Philippine bare-backed fruit bat

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The Philippine bare-backed fruit bat (Dobsonia chapmani) lives on Negros Island and Cebu Island in the Philippines. Like other bare-backed fruit bats, its wings met along the midline of their bodies, making it a very agile flier. It roosted in caves, in areas where a little light penetrated the gloom. It was so abundant that it left piles of guano, which were used by miners as fertiliser. By the mid-1980s, the lowland forest was replaced by sugar cane plantations and the bat vanished. In the early 1970s the species was declared extinct as none had been sighted since 1964 but the bat was rediscovered in 2000. The species now survives in very small numbers. The bat lives in caves but comes out at night to eat fruit from local rainforest. After the forests were cut down to make way for sugar plantations the bat population dropped drastically and the few remaining ones are still hunted for their meat. Now the bats reside in the few areas of forest left and if these are cut down the species is likely to go extinct. The forest where the bats live in Cebu is slightly protected in that it cannot be cut down but on Negros there are no conservation measures in place. Unless more is done about the situation the species is likely to be made extinct.