Asian Particolored Bat

Fascinating facts about the Asian Particolored Bat

• An adult Asian parti-colored bat has a body length of 6–7 cm and a wing length of 5 cm.
• When Wilhelm Peters first described this creature in 1880, he named it Vesperus sinensis, borrowing the Latin word for China. The original name stuck until a 1997 taxonomic rule swap forced a return to Vespertilio sinensis. The change reminds us that scientific names are living records of history, not set in stone.
• Its fur is bicolored: dark, black-brown at the base and off-white at the tips.
• It was evaluated in 2019 as a least-concern species and is found across East Asia, from Taiwan to Siberia.

At a glance

About the Asian Particolored Bat

The Asian parti-colored bat (Vespertilio sinensis) is a diminutive aerial insectivore, its compact body measuring just 6–7 cm in length, tail 4.3–4.5 cm, and wings spanning about 5 cm. Its forearms are 43–55 mm long, and its hairs are bicolored, with the basal portions blackish brown and the distal portions off-white. It is distributed across East Asia, from Taiwan through eastern China, eastern Mongolia and Russia (Siberia) to the Korean Peninsula and Japan (Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu).

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