24 AMERICAN MUSEUM NOVITATES NO. 3963 
lected in 1968 on the Great Abbai Expedition in Ethiopia, where it was captured over the Blue 
Nile about 1 m above the water (Hill and Morris, 1971). The surrounding habitat was mostly 
maize fields and thick brush (Hill and Morris, 1971). The Nigerian specimen of M. morrisi was 
captured by mistnet in the Sudan savannah in a region of short grass and acacia bush, with 
some silk cotton trees, near the River Benue (Hill et al., 1988). Nothing is known about the 
roosting habits of this species. 
FORAGING HABITS: Three ecomorphs of Myotis are generally recognized; aerial netters (also 
called aerial hawkers), gleaners, and trawlers (Findley, 1972; Koopman, 1994; Ruedi and Mayer, 
2001; Morales et al., 2019). Each of these is characterized by a suite of phenotypic traits involv- 
ing ear length, skull shape, wing length and width, leg and foot length, and attachment site of 
the posterior plagiopatagium (Morales et al., 2019), Morales et al. (2019) used these traits to 
determine the ecomorph class for over 90 Myotis species, and they classified the majority of 
Chrysopteron species as gleaners including Myotis welwitschii, M. tricolor, M. rufoniger, M. 
formosus, M. emarginatus, and M. goudoti, Myotis scotti was classified as an aerial netter, and 
M. bocagii as a trawler (Morales et al., 2019). Given the morphological similarity of Myotis 
nimbaensis to M. welwitschii, M. tricolor, M. rufoniger, and M, formosus, we might expect that 
M. nimbaensis is also a gleaner. However, the usefulness of these categorizations for Chrysop- 
teron species remains to be determined. Stoftberg and Jacobs (2004) tested the abilities of cap- 
tive Myotis tricolor to catch prey presented in a variety of ways, and they found that while this 
species easily captured aerial prey, it did not glean. Those authors noted that M. tricolor has 
more pointed wings than many bats known to glean, and also varies from known gleaners in 
the genus Myotis (e.g., M. lucifugus and M. septentrionalis) in using short bandwidth echoloca- 
tion calls that typically lack harmonics. In contrast, M. septentrionalis consistently produces 
two harmonics in addition to the dominant one, and M. lucifugus produces one harmonic in 
addition to the dominant harmonic (Stoffberg and Jacobs, 2004) effectively making the band- 
width of their calls even broader. While we did not detect any harmonics in the release calls 
of M. nimbaensis, we found that it produced broader bandwidth calls than those of Myotis 
tricolor. Although its relatively long call duration may suggest M. nimbaensis is not specialized 
for gleaning, it is similar to that of Myotis lucifugus, which is both an aerial hunter and gleaner 
(Ratcliffe and Dawson 2003). 
Details of foraging habits and diet of African Chrysopteron are poorly known. Nothing is 
known of the diet of M. morrisi, and a description of M. welwitschii feeding on small beetles 
is based on fecal pellets from a single individual (Moratelli, 2019). Captive individuals appar- 
ently prefer soft-shelled insects (Happold and Happold, 2013). Myotis welwitschii has been 
observed entering houses at night while foraging (Skinner and Smithers, 1990; Taylor, 1998) 

FIGURE 10, Maximum likelihood phylogenetic reconstruction of subgenus Chrysopteron using an alignment 
of 634 base pairs of mitochondrial gene cytochrome b, Colored circles at nodes represent support values as 
bootstrap percentage from maximum likelihood analyses. Support values lower than 50% at shallow nodes 
are not shown, Tip labels indicate GenBank accession number and locality, Myotis tricolor 1, 2, and 3 and M. 
welwitschii 1 and 2 are labeled following Patterson et al. (2019). 
