Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T02:43:34.809Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Diversity of Malaysian insectivorous bat assemblages revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2014

Lee-Sim Lim ,
Adura Mohd-Adnan ,
Akbar Zubaid ,
Matthew J. Struebig  and
Stephen J. Rossiter
Lee-Sim Lim
Affiliation:
School of Distance Education, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800, Penang, Malaysia School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK
Adura Mohd-Adnan
Affiliation:
Faculty of Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia
Akbar Zubaid
Affiliation:
Faculty of Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia
Matthew J. Struebig*
Affiliation:
Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NR, UK
Stephen J. Rossiter
Affiliation:
School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK
*
1Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

To what extent tropical forest persisted in the Malay-Thai Peninsula during the Last Glacial Maximum, or contracted southwards with subsequent post-glacial expansion, has long been debated. These competing scenarios might be expected to have left contrasting broad spatial patterns of diversity of forest-dependent taxa. To test for a post-glacial northward spread of forest, we examined latitudinal clines of forest-dependent bat species at 15 forest sites across Peninsular Malaysia. From captures of 3776 insectivorous forest bats, we found that low richness characterized the north of the study area: predicted richness of 9–16 species, compared with 21–23 in the south. Predicted species richness decreased significantly with increasing latitude, but showed no relationship with either seasonality or peninsula width. Analyses of beta-diversity showed that differences between communities were not related to geographical distance, although there was evidence of greater differences in species numbers between the most distant sites. Assemblages were consistently dominated by six cave-roosting species from the families Rhinolophidae and Hipposideridae, while another 16 species were consistently rare. We suggest that these observed patterns are consistent with the hypothesized northward expansion of tropical rain forest since the Last Glacial Maximum, but emphasize that more surveys in the extreme north and south of the peninsula are required to support this assertion.

Keywords

alpha diversitybeta diversityChiropteracommunity structurePalaeotropicsSouth-East Asiaspecies richnesstropical forest
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Tropical Ecology , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , March 2014 , pp. 111 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

