Brown long-eared bat

Brown Long-eared Bat
Conservation status
Least Concern (IUCN 3.1)
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Order:	Chiroptera
Suborder:	Microchiroptera
Family:	Vespertilionidae
Genus:	Plecotus
Species:	P. auritus
Binomial name
Plecotus auritus (Linnaeus, 1758)

"Long-eared bat" redirects here. For the American species sometimes known as Long-eared bat, see Long-eared Myotis.

The brown long-eared bat or common long-eared bat (Plecotus auritus) is a fairly large European bat. It has distinctive ears, long and with a distinctive fold. It is extremely similar to the much rarer grey long-eared bat which was only validated as a distinct species in the 1960s.

An adult brown long-eared bat has a body length of 4.5-4.8 cm, a tail of 4.1-4.6 cm, and a wing length of 4-4.2 cm. The ears are 3.3-3.9 cm in length, and readily distinguish this from most other bat species.

They are relatively slow flyers compared to other bat species.

Habitat

It is found in Europe. The UK distribution can be found on the National Biodiversity Network website and can be seen here.

This species appears to prefer caves as roosting sites, but roosts in trees holes, buildings and bat boxes as well. The roosts in trees may be close to the ground.

It hunts above woodland, often by day, and mostly for moths, gleaning insects from leaves and bark. This is one of the bats for which eyesight is more important than echolocation in finding prey (Stevens 2005).

Echolocation

Echolocation is used to find prey. The frequencies used by this bat species for echolocation lie between 27-56 kHz, have most energy at 45 kHz and have an average duration of 2.5 ms. ^[1][2]

Gallery

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  Drawing by Ernst Haeckel

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  Detail of head

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  Woodcut from R. A. Sterndale, 1884

References

• Woodland Management For Bats Guide
• Chiroptera Specialist Group (1996). Plecotus auritus. 2006. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. IUCN 2006. www.iucnredlist.org. Retrieved on 12 May 2006.
• Stevens, Martin (2005): The role of eyespots as anti-predator mechanisms, principally demonstrated in the Lepidoptera. Biol. Rev. 80(4): 573–588. doi:10.1017/S1464793105006810 (HTML abstract)

1. ^ Parsons, S. and Jones, G. (2000) 'Acoustic identification of twelve species of echolocating bat by discriminant function analysis and artificial neural networks.' J Exp Biol., 203: 2641-2656.
2. ^ Obrist, M.K., Boesch, R. and Flückiger, P.F. (2004) 'Variability in echolocation call design of 26 Swiss bat species: Consequences, limits and options for automated field identification with a synergic pattern recognition approach.' Mammalia., 68 (4): 307-32.

External links

• ARKive Photographs