Steve Parish knows very well the delight of taking a nature photo that is a world first, and on Saturday 20 March he experienced that thrill again when he photographed a Golden-tipped Bat (Kerivoula papuensis) eating a spider in captivity. The male bat suffered injuries after flying into a ceiling fan while hunting on the veranda of a residence at Nobby Glen Road, Kandanga. Bat and spider enthusiast Rachel Lyons cared for the bat, which Steve Parish photographed eating a Garden Orb-weaver — the first close-up photo of a bat eating a spider.
“Spider consumption is generally regarded as being rare in bats and the notion that one species feeds almost exclusively on spiders was quite a revelation. As far as I know, a close-up photo or video of a bat eating a spider has never been taken,” commented esteemed mammalogist Les Hall, who accompanied Steve Parish on the photo shoot. “Certainly, with regards to the Golden-tipped Bat in Australia, it has never been photographed eating a spider.”
Research on the Golden-tipped Bat observed individuals having spider web on their fur and spider mouth parts attached to their ears and embedded in body fur, which led to the conclusion spiders were part of their diet. A detailed study by Martin Schulz in 2000 revealed that the Golden-tipped Bat was a spider specialist. The Garden Orb-weaver (Eriophora biapicata) was not the only spider on the bat’s menu. It also consumed a Golden Orb-weaver (Nephila ornata), Acroaspis tuberculifera and another unidentified orb-weaver species in the Araneidae family. The bat ate the abdomen and parts of the thorax, but rejected the head and legs.
The Golden-tipped Bat was discovered in Australia, on a cattle station southwest of Rockhampton, by Dr Carl Lumholtz in 1884, and sighted again near Cooktown in 1897. However, after 1897 the species almost disappeared. By the 1970s, the rare species was considered close to extinction, according to mammalogists David Ride and Harry Frith.
With the introduction of “new” bat traps in the 1960s, serious bat surveys were undertaken. Mistnets were used to capture species for scientific studies and with improved distribution data, Golden-tipped Bats were listed as rare. Golden-tipped bats are distributed along Australia’s east coast from Cape York Peninsula to southern New South Wales and are also found in Papua New Guinea and on the island of Biak in Indonesia. Visit http://www.steveparish.com.au/photography-enthusiasts for more photography news
