ARPHA Preprints, doi: 10.3897/arphapreprints.e142564
First record of leucism in the Spix’s Disc-winged Bat Thyroptera tricolor (Chiroptera: Thyropteridae) in Belize
expand article infoVanessa Irene Martin‡, Vanessa L Kilburn‡, Mathieu Charette‡, Bruce W Miller§
‡ Toucan Ridge Ecology and Education Society, Middlesex, Belize§ Neotropical bat acoustic assessments, Canadian Lakes, United States of America

Corresponding author: Vanessa Martin ( martinvanessa18@gmail.com )

© Vanessa Martin, Vanessa L Kilburn, Mathieu Charette, Bruce W Miller.
This is an open access preprint distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation: Martin V, Kilburn VL, Charette M, Miller BW (2024) First record of leucism in the Spix’s Disc-winged Bat Thyroptera tricolor (Chiroptera: Thyropteridae) in Belize. ARPHA Preprints. https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e142564
Open Access
Abstract

Although chromatic disorders are widely reported in the animal kingdom, few reports of true leucism have been published in Neotropical bats. In this note we report our observations of a leucistic Thyroptera tricolor Spix (Spix’s Disc-winged Bat) in the Maya Mountains of the Stann Creek District of Belize. Observations made between March 2023 and April 2024 at the Toucan Ridge Ecology and Education Society (T.R.E.E.S) research station recorded a group of Thyroptera tricolor with one leucistic male identified on three separate occasions. Our observations are the first documented account of leucism for this species and the Thyropteridae family.

Keywords
Leucism, Chromatic disorders, Bats, Neotropics, Thyroptera tricolor, albinism