LITERATURE CITED

ALDRIDGE, H. D. J. N. & RAUTENBACH, I. L. 1987. Morphology, echolocation and resource partitioning in insectivorous bats. Journal of Animal Ecology 56:763–778.Google Scholar
BECK, J., KITCHING, I. J. & HAXAIRE, J. 2007. The latitudinal distribution of sphingid species richness in continental Southeast Asia: what causes the biodiversity “hot spot” in northern Thailand? The Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 55:179–185.Google Scholar
BLACKBURN, T. M. & GASTON, K. J. 1996. Spatial patterns in the species richness of birds in the New World. Ecography 19:369–376.Google Scholar
BROOK, B. W., SODHI, N. S. & NG, P. K. L. 2003. Catastrophic extinctions follow deforestation in Singapore. Nature 424:420–426.Google Scholar
CANNON, C. H., MORLEY, R. J. & BUSHE, A. B. G. 2009. The current refugial rainforests of Sundaland are unrepresentative of their biogeographic past and highly vulnerable to disturbance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 106:11188–11193.Google Scholar
CHAO, A., CHAZDON, R. L., COLWELL, R. K. & SHEN, T.-J. 2005. A new statistical approach for assessing compositional similarity based on incidence and abundance data. Ecology Letters 8:148–159.Google Scholar
CHAO, A., JOST, L., CHIANG, S. C., JIANG, Y.-H. & CHAZDON, R. A. 2008. Two-stage probabilistic approach to multiple-community similarity indices. Biometrics 64:1178–1186.Google Scholar
CLARKE, K. R. 1993. Non-parametric multivariate analyses of changes in community structure. Australian Journal of Ecology 18: 117–143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
COLWELL, R. K., MAO, C. X. & CHANG, J. 2004. Interpolating, extrapolating, and comparing incidence-based species accumulation curves. Ecology 85:2717–2727.Google Scholar
CORLETT, R. T. 2009. The ecology of tropical East Asia. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 274 pp.Google Scholar
FAHR, J. & KALKO, E. K. V. 2011. Biome transitions as centres of diversity: habitat heterogeneity and diversity patterns of West African bat assemblages across spatial scales. Ecography 34:177–195.Google Scholar
FITZHERBERT, E., STRUEBIG, M., MOREL, A., DANIELSEN, F., BRUHL, C., DONALD, P. & PHALAN, B. 2008. How will oil palm expansion affect biodiversity? Trends in Ecology and Evolution 23:538–545.Google Scholar
FRANCIS, C. M. 1990. Trophic structure of bat communities in the understorey of lowland dipterocarp rain forest in Malaysia. Journal of Tropical Ecology 6:421–431.Google Scholar
FRANCIS, C. M. 2008. A field guide to the mammals of South-east Asia. New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd, London. 392 pp.Google Scholar
GATHORNE-HARDY, F. J., SYAUKANI, DAVIES, R. G., EGGLETON, P. & JONES, D. T. 2002. Quaternary rainforest refugia in south-east Asia: using termites (Isoptera) as indicators. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 75:453–466.Google Scholar
HELLER, K.-G. & VOLLETH, M. 1995. Community structure and evolution of insectivorous bats in the Paleotropics and Neotropics. Journal of Tropical Ecology 11:429–442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HIJMANS, R. J., CAMERON, S. E., PARRA, J. L., JONES, P. G. & JARVIS, A. 2005. Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas. International Journal of Climatology 25:1965–1978.Google Scholar
HUGHES, A. C., SATASOOK, C., BATES, P. J. J., BUMRUNGSRI, S. & JONES, G. 2011. Explaining the causes of the zoogeographic transition around the Isthmus of Kra: using bats as a case study. Journal of Biogeography 38:2362–2372.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HUGHES, J. B., ROUND, P. D. & WOODRUFF, D. S. 2003. The Indochinese–Sundaic faunal transition at the Isthmus of Kra: an analysis of resident forest bird species distributions. Journal of Biogeography 30:569–580.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
KINGSTON, T. 2009. Analysis of species diversity of bat assemblages. Pp. 195–206 in Kunz, T. H. & Parsons, S. (eds.). Ecological and behavioral methods for the study of bats. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.Google Scholar
KINGSTON, T. 2010. Research priorities for bat conservation in Southeast Asia: a consensus approach. Biodiversity and Conservation 19:471–484.Google Scholar
KINGSTON, T., FRANCIS, C. M., ZUBAID, AKBAR & KUNZ, T. H. 2003. Species richness in an insectivorous bat assemblage from Malaysia. Journal of Tropical Ecology 19:67–79.Google Scholar
KINGSTON, T., LIM, B. L. & ZUBAID, AKBAR. 2006. Bats of Krau Wildlife Reserve. Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi. 148 pp.Google Scholar
MAO, C. X., COLWELL, R. K. & CHANG, J. 2005. Estimating species accumulation curves using mixtures. Biometrics 61:433–441.Google Scholar
MCCOY, E. D. & CONNOR, E. F. 1980. Latitudinal gradients in the species diversity of North American Mammals. Evolution 34:193–203.Google Scholar
