Hunted for food Claude Balcaen/FLPA

Flying foxes are in deep trouble. Almost half the species of this type of fruit bat are now threatened with extinction.

The bats face a variety of threats, including deforestation and invasive species, but the main one is hunting by humans, says Christian Vincenot, an ecological modeller at Kyoto University in Japan, who highlights their plight in a perspective article in Science this week.

The bats are hunted for food, for their supposed medicinal properties and for sport. They are also killed by farmers to protect fruit crops. Around half of the 90,000 bats on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius have been killed in a government-sponsored cull in the past two years alone.


The threats are particularly severe for those species that live on islands scattered across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which is most of them – 53 of the 65 species of flying fox are island-dwellers. “Islands exacerbate all these issues, because there are fewer places for the animals to hide,” says Vincenot.

But it is also islands that have the most to lose if the bats are wiped out. On many islands, fruit bats are the only pollinators and seed dispersers, especially for fruits with large seeds, says Vincenot.

Cascade effect

If the bats are lost, it could have a cascading effect throughout the ecosystem and the economy. For example, the durian fruit, a multi-million dollar crop, is pollinated almost exclusively by fruit bats.

“The bats are a keystone species,” says Scott Heinrichs, founder of the Chicago-based Flying Fox Conservation Fund. “When you take them out, the ecosystem will eventually collapse.”

Vincenot is calling for island nations to recognise the importance of the bats, and provide them with legal protection – and properly enforce the laws that already exist – to save the bats from extinction.

Heinrichs says that recovery is possible. The flying foxes on Pemba Island in the Indian Ocean were reduced to just a few individuals in the 1980s, but the population recovered to more than 20,000 over the course of 20 years of conservation efforts.

But it won’t be easy. “There aren’t a lot of people out there who want to conserve them,” says Heinrichs.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aam7582

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