Japanese long-eared bat
The Japanese long-eared bat is a species of vesper bat endemic to Japan, where it is found in Hokkaido, Honshu and Shikoku. It has distinctive, long ears, hence its Japanese name, the 'rabbit bat'. Formerly included as a subspecies of the European bat Plecotus auritus, genetic studies now indicate Plecotus sacrimontis is a separate species.
Taxonomy and etymology
It was described as a new species in 1908 by American zoologist Glover Morrill Allen. The holotype had been collected in December 1906 by Alan Owston on Mount Fuji. Allen received the specimen from Thomas Barbour. Allen noted that it resembled the brown long-eared bat, Plecotus auritus. Its species name "sacrimontis" is from Latin sacer meaning "sacred" and mons meaning "mountain."In 1929, Nikolay Alekseyevich Bobrinski published that he considered P. sacrimontis as a synonym of P. auritus.
In 1938, Allen himself expressed doubts about P. sacrimontis as a species, saying "Bobrinski...is very likely right in believing the name a synonym of P. auritus." In 1942, George Henry Hamilton Tate published that he considered P. sacrimontis as a subspecies of P. auritus, with a trinomen of P. auritus sacrimontis. This was largely maintained until 2006, when Spitzenberger et al. revised the genus Plecotus. They found that P. sacrimontis had a high genetic distance from other Plecotus species, and thus determined that it should be considered a full species rather than a subspecies of P. auritus.