Bats of Southern and Central Africa. Ara Monadjem
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Название: Bats of Southern and Central Africa
Автор: Ara Monadjem
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биология
isbn: 9781776145843
isbn:
Karl L. Koopman (1920–1997) was a mammalogist in the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), New York, where he worked studiously until the weekend of his death. His career began in 1948, developing into a focus on taxonomy and biogeography, especially bats. He joined the AMNH in 1961. His encyclopaedic knowledge of the diversity of the worlds' Chiroptera rivalled that of John Edwards Hill. Karls' contributions to knowledge of African Chiroptera include revisions of the taxonomy of the bats of Sudan (1975), Liberia and West Africa; these exemplify both a meticulous attention to the details, and a sweeping geographical perspective. A skilled debater on the subjects he held dear, Karl remains fondly acknowledged as the mentor of an impressive alumni of postgraduate students (Griffiths 1998).
J. A. J. ‘Waldo’ Meester (1931–1994) devoted his life to the study of African small mammals, specialising in the taxonomy of shrews and golden moles. He is best known for his two definitive works: The Mammals of Africa: An Identification Manual (Meester and Setzer 1971) and Classification of Southern African Mammals (Meester et al. 1986). He served as Curator of Mammals at the Transvaal Museum (1952–1963), Director of the Kaffrarian (Amathole) Museum in King Williams' Town (1964) and Founder and Director of the Mammal Research Institute at the University of Pretoria (1966–1971). As Board Member of the Durban Natural Science Museum, he campaigned for the creation of a Mammalogy position there and donated his entire library to the museum.
Randolph L. Peterson (1920–1998) curated the Mammal Section at the ROM from 1946 until retirement in 1985, continuing his research until his death; he assembled one of the worlds' significant collections of African bats. His work on bats was the joy of his professional life, and under his curation the collection of bats at the ROM grew into one of the worlds' finest, both in size (over 35,000 specimens) and global representation (Eger and Mitchell 1990). His thorough studies of African free-tailed bats deserve to be singled out in providing an invaluable contribution to our knowledge of this poorly known group.
Austin Roberts (1883–1948) worked at the Transvaal Museum, Pretoria, from 1910 to 1946. He was a superb field naturalist and perceptive vertebrate taxonomist. Alongside his well-known pioneering research on the southern African avifauna, Roberts described a total of 406 taxa of mammals as new to science; these included 15 subspecies and eight species amongst a total of 29 Chiropteran taxa (Brain 1998).
Donovan Reginald Rosevear (1900–1986) pioneered the development of the forestry industry in Nigeria from 1924 to 1954. His enthusiastic studies of the West African fauna included significant collections of mammals. After his formal retirement, he completed three monographs on West African mammals over the subsequent 20 years in research at the British Museum (Keay 1986). These included a significant, lasting contribution in The Bats of West Africa (Rosevear 1965).
Reay Henry Noble Smithers (1907–1987), naturalist, falconer, editor, conservationist and mammalogist (among many professions), began his career as a chemist until joining the South African Museum in 1933; he transferred to the fledgling organisation of the then Museums of Southern Rhodesia in 1947. Besides his founding of four major museums in Zimbabwe, Reay both undertook and facilitated comprehensive natural history surveys across south-central Africa, notably of the mammals of Botswana (Smithers 1971). Among many selfless contributions were lasting inputs into conservation, notably to pioneering legislation of the National Parks and Wildlife Act of Zimbabwe. Perhaps the greatest monument to his legendary excellence in museology and commitment to science resides in the largest collection of mammals in the southern hemisphere at Bulawayos' Natural History Museum. His magnum opus, the Mammals of the Southern African Subregion (Smithers 1983), collated a wealth of his original data on the regions' mammal fauna, including bats (Raath 1988).
Michael Rogers Oldfield Thomas (1858–1929) devoted virtually all his lifes' attentions to the mammal collection at the British Museum (Natural History) – from 1878 until after his official retirement in 1924. In this period the collection grew exponentially through at least 1 million specimen accessions. His lifes' total of 1,090 scientific publications included the scientific descriptions of some 2,090 new taxa of mammals from across the world; Thomas named many Afrotropical bats (Hill 1990). This immense taxonomic legacy endures, alongside the mammal collection in the British Museum, as a significant foundation of scientific knowledge in the twenty-first century. This portrait (circa 1914) was painted by John Ernest Breun.
THE VALUE OF SPECIMENS
Many of the known bat records – vouched for by preserved specimens of bats – have been published. For example, the first article devoted exclusively to the bats of Zimbabwe (Harrison 1959) summarised new material added to the museum collections of the country. In the main, these older articles were published in museum journals that are relatively hard to obtain, or the data reside in monographs long out of print (e.g. Ansell 1978, Smithers and Wilson 1979). Existing taxonomic uncertainties often undermine the credibility of these historical data, but fortunately, nearly all the originally reported specimens still exist – in museum collections. Continued preservation of each specimen maintains a node of original data, whose persistence over time acts to anchor the interconnecting web of knowledge. By remaining available for independent re-examinations, each of these specimens maintains the veracity of scientific knowledge. An excellent example is the recent revision of Afrotropical slit-faced bats, Nycteris, using specimens (Demos et al. 2019a). The value of natural history collections preserved in museums increases with time, but they are regrettably too often neglected, even within the biological community (Cotterill 1995a, 1999, 2002c, 2016, Cotterill and Foissner 2010, Gippoliti 2018).
The loss of any one of these specimens, let alone an entire collection, has severe consequences. A pertinent example is the fire that destroyed a wealth of unique zoological specimens at the Museu Bocage, Lisbon, in March 1978. Its depredations on scientific knowledge included the destruction of all the type material of the Chiroptera described by J. V. Barboza du Bocage and A. F. de Seabra from Angola (see Palmeirim et al. 1979, Bergmans 1990). In this book we repeatedly refer to the problems these losses will continue to cause in bat taxonomy for many taxa.
These specimens are the fundamental sources of scientific data to support efforts to conserve biodiversity, as explicitly recognised by the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity. The distribution maps in this book are based entirely on museum specimens representing 6,344 unique locality-species records (Figure 11), 73% of which СКАЧАТЬ