Australian Museum surveys of the vertebrate fauna of Coolah Tops National Park, NSW

Abstract

Coolah Tops, c. 360 km northwest of Sydney, at the western end of the Liverpool Range, in central western New South Wales, is a fertile basalt plateau that rises to over 1000 m, and so is cooler and wetter than the surrounding drier and hotter western slopes. It represents a western outlier of tall moist montane forest and may therefore have served as a mesic refuge during arid climatic cycles. Despite its high biodiversity and biogeographical interest, Coolah Tops National Park and the surrounding area was very poorly represented in natural history museum collections. This report details the results of two field trips that Australian Museum Research Institute (AMRI) vertebrate staff made to Coolah Tops in May and November 2018. During these surveys, 109 vertebrate species were recorded in the National Park. In total, 160 specimens and associated tissues of 39 species were added to Australian Museum collections. An additional 51 tissue samples from three bird and six mammal species, as well as 13 skeletal remains of six mammal species were also added. This field work has continued to document the vertebrate biodiversity of Coolah Tops National Park and has significantly increased the AM's holding of specimens and genetic samples from this biologically significant area of NSW. Some of this recently collected material has already been incorporated into several research projects and it will continue to be utilized by AMRI and other researchers for decades to come. Technical Reports of the Australian Museum Onlinea peer-reviewed open-access journal published by the Australian Museum, Sydney communicating knowledge derived from our collections ISSN 1835-4211 (online) * introduced species; ** listed threatened species; T = captured, S = sighted, C = call record, -= not sighted, no call recorded * donated to the Australian Museum by Michael Murphy, NPWS.

A new bat species from southwestern Western Australia, previously assigned to Gould’s Long-eared Bat Nyctophilus gouldi Tomes, 1858

“…The successful identification of some samples required extensive comparisons with bat reference samples held by the Australian Museum and vouchered specimen data from online databases (NCBI GenBank and BOLDSystems). During this work phylogenetic analysis of samples of N. gouldi from WA and eastern Australia were found not to be monophyletic and differed by a level of DNA sequence divergence greater than that found between some currently recognized microbat species (Eldridge et al, 2020).…”

“…This paper arose from efforts to use a DNA bar-coding approach to confirm species identifications of microbat specimens sampled during Australian Museum fieldwork (Eldridge et al, 2020). The successful identification of some samples required extensive comparisons with bat reference samples held by the Australian Museum and vouchered specimen data from online databases (NCBI GenBank and BOLDSystems).…”

Rediscovery of the long-eared bat genus Nyctophilus (Chiroptera: Vespertilionidae) in Timor and a reassessment of Nyctophilus timoriensis

“…daedalus Thomas, 1915a in some respects and that the latter taxon is a likely composite of at least two species. Eldridge et al (2020) demonstrated that multiple species are likely included under "N. geoffroyi" as currently understood; see also Parnaby et al (2021). They found species-level differences in average divergence of mitochondrial genes (cytochrome B and cytochrome oxidase 1) between samples from eastern NSW and those from the Pilbara and southwestern Western Australia.…”

“…Measurements of an extensive series of N. geoffroyi from throughout Australia indicates that Tasmanian animals average larger than those from mainland Australian. Tasmanian specimens are excluded from further consideration here, given that mainland Australian "N. geoffroyi" is a composite of at least two species (Eldridge et al, 2020) and the taxonomic status of Tasmanian populations has not been assessed. Our analyses treat N. geoffroyi as one entity because we did not identify any obvious geographic or morphological groupings in the morphometric data.…”

“…The taxonomic status of mainland Australian N. geoff royi is relevant to our assessment of the status of Timor Nyctophilus. Assigning current nomenclature to the two putative species within N. geoffroyi demonstrated by Eldridge et al (2020) will require further work because names cannot reliably be assigned solely from geography. Three subspecies of N. geoffroyi are often recognized based on Thomas (1915a) and Iredale & Troughton (1934), but their validity remains uncertain (Simmons, 2005) and their geographic limits poorly defined.…”