 Rodrigues Fruit Bat
Lifestyle:
Rodrigues fruit bats are crepuscular: they fly out to feed at dusk, and return to their roost trees at dawn. Like other fruit bats, the Rodrigues bat essentially drinks fruit juices. It crushes fruit in its wide mouth by pressing its tongue against its hard, ridged upper palate. It swallows the juices and the soft pulp, and spits out hard pulp, seeds, and skin, often in a neat bat-mouth-shaped pellet! In the wild, it eats guavas, mangoes, bananas, papaya, figs, and breadfruit, and appears particularly fond of ripe tamarind pods. Rodrigues bats will also eat flowers, nectar, pollen, and sometimes leaves or bark.
Male Rodrigues bats maintain a harem of up to 8 females. Harems often roost together in large colonies, or “camps,” in the upper forest canopy, probably for added protection from predators. Like other fruit bats, Rodrigues fruit bats help “plant” the rain forest, by dispersing the seeds of the fruits and plants they eat.
Range and Habitat:
The Rodrigues fruit bat is found only in the dense rain forests on the island of Rodrigues (part of Mauritius), off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Like many island species, these bats have suffered from human intrusion into their habitat that can cause them to become endangered.
Gestation and Offspring:
Gestation 140–150 days; 1 pup
Sexually mature females usually have 1 pup a year. The baby bat is born blind and naked, with underdeveloped wings. It nurses from its mothers teats, located under her armpits. The pup clings to the mother's fur even when she flies! Its milk teeth are sharply hooked so the baby is safely attached to its mother. Like other mammals, the milk teeth later fall out and are replaced by permanent teeth. Pups can fly on their own at about 3 or 4 months, and will remain near their mothers for about 1 year.
Size:
Wingspan of approximately 3 feet
Endangered Status:
Not currently endangered; in the 1970s fewer than 100 survived in the wild.
|
