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By Kevin Doyle

PHNOM PENH, (Reuters)

The world has lost its largest colony of bats living in a man-made structure.

They've been evicted -- to save centuries of Cambodian history.

Visitors to the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh will no longer see the dusk flight of more than two million bats from the roof of the National Museum like billows of smoke stretched across the orange setting sun.

The huge colony of wrinkle-lipped bats has been shut out of its old roost in the museum's roof, their home since April 1975 when the communist Khmer Rouge rebels emptied Phnom Penh of people at the start of their four-year reign of terror.

No one knows where the bats have gone, but the eviction ends a row between wildlife conservationists and curators of one of the finest collections of ancient Cambodian artefacts over their tenancy rights.

"The museum today is better -- no bad smell," says museum director Khun Samean. "Nowhere else in the world are there bats in a museum."

Debate has raged since the mid-1990s over the huge bat colony which deposited tonnes of nitrogen-rich droppings, or guano, each month inside the museum, attracting equally gigantic numbers of fleas, lice and cockroaches.

The inconvenience was only partly made up for by a modest profit earned from selling the smelly guano as fertilizer.

The museum recently introduced a very simple but very final solution. A wire mesh installed in the dead of night to keep the bats from returning home after their nightly search for food.

"The bad smell, the bad dust, the fleas. It was very difficult. They all helped to destroy visitors' health," Khun Samen said.

DRIPPING BAT EXCREMENT

Frenchman Bertrand Porte, supervisor of the museum's conservation workshop, said the rainy season turned the guano into a dripping flow of dark brown bat excrement resembling percolated coffee.

The guano would drip onto the ancient artefacts, permanently damaging many of them.

"When the droppings mixed with water and fell down onto the statues it was just awful," Porte said. "Many statues have marks of this and it is impossible to take out."

Conservationists planned to build a new concrete ceiling to stop the flowing guano. But the project -- which was both difficult and dangerous work in the French-colonial-era building -- was still no solution, said Porte.

"We would always have the smell and the parasites."

But conservationists say the bat eviction was an ecological tragedy for Cambodia, which recently ended decades of warfare.

"In a building, this was the largest colony in the world," said Joe Walston, a senior technical adviser with the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

"That was a thing unique for Cambodia, and Cambodia could do with records like this."

When Cambodia's national museum reopened following the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979 the bats were tolerated.

Unmolested in the museum's impressive high-peaked roofs they multiplied, and their dusk departures for nocturnal feeding became a tourist attraction.

But in the past month the long black cloud of swarming bats has been absent from Phnom Penh's skies.

DESTINATION A MYSTERY

No one knows where the bats went. Experts say they will likely die if deprived of a proper breeding ground.

"These bats require large roosts. They have colonial nurseries as they breed. They can't breed in small groups so... they are no longer a functioning, breeding population," Walston said.

"Effectively, it doesn't really matter whether they killed them there or they just evicted them," he said.

The demise of the colony -- which consisted of three species of wrinkled-lipped bats, one of which was considered rare -- may have environmental consequences for the city.

The bats ate tonnes of crop-destroying insects and mosquitoes. Their disappearance means large quantities of chemical pesticides may now be needed to do the job the bats had done naturally, wildlife experts said.

But museum director Khun Samean is unrepentant, saying bats should live in caves and not inside the country's foremost repository of ancient artefacts.

"If people would like to see bats please go to Battambang province. There are a lot of bat colonies there," he said.

Some museum staff, however, feel differently. Cleaner On Sito said he misses the extra money from collecting guano, and feels a little guilty.

"When I see a bat trying to sneak in to its old nest, I feel sorry," he said. "I miss them now. But we did have to clean the museum."

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