Ученые подтвердили присутствие в Европе летучей мыши, скрывавшейся от науки 200 лет

Low-flying microphones confirmed a “whispering” bat species European science had chased for nearly 200 years On a small volcanic island between Tunisia and Sicily, researchers stood in the dark and listened for a bat that European science had been chasing for centuries. The Egyptian slit-faced bat is common across Africa and the Middle East — yet every attempt to confirm its presence in Europe had come up empty. The reason it stayed hidden wasn’t scarcity. It was microphone height. A bat hiding in plain sight The Egyptian slit-faced bat (Nycteris thebaica) is no rare or fragile outlier. It thrives across Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and the Middle East — a wide, stable distribution that made its complete absence from Europe genuinely puzzling to zoologists. The puzzle wasn’t entirely new. Naturalists in 19th-century Sicily wrote about what appeared to be this species in regional literature, but those accounts were thin. They lacked preserved specimens, precise locality data, and the diagnostic descriptions that allow later scientists to verify a claim. Without that foundation, the records couldn’t be accepted — yet they couldn’t be dismissed either. That left the Egyptian slit-faced bat in a peculiar scientific limbo for nearly 200 years. The historical mentions were real enough to intrigue researchers, but too vague to act on. As lead author Danilo Russo explained, “For almost two centuries, we could neither confirm nor dismiss those records.” The species hovered at the edge of European zoology — present in the literature, absent from the maps. Why this bat is so hard to detect Part of what makes this story unusual is that the bat itself was never especially elusive in its home range. In Africa, it’s a well-documented species. In Europe, it was invisible — and that invisibility was largely a product of how researchers were looking. The Egyptian slit-faced bat is a microbat in the most literal sense. It weighs between 6.5 and 12 grams — roughly the weight of two nickels — and flies low and slow on broad wings, staying close to the ground as it hunts. Its echolocation is extraordinarily quiet: short, high-frequency calls so faint that the species has earned the nickname “the whispering bat.” That quietness connects directly to how it hunts. Rather than chasing prey through open air, it uses a technique called gleaning — listening passively to sounds generated by its prey, the rustle of a spider or the scrape of a scorpion, then snatching targets directly off surfaces. This strategy reduces how often it needs to echolocate, shrinking its acoustic footprint even further. Standard bat monitoring doesn’t account for any of this. Conventional surveys position microphones well above the ground, suited to species that fly higher and call louder. For the Egyptian slit-faced bat, that placement is systematically wrong — the calls are too faint, and the flight path too low, for equipment to register anything at all. The fix that changed everything Once researchers suspected the species might be present on Pantelleria, they adjusted their approach. The change was straightforward but consequential: microphones were moved to less than half a meter — about 18 inches — above the ground, and the sensitivity of the recording devices was increased. Results came quickly. The targeted survey captured multiple call sequences with the hallmarks of Nycteris thebaica: short, multi-harmonic, frequency-modulated echolocation calls matching the species’ known acoustic profile. Social vocalizations were recorded too, along with evidence of two bats flying together. That last detail mattered. As Mirjam Knörnschild from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin noted, “The presence of two bats flying together, along with social vocalizations, points to a small, previously undetected population on the island.” A lone wanderer could be dismissed as a fluke. Two bats behaving socially suggest something more established — a resident presence rather than an accident. Every call recorded during the survey was attributable to the Egyptian slit-faced bat. The first scientifically documented European presence of the species had been confirmed — not through a new discovery of the animal itself, but through a recalibration of how researchers listened for it. What Pantelleria reveals about animal movement Pantelleria is a volcanic island sitting in the Sicily Channel, roughly equidistant between Tunisia and the southwestern tip of Sicily. Its position makes it a natural corridor — a biological stepping stone where species moving between North Africa and Europe might pause, establish, or pass through. The discovery fits neatly into existing biogeographical thinking. During historical periods when sea levels were lower, the water gaps between North Africa and the islands of the Sicily Channel would have been narrower. For a slow-flying microbat that stays close to the ground, those shorter crossings may have been manageable — allowing the species to extend its range gradually northward, island by island, over generations. That framing also changes how researchers now read the 19th-century Sicilian records. Rather than treating them as errors or curiosities, the new findings suggest they may have been accurate observations of a population quietly present for a very long time — simply overlooked because the tools used to find it were pointed in the wrong direction. From historical mystery to conservation urgency The study, published in Global Ecology and Conservation, does something more than resolve an old question. It converts a historical footnote into an active scientific and conservation priority almost immediately. Confirming the species’ presence is only the beginning. Researchers now need to estimate the size of the Pantelleria population, locate its roosting sites — likely caves, hollow trees, or abandoned structures — and determine whether the bat also occurs on other islands in the Sicily Channel or on Sicily itself. Genetic analysis is planned to establish where the population originated and how closely it relates to African populations. Russo was direct about what the discovery means for next steps: “Our study turns a historical uncertainty into a conservation issue. While Nycteris thebaica has long persisted unnoticed on Pantelleria, we now need to determine the size of this population, identify its roosting sites, assess whether it also occurs elsewhere in Sicily or the Sicily Channel Islands, and determine how it should be protected.” The case isn’t closed — it’s newly opened. What comes next depends on how quickly researchers can move from confirmation to understanding, and from understanding to protection. A bat that hid for two centuries by flying low and whispering may not have much time left to remain unstudied. The complete findings are available here: Russo, D., Cistrone, L., Biddittu, A., & Knörnschild, M. (2026). A ghost from the past: acoustic evidence for the long-overlooked occurrence of the African bat Nycteris thebaica in Europe. Global Ecology and Conservation, e04377. Read the whole thing? Get the week's signal, not the noise Our sharpest reporting on energy, climate and nature — free, once a week.