Evolutionary biogeography of a fruit-bat, Rousettus aegyptiacus, in the Mediterranean region (I. Horáček, P. Benda, P. Hulva, H. Jahelková, R. Lučan, + colleagues from Masaryk University and Institute of Scientific Instruments CAS in Brno + students)

In geographic and genetic structure, the Mediterranean population of fruit bat, Rousettus aegyptiacus, an only offshot of the family Pteropodidae beyond tropes, markedly differs from all other bats of that region. The project is intended to explain the background factors of these specificities, history and life-history traits promoting colonization of the Mediterranean and maintenance of local populations and answer which aspects of the climatic and environmental history of the region affected it essentially. The project combines methods of fine-grain molecular phylogeography and a long-term field study of the biology of the model species in several geographically distant model subpopulations and is expected to provide a complex information on the Mediterranean fruit bat including estimates of its total abundance and a critical reexamination of its biogeographic specificities.