Animal · India, Bangladesh, Pakistan
Indian flying fox
Pteropus medius — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The Indian flying fox is one of the largest bats in the world, with wings that span up to one and a half metres and a face much like a fox. It feeds on fruit and flowers, not on insects.
Picture credit: Dinesh Valke (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Dinesh Valke (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the Indian flying fox live?
Home: Tall roosting trees near villages and fields in South Asia.
In the wild it lives in these countries: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bhutan.
Conservation status from the IUCN: close to being at risk.
The short profile
Fully grown: body 15-22 cm, wingspan 1.2-1.5 m. It weighs about 1 kilograms. On the menu: plants.
The story behind it
By day these bats hang head down in a few huge trees at the edge of a village, sometimes in camps of several hundred or even a few thousand animals. The colony is noisy: the bats squabble over branches, fan themselves with their wings and shuffle about. At dusk they set off, sometimes flying many kilometres to reach ripe figs, mangoes and guavas. Unlike small insect-eating bats they do not use echolocation; they find their food with large eyes and a keen nose. As they drink nectar and drop seeds along the way they pollinate trees and help forests spread. Their numbers are slowly falling, because old roosting trees are cut down and the bats are sometimes driven away from orchards.
Find it on the globe
Indian flying fox is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Is a flying fox really a fox?
No, it is a bat. It got the name because its brown head, pointed nose and big eyes look like a fox's face. Foxes and bats are not closely related at all.
Do fruit bats use echolocation?
The Indian flying fox does not. Small insect-eating bats send out calls and listen for the echo, but this bat finds ripe fruit with its large eyes and a very good sense of smell.
Why are flying foxes good for forests?
They drink nectar from flowers and carry pollen from tree to tree, and they drop fruit seeds far from the parent tree. That is how many tropical trees get planted in new places.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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