Bats in a bamboo
This short note by H. N. Ridley documents the discovery of a colony of Tylonycteris pachypus bats sheltering inside a single joint of dead bamboo (Dendrocalamus pendulus) in the Botanical Gardens, Singapore.
Summary
Ridley describes how a coolie splitting a bamboo culm in May 1908 discovered bats within a joint, which was brought to him tied up. Upon careful opening at the museum, he and Dr. Hanitsch found twenty-three bats—four adult females and nineteen young, one of which was still suckling (p. 103). The joint was only a foot long with a two-inch internal diameter, and the sole entrance was a triangular crack a quarter of an inch wide in the upper septum. The interior was wet and dark, with some dipterous larvae present. A second clump of the same bamboo yielded two additional joints containing young bats of the same species; in one, all bats (approximately thirty) were dead and decomposed after the culm had been left in the sun for several days (p. 103). Specimens were sent to the British Museum, where Oldfield Thomas identified them as Tylonycteris pachypus and noted that the species’ exceedingly flattened skull accounts for its ability to pass through such a narrow crack, adding that he had never heard of specimens found in such a location before (p. 104).