Straw-colored Fruit Bat

About the straw-colored fruit bat

The straw-colored fruit bat is a large fruit bat and the most widely distributed of Africa's megabats, common across a range that stretches from the southwestern Arabian Peninsula through the forest and savanna zones of sub-Saharan Africa. Its name comes from the silky, yellowish-brown color of its fur; males tend toward bright orange while females run more yellowish, with black wings and pale, tawny backs. The bats have notably large cheeks, eyes, and ears, an oversized heart, and long wings tapered at the tip. Weighing 8 to 12 oz (230 to 340 g) and measuring 5.7 to 9 in (14 to 23 cm) in body length, males typically run larger than females, and their wingspan can reach 30 in (76 cm).

Behavior and diet

This is a deeply social species, living in colonies that typically number over 100,000 and sometimes approach a million individuals. Its most striking behavior is a seasonal migration: from October through the end of December each year, as many as 10 million straw-colored fruit bats converge on Kasanka National Park in Zambia, packing into a roughly 2-hectare (4.9-acre) patch of Mushitu forest each day — the largest mammal migration on the planet, and one that wasn't documented by researchers until 1980. At night, bats leave the roost in smaller groups to find food by sight and smell, and they've been observed chewing soft wood, apparently for moisture. Though they feed at night, they aren't strictly nocturnal, spending daylight hours resting and moving around within the colony, and they show strong site fidelity, returning year after year, season after season, to places that produced food before.

Mating runs from April to June and isn't synchronized across the population, but what follows is: implantation is delayed until October for every female at once, timed to one of two dry periods in the bats' range, with births following in February and March. Beyond their own reproduction, the bats do outsized ecological work — pollinating flowers and dispersing seeds through the forests they pass through, and serving as the main seed disperser for the African teak tree, Milicia excelsa, an increasingly rare and economically valuable species. Diet shifts with circumstance: wild bats eat bark, flowers, leaves, nectar, and fruit, while bats in captivity are typically given mixes of apples, oranges, bananas, and grapes, sometimes supplemented with a marmoset diet.

Range and habitat

The straw-colored fruit bat is the most widely distributed fruit bat in Africa, and possibly in the world, found from Senegal to Ethiopia and south to South Africa, largely within sub-Saharan forest and savanna zones, as well as around the southwestern Arabian Peninsula. It also turns up in urban areas and at altitudes as high as 2,000 m (6,600 ft), and it favors tall trees for roosting wherever it settles.

Conservation status

The straw-colored fruit bat is listed as Near Threatened due to a decreasing population trend. The species is hunted for bushmeat in West and Central Africa: a 2011 estimate put the number traded as bushmeat at about 128,400 bats a year in just four cities in southern Ghana.