Mouse-eared bat


The mouse-eared bats are a diverse and widespread genus of bats within the family Vespertilionidae.

Relationships

Myotis has historically been included in the subfamily Vespertilioninae, but was classified in its own subfamily, Myotinae, by Nancy Simmons in 1998. In her 2005 classification in Mammal Species of the World, Simmons listed the genera Cistugo and Lasionycteris in the Myotinae in addition to Myotis itself. However, molecular data indicate that Cistugo is distantly related to all other Vespertilionidae, so it was reclassified into its own family, the Cistugidae, and that Lasionycteris belongs in the Vespertilioninae. The genus Submyotodon has since been added to the subfamily, making it and Myotis its only members.

Appearance and behavior

Their ears are normally longer than they are wide, with a long and lance-shaped tragus, hence their English and zoological names. The species within this genus vary in size from very large to very small for vesper bats, with a single pair of mammary glands.
Mouse-eared bats are generally insectivores. M. vivesi, and several members of the trawling bat ecomorph Leuconoe, have relatively large feet with long toes, and take small fish from the water surface.

Longevity

Myotis species are remarkably long-lived for their size; in 2018, researchers revealed that a longitudinal study appears to indicate that Myotis telomeres do not shrink with age, and that telomerase does not appear to be present in the Myotis metabolism.

Species

Traditionally, Myotis has been divided into three large subgenera—Leuconoe, Myotis, and Selysius. However, molecular data indicate that these subgenera are not natural groups, but instead unnatural assemblages of convergently similar species. Instead, Myotis species largely fall in two main clades, one containing Old World and the other New World species. However, the Asian species Myotis latirostris falls outside the clade formed by these main groups, and may represent a separate genus, and the Eurasian Myotis brandtii is related to New World species.
Myotis is a highly species-rich genus, and the classification of many species remains unsettled. In the below list, all differences in taxonomy from the 2005 third edition of Mammal Species of the World are indicated in footnotes.