Saving Malayan flying foxes

11/10/2009

Jonathan Epstein with the Wildlife Trust releases a Malayan flying fox/Copyright © 2009 Wlldlife Trust

The Malayan flying fox (Pteropus vampyrus), doesn’t look like your ordinary bat. They eat fruit rather than insects, have large eyes, and a huge wing span of up to five feet across. Parents might know of the beloved children's book, Stellaluna, which features a flying fox, also known as fruit bat, as the main character. Or did you see the animated movie Ferngully? The character Batty Koda was also a flying fox. Megabats live throughout the “Old World” of Australia, Indonesia, and islands off of Africa, and unlike microbats, they don’t echolocate.

Because of their large size, people have overhunted fruit bats for food, and some have gone extinct or currently face extinction. That’s the case of the Malayan flying fox, the largest flying fox species, which is listed as near-threatened in the IUCN Red List. They live throughout Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Malaysia. Flying foxes play important ecological roles as seed dispersers of the fruit they eat, and in some cases they also pollinate flowers. Their decline would have repercussions throughout the ecosystems in which they live.

A new study led by Jonathan Epstein of the Wildlife Trust became the first to look at the effect of hunting on these giant bats in Malaysia. They monitored 33 roosting sites in peninsular Malaysia over three years, analyzed hunting license sales to figure out whether the bats were being sustainably harvested, or not, and outfitted Malayan flying foxes with satellite telemetry collars to see where they went. 

According to the findings over the past three years, some 87,800 bats were hunted between 2002 and 2005, and using conservative baseline population estimates of 100,000, 250,000 and 500,000 bats in Malaysia (the exact numbers remain unknown), they found that at any of those values, current hunting levels appear to be unsustainable and could cause the species to go extinct in peninsular Malaysia. On top of the officially reported numbers, farmers sometimes kill bats as pests, plus there’s some illegal hunting activity, and those values are not included in the stats.

Epstein and his colleagues fitted seven adult male bats with satellite telemetry collars, and their results showed - for the first time - that these enigmatic mammals fly long distances between neighboring nations.  Some individuals flew hundreds of miles, beyond peninsular Malaysia all the way to Thailand and Indonesia.

Epstein and his colleagues believe neighboring nations should work together to ensure the migratory animals get managed sustainably so the species does not decline and go extinct. Perhaps these animals should have an international treaty protecting them akin to the one protecting migratory birds. Epstein and his colleagues recommended a temporary ban on hunting in Malaysia to more closely assess the situation. Officials from the Malaysian Department of National Parks and Wildlife (PERHILITAN), who participated in the research, have decided to review current hunting policy due to the new study.

British naturalist and author Gerald Durrell, founded the Wildlife Trust in 1971. I remember reading Durrell’s hilarious books about wildlife when I first visited Australia in 1990 as a college student. The Trust now supports wildlife research around the world.

Comments

[bryant]

How big are fly fox bats??