Hypsugo crassulus (Thomas, 1904)

New material

ZFMK 2008.0299, ♀, FC, 8 March 2008; ZFMK 2008.0030, ♂, WSV, 12 December 2008 .

Five specimens of this tiny vespertilionid were captured at Simandou, two at FC and three at WSV. One female from FC carried an embryo of 14 mm crown-rump length. In the consensus topology (Fig. 3) our specimens grouped with sequences labelled H. c. bellieri from Mount Nimba, Liberia, and H. eisentrauti from Côte d’Ivoire in Monadjem et al. (2013 b) but are now labelled H. crassulus (see Appendix for cross reference). Simmons (2005) considers bellieri to be a synonym of crassulus and she limits eisentrauti to the Cameroon highlands eastwards to Somalia, Kenya and Rwanda. Fahr (2013 d) discusses the species as Pipistrellus crassulus with specimens from seven localities in Guinea, Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire as belonging to the subspecies P. c. bellieri. We tentatively consider the entire Hypsugo clade shown in Fig. 3 as H. crassulus .

Conservation status

Least Concern (as Pipistrellus crassulus). Considered “widespread and not rare” but the population trend is unknown (IUCN, 2015).