Trivia question for Jul-04-2011

Happy Independence Day Everyone from all of us at OMG 😉  Olivia is up today and she picked an interesting critter for today’s trivia.  These guys feed on juice from tree fruit, flying up to 30 miles each night to find ripe crop.

This bat is a very large bat with a wing span of between 4-5 feet. It is nocturnal and feeds mainly on ripe fruits such as mangoes and bananas and nectar. This bat is gregarious and lives in colonies which can number a few hundred. Their offspring has no specific name besides ‘young’.

So here are Olivia’s questions: Tell us what kind of bat this is and what they are known to do around water to retrieve fallen fruit?  Also, tell us what happens to the bat if their wing membrane is pierced?

Good Luck 😉

Answer:

Congratulations to our friend Carmel for being the first to identify these cool bats.  We featured the Indian Flying Fox.  The Indian Flying-fox is a species of megabat. It is found in Bangladesh, China, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Also known as the Greater Indian Fruit Bat, it lives mainly in forests.

These large bats are so adaptable that they can even swim and often salvage fallen fruit from rivers.  If their wing membrane is ever pierced, the hole with usually heal itself within a week.  It has also been reported that a flying fox once crash landed on a boat deck, alive but exhausted, 200 miles from land.  Here is more on these big bats.  Indian Flying Fox

Thanks for playing along 😉