On the bat fauna of the Bahrain Archipelago (Chiroptera).

Only thirteen records of four bat species belonging to three families have been known from the Bahrain Archipelago until now, Asellia tridens, Taphozous nudiventris, Pipistrellus kuhlii, and Vansonia rueppellii. Here the results of a short-time systematic survey of bats in Bahrain are presented. During an acoustic survey (15 bat detector sessions, ca. 190 km of car transects, ca. 17 hours of recordings in total), 456 bat call sequences were recorded that contained 12,051 particular bat call pulses. A majority of the recorded calls was represented by the calls of Pipistrellus kuhlii (96.1%), followed by Rhyneptesicus nasutus (3.5%), Otonycteris hemprichii (0.06%), and Taphozous nudiventris (0.01%). Combining the new and published data, 63 records (species / site) of five bat species are currently available from the Kingdom of Bahrain. While the occurrence of two species was confirmed (Taphozous nudiventris - 3 records, Pipistrellus kuhlii - 46 records), two species were discovered newly in Bahrain (Otonycteris hemprichii - 1 record, Rhyneptesicus nasutus - 8 records), one species was not recorded by the recent survey although certainly present (Asellia tridens - 5 records), and one species was suggested to be deleted from the faunal list of the country (Vansonia rueppellii). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]