmed one of the species in the Caatinga biome of Sergipe (Table 2).
In Sergipe, Donato et al. (2012) recorded the predation of L. aurita by a rainbow boa Epicrates cenchria (Linnaeus 1758), in the Pedra Branca Cave (10º46'11" S, 37º47'19" W), located in the village of Pedra Branca, municipality of Laranjeiras.Although no voucher specimens of L. aurita from this cave have been deposited in any scientific collection.This cave, registered by the Brazilian Speleology Society as SE-06, is located near a channel of the Sergipe River, in an area of mangrove forest within the intertidal zone with the Atlantic Forest biome (Almeida et al., 2006).
Lonchorhina aurita is classified as "Least Concern" by the IUCN due to its wide distribution and low population decline (Solari, 2015) and it is currently not included in the Brazilian Red List (Machado et al., 2008).Nevertheless, it was included in the seven most endangered bat species defined by the Official National List of Endangered Fauna of Brazil published by the Brazilian Environment Ministry (MMA) through federal ordinance number 444 on December 17 th , 2014.The record of the species reported here thus increases the number of endangered bat species found in Sergipe to three (Leal et al., 2013;Machado et al., 2008; Ordinance number 444/2014 -MMA).
Based on a revision of zoological collection data bases, specialized literature and scientific papers we founded records of L. aurita in more than 150 localities of 16 countries (Figure 1; Table 2).However, this species is relatively rarely in inventories and is poorly represented in scientific collections due to the inherent bias of sampling with mistnets set at ground level (Farias et al., 2006;Farias, 2012).Insectivorous bats are more capable of detecting the nets by echolocation, given the higher frequencies they use to detect their prey (Fleming et al., 1972).
In the specific case of L. aurita, Nelson (1965) found that the bat is not only able to detect mist-nets using its sonar, but may even perch on the net before returning to its roost, which may account for the few records of the species when using the mist-nets method.Solari (2015) mentions that this bat is an extremely agile flier and may stop and hover in front of a mist net or escape through small gaps.
Esbérard et al. (1997) suggested that setting mist-nets in the proximity of bodies of water increases the probability of capturing L. aurita, although this cannot be confirmed here, given that no other trapping methods were employed in the present study in Canindé do São Francisco, impeding any systematic comparison of methods.Among the currently available options that may contribute to the increase of distribution area of L. aurita, given its difficult of capture in fieldworks that use mist-nets (Solari, 2015), the use of ultrasonic detectors to identification and monitoring of echolocation signals has been reported as the most efficient.The use of this method has allowed for records of several insectivorous bat species traditionally considered rare and of restricted distribution (Kalko and Aguirre, 2006).
In general, the data on the occurrence of bat species in Sergipe are still incipient (Leal et al., 2013) and the bat fauna associated with cave environments is especially poorly known (Guimarães and Ferreira, 2014).Out of a total of 94 caves are known to exist in Sergipe (CANIE/CE-CAV, 2018), which can provide potential roosts for L. aurita, species known to be primarily cave-dwelling (Goodwin

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Geographic distribution of Lonchorhina aurita throughout North America, Central America and South America.Star: new record from the Sergipe, Northeast Brazil.Black circles: previous records.The numbers correspond to the records as indicated in the Table 2.

Table 1 .
Update of the distribution of Lonchorhina aurita (Chiroptera), a vulnerable cave-dwelling bat in Brazil Selected measurements (mm) of the Lonchorhina aurita specimens from Caatinga of Northeastern Brazil and other localities in North America and South America.

Table 2 .
Neotropical Biology and ConservationUpdate of the distribution of Lonchorhina aurita (Chiroptera), a vulnerable cave-dwelling bat in Brazil Localities with records of Lonchorhina aurita throughout North America, Central America and South America.The numbers refer to the points shown in Figure1.

Table 2 .
Continuation.Neotropical Biology and ConservationUpdate of the distribution of Lonchorhina aurita (Chiroptera), a vulnerable cave-dwelling bat in Brazil