The research was conducted as part of the international IKI project, “One Health in Nature Conservation: Strengthening Landscape Resilience to Zoonotic Disease Emergence through Strengthening Conservation Systems in Central Asia.” The project is being implemented by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), with the support of the National Committee on Ecology and Climate Change of the Republic of Uzbekistan.
The Turkmen long-eared bat is a rare bat species whose distribution and lifestyle have remained poorly understood for a long time. In 1988, zoologist Pyotr Petrovich Strelkov described it as a subspecies of the grey long-eared bat (Plecotus austriacus). In 2006, Friederike Spitzenberger and her co-authors recognised the Turkmen long-eared bat as a distinct species based on morphological and genetic research.
Until recent studies, the latest record of this species in the wild dated back to 1970. No new encounters had been documented over the following 55 years, and information about the species was based primarily on museum specimens.
In autumn 2025, an international research team from Germany, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, led by the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (Berlin Natural History Museum), rediscovered the Turkmen long-eared bat in Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert. For the first time, researchers were able to obtain photographs and video footage of living individuals and record their acoustic signals. One of the bats was found in an area close to the border with Uzbekistan.
The discovery of the Turkmen long-eared bat on the Ustyurt Plateau provides the first evidence of the species’ presence in Uzbekistan’s fauna and marks a new milestone in the study of the country’s biodiversity. The finding not only expands scientific knowledge of the distribution of rare bats in Central Asia but also highlights the importance of continuing research in the country’s lesser-studied natural areas.