Why Fruit Bats Are the Planet’s Most Intriguing Wildlife.mp4

Did you know the Rodrigues fruit bat (a.k.a. "flying fox") has a wingspan of three feet?

Transcript

00:00What's new? At the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, we have a new bat house that consists of 13 Rodriguez fruit bats.

00:08Yeah, make that place! That's hilarious!

00:11Oh, that was so cute.

00:15There you go.

00:17The Rodriguez fruit bat is from one small island east of Madagascar.

00:21All of the individuals in our collection are about three feet across when their wings are expanded.

00:27They live off a diet of primarily fruits and vegetables.

00:32We make up a special slurry, we call it, which is composed of some bird diet and primate diet,

00:38and also some nectar and other supplements.

00:40And then we also offer several different types of fruits and vegetables cut up over the course of the day.

00:50These bats don't have much of a history working with people, so our goal is to work closely with them

00:55so we can accomplish a couple of important things with them, like getting weekly weights on the whole group,

01:03as well as carrying them around from one area to the other, transporting them,

01:07stuff that we can start now so that they can do with us with low stress in the future.

01:15Primarily, the Rodriguez fruit bat is endangered because it has such a limited distribution on the earth.

01:22It is limited to only one small island in the Indian Ocean, and that island is subject to habitat destruction

01:29by humans as well as natural disasters.

01:33Right now we have five males and eight females, and since we mixed the males and females together

01:40for the first time in October, we've already seen lots of breeding activity in the colony.

01:45So we would expect some newborns sometimes within the next few months.