Fruit bat

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See also the band, Fruit Bats

Fruit 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 a single suborder, the Megachiroptera, within the order Chiroptera (i.e., bats). They include the solitary family Pteropodidae.

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

Not all so-called megabats are large: the smallest species is 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) long and thus smaller than some microbats. The largest reach 40 cm (16 inches) in length and attain a wingspan of 150 cm (5 feet), weighing in at nearly 1 kg (more than 2 pounds). Most fruit bats have large eyes, allowing them to orient visually in the twilight of dusk and inside caves and forests.

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 juices 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.^{[citation needed]}

Frugivorous bats aid the distribution of plants (and therefore, forests) by carrying the fruits with them and spitting the seeds or eliminating them elsewhere. Nectarivores actually pollinate visited plants. They bear long tongues that are inserted deep into the flower; pollen thereby passed to the bat is then transported to the next blossom visited, pollinating it. This relationship between plants and bats is a form of mutualism known as chiropterophily. Examples of plants benefitting from this arrangement include the baobabs of the genus Adansonia and the sausage tree (Kigelia).

1 Fruit bats in popular culture
2 Classification
- 2.1 List of genera
3 References

[edit] Fruit bats in popular culture

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 creatures and pose no direct threat to human beings, baby cows, nor children who are ill. In the book series Silverwing by Kenneth Oppel, a fruit bat named Java is one of the main characters in the final book of the series.

[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.^{[citation needed]} 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, suggest that certain families of microbats (possibly the horseshoe bats, mouse-tailed bats and the false vampires) are evolutionarily closer to the fruit bats than to other microbats.^[1]