Flying foxes live long, breed slowly, and carry rare viruses
Pteropus bats—fruit bats or flying foxes—are among the world’s largest bats. Females of most species bear only one young a year, so slow life histories make hunting, culling, and storms especially dangerous; six species have gone extinct in modern times. Brisson coined the Greek “wing-foot” genus name in 1762.
Pteropus is a genus of megabats, among the biggest bats alive, known as fruit bats or flying foxes, a name used for them since at least 1759. At least 60 living species range across South and Southeast Asia, Australia, East Africa and islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. They weigh from 120 g to 1.6 kg, with males usually bigger. The large flying fox has the longest forearm and widest reported wingspan of any bat, up to 1.5 metres, though at 1.1 kg it is outweighed by the Indian and great flying foxes at 1.6 and 1.45 kg.
They eat fruit and other plant matter, sometimes insects, and find food by smell. They cannot echolocate, so they navigate by sharp eyesight, and most, though not all, are active at night. Their feeding makes them valuable: they pollinate plants and scatter seeds that help forests regrow. Yet they are often persecuted for real or imagined damage to crops.
Flying foxes live long and breed slowly, most females raising one pup a year, so hunting, culling and natural disasters hit them hard; overhunting has wiped out six species in modern times. They also carry rare but deadly pathogens. Hendra virus and Australian bat lyssavirus, the latter producing a disease much like rabies, account for seven recorded human deaths between them, and Nipah virus, also spread by flying foxes, has been blamed for more than 100. For indigenous peoples they appear in art, folklore and weaponry, and their fur and teeth once served as money; some cultures still use the teeth that way.
The genus name joins the Greek words for wing and foot and was coined by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1762. Because Brisson did not consistently use two-part names, some authors credited Johann Erxleben's 1777 work instead. In 1998 the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature rejected Brisson's book as a whole but conserved about a dozen of its genus names, Pteropus included. The type species is the Mauritian flying fox, Pteropus niger, which Robert Kerr described in 1792.
Source: Pteropus