MORLEY, R. J. 2000. Origin and evolution of tropical rain forests. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester. 378 pp.Google Scholar
MURRAY, S. W., CAMPBELL, P., KINGSTON, T., ZUBAID, A., FRANCIS, C. M. & KUNZ, T. H. 2012. Molecular phylogeny of hipposiderid bats from Southeast Asia and evidence of cryptic diversity. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 62:597–611.Google Scholar
PEAKALL, R. & SMOUSE, P. E. 2006. GENALEX 6: genetic analysis in Excel. Population genetic software for teaching and research. Molecular Ecology Notes 6:288–295Google Scholar
SATHIAMURTHY, E. & VORIS, H. K. 2006. Maps of Holocene sea level transgression and submerged lakes on the Sunda Shelf. The Natural History Journal of Chulalongkorn University 2:1–44.Google Scholar
SHEN, T. J., CHAO, A. & LIN, J. F. 2003. Predicting the number of new species in further taxonomic sampling. Ecology 84:798–804.Google Scholar
SIMMONS, N. B. 2005. Order Chiroptera. Pp. 312–529 in Wilson, D. E. & Reeder, D. M. (eds.). Mammal species of the World: a taxonomic and geographic reference. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.Google Scholar
SIMPSON, E. H. 1949. Measurement of diversity. Nature 163:688.Google Scholar
SODHI, N. S., KOH, L. P., BROOK, B. W. & NG, P. K. L. 2004. Southeast Asian biodiversity: an impending disaster. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 19:654–660.Google Scholar
STEVENS, R. D. 2013. Gradients of bat diversity in Atlantic forest of South America: environmental seasonality, sampling effort and spatial autocorrelation. Biotropica 45:764–770.Google Scholar
STEVENS, R. D. & WILLIG, M. R. 2002. Geographical ecology at the community level: perspectives on the diversity of new world bats. Ecology 83:545–560.Google Scholar
STOCKWELL, E. F. 2001. Morphology and flight manoeuvrability in New World leaf-nosed bats (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae). Journal of Zoology 254:505–514.Google Scholar
STOUT, J. & VANDERMEER, J. 1975. Comparison of species richness for stream-inhabiting insects in tropical and mid-latitude streams. American Naturalist 109:263–280.Google Scholar
STRUEBIG, M. J., KINGSTON, T., AKBAR, ZUBAID, MOHD-ADNAN, ADURA & ROSSITER, S. J. 2008. Conservation value of forest fragments to Palaeotropical bats. Biological Conservation 141:2112–2126.Google Scholar
STRUEBIG, M. J., KINGSTON, T., ZUBAID, A., LE COMBER, S. C., MOHD-ADNAN, A., TURNER, A., KELLY, J., BOZEK, M. & ROSSITER, S. J. 2009. Conservation importance of limestone karst outcrops for Palaeotropical bats in a fragmented landscape. Biological Conservation 142:2089–2096.Google Scholar
STRUEBIG, M. J., KINGSTON, T., PETIT, E. J., LE COMBER, S. C., ZUBAID, A., MOHD-ADNAN, A. & ROSSITER, S. J. 2011. Parallel declines in species and genetic diversity in tropical forest fragments. Ecology Letters 14:582–590.Google Scholar
STRUEBIG, M., BOŻEK, M., HILDEBRAND, J., ROSSITER, S. & LANE, D. W. 2012. Bat diversity in the lowland forests of the Heart of Borneo. Biodiversity and Conservation 21:3711–3727.Google Scholar
STRUEBIG, M. J., TURNER, A., GILES, E., LASMANA, F., TOLLINGTON, S., BERNARD, H. & BELL, D. 2013. Quantifying the biodiversity value of repeatedly logged rainforests: gradient and comparative approaches from Borneo. Advances in Ecological Research 48:183–224.Google Scholar
VINCENT, J. R. & YUSUF, HADI. 1993. Malaysia. Pp. 702 in Committee on Sustainable Agriculture and the Environment in the Humid Tropics (ed.). Sustainable agriculture and the environment in the humid tropics. National Academy Press, Washington, DC. 720 pp.Google Scholar
VORIS, H. K. 2000. Maps of Pleistocene sea levels in Southeast Asia: shorelines, river systems and time durations. Journal of Biogeography 27:1153–1167.Google Scholar
WHITTAKER, R. H. 1972. Evolution and measurement of species diversity. Taxon 21:213–251.Google Scholar
WIKRAMANAYAKE, E. D., DINERSTEIN, E., LOUCKS, C. J., OLSON, D. M., MORRISON, J., LAMOREAUX, J., MCKNIGHT, M. & HEDAO, P. 2002. Terrestrial ecoregions of the Indo-Pacific: a conservation assessment. Island Press, Washington, DC. 824 pp.Google Scholar
WOODRUFF, D. S. 2003. Neogene marine transgressions, palaeogeography and biogeographic transitions on the Thai–Malay Peninsula. Journal of Biogeography 30:551–567.Google Scholar
WOODRUFF, D. S. & TURNER, L. M. 2009. The Indochinese-Sundaic zoogeographic transition: a description and analysis of terrestrial mammal species distributions. Journal of Biogeography 36:803–821.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
WURSTER, C. M., BIRD, M. I., BULL, I. D., CREED, F., BRYANT, C., DUNGAIT, J. A. J. & PAZ, V. 2010. Forest contraction in north equatorial Southeast Asia during the Last Glacial Period. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 107:15508–15511.Google Scholar