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Flying Fox of the Southwest Pacific |
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Giant Fruit Bats |
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Visitors to Australia, Papua New Guinea, or other islands of the Southwest Pacific are sometimes shocked at the giant bat called “Flying Fox.” There’s no need to fear, however, for these are fruit bats, not vampire bats. Furry dog-faced mammals fly around the jungles at night, searching for fruit.
Flying Foxes sleep hanging upside down during daylight hours, sometimes on branches crowded with dozens of cousins and neighbors, chattering at each other.
In some areas of Northern Australia, fruit bats can be menacing, eats tons of fruit from orchards. Still, many Australians love these bats, despite their threat to the owners of fruit trees.
In some areas of Papua New Guinea, islanders consider this bat to be a delicacy: an ingredient of soup. But how do they catch Flying Foxes (called “black bocus” by those who speak the pidgin English language of Tok Pisin)? Native men and boys often climb trees to get coconuts, but a colony of fruit bats would never stay put during such a slow attack. One way natives catch Flying Foxes is with a slingshot. When a man with a slingshot is under a thick crowd of bats, the bat-density makes it more likely that one bat will be shot and become soup. |
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This Flying Fox fruit bat has a branch of its own: a prime location for a long day’s sleep. |
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For many years, reports of “pterodactyls” in Papua New Guinea were dismissed as misidentifications of Flying Fox fruit bats. Recent investigations on Umboi Island, however, bring to light an astonishing possibility: The creature called “ropen” does not hang upside down from a branch but holds itself upright on tree trunks. In addition, the ropen does not eat fruit but fish that it catches on reefs by using a bioluminescent glow as it flies at night, over the water. If that was not enough to contradict the fruit bat, the ropen has a long tail, almost have as long as its wingspan. Some reports indicate that there is something at the end of the tail that may correspond to the Rhamphorhynchoid tail flange. A living pterosaur? That would be astonishing. |
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