Fruit bat

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See also the band, Fruit Bats

iFruit bats

Large flying fox, Pteropus vampyrus

Scientific classification

Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Order:	Chiroptera
Suborder:	Megachiroptera Dobson, 1875
Family:	Pteropodidae Gray, 1821

Subfamilies

Macroglossinae
Pteropodinae

Fruit bats constitute the suborder Megachiroptera within the order Chiroptera (bats). They include the single family Pteropodidae.

While the microbats are distributed over all continents (excluding Antarctica), the fruit bats live only in the tropical regions of the Eastern Hemisphere: Asia, Africa and Oceania.

Not all fruit bats are large: the smallest species is 6 cm (2.4 inches) long and thus smaller than some microbats. The large Fruit bats are 40 cm (16 inches) long and have a wingspan of 150 cm (5 feet). These giants are almost 1 kg (more than 2 pounds) in weight. Most fruit bats have large eyes allowing them to orient visually in the twilight of dusk and inside caves.

The sense of smell is excellent in these creatures. In contrast to the microbats, the fruit bats do not, as a rule, use echolocation (with one exception, the Egyptian fruit bat Rousettus egyptiacus, which uses high-pitched clicks to navigate in caves).

Fox Island, Australia, is believed to be the largest colony of flying foxes on the continent

Fruit bats are frugivorous or nectarivorous, i.e., they eat fruits or lick nectar from flowers. Often the fruits are crushed, and only the fruit juice is consumed. The teeth are adapted to bite through hard fruit skins. Large fruit bats must land in order to eat fruit, while the smaller species are able to hover with flapping wings in front of a flower or fruit.

All fruit bats aid the distribution of plants (and, therefore, forests) by carrying the fruits with them and spitting the seeds out elsewhere. Nectar-feeding fruit bats actually pollinate visited plants. They have long tongues that are inserted deep into the flower. Pollen is then taken to the next blossom, which will thereby be pollinated. This relationship between plants and bats is called a form of mutualism known as chiropterophily. Examples are the baobabs of the genus Adansonia and the sausage tree (Kigelia).

Because of their large size and somewhat "spectral" appearance, fruit bats are sometimes used in horror movies to represent vampires or to otherwise lend an aura of spookiness. In reality, as noted above, the bats of this group are purely herbivorous and pose no direct threat to human beings.

[edit] Classification

Livingstone’s Fruit Bat Pteropus livingstonii

In the 1980s and 1990s, some researchers proposed (based primarily on the similarity of the visual pathways) that the Megachiroptera were in fact more closely affiliated with the primates than the Microchiroptera, with the two groups of bats having therefore evolved flight via convergence. However, a recent flurry of genetic studies strongly support the more longstanding notion that both groups are indeed members of the same clade, the Chiroptera. In fact, some of this evidence, though as yet unresolved, seems to suggest that certain families of microbats (the Rhinolophidae, Rhinopomatidae and Megadermatidae) are evolutionarily closer to the megabats than to other microbats.