{"id":335480,"date":"2026-10-18T08:07:40","date_gmt":"2026-10-18T04:07:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/real-estate-mauritius.mu\/?p=335480"},"modified":"2026-10-18T08:09:24","modified_gmt":"2026-10-18T04:09:24","slug":"mauritian-flying-fox-fruit-bat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/real-estate-mauritius.mu\/en\/mauritian-flying-fox-fruit-bat\/","title":{"rendered":"Mauritian Flying Fox: The Endemic Fruit Bat at the Heart of the Cull Debate"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Mauritian flying fox (Pteropus niger<\/em>) is the island’s largest endemic land mammal, a fruit bat the IUCN has listed as Endangered since 2018. It spreads the seeds of a large share of Mauritius’s native trees, yet it also feeds on lychees and mangoes in commercial orchards. That clash led the government to order culls in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019.<\/p>\n

What is the Mauritian flying fox?<\/h2>\n

It is a big fruit bat with a wingspan of up to 80 cm, long silky golden fur and small ears. Unlike the small insect-eating bats, it does not use echolocation; it finds food by smell and sight.<\/p>\n

It lives nowhere else in the world. By day it roosts in forest, often on the leeward side of the mountains, out of full sun and in places with restricted access. A single roost can cover a few hundred trees. The bats leave at dusk and can travel up to 24 km in a night to feed.<\/p>\n

Colonies shift between roosts with the wind, the fruit supply and the breeding cycle. Mothers with young and bachelor males use separate roosts.<\/p>\n

What it eats, and why the forests need it<\/h2>\n

The flying fox eats mostly fruit, both native and introduced, along with nectar. It finds it in forests, but also on plantations, smallholdings and in gardens.<\/p>\n

Its ecological role has been measured. In six of the best-preserved wet forests in Mauritius, researchers surveyed 90 plots of 100 m\u00b2. About 24.6% of native woody plant species have fruit that the bat eats and whose seeds it disperses. Those species make up 53.1% of the stems and 63.1% of the basal area of native woody plants. For roughly half of that basal area, the flying fox is the only native vertebrate that disperses the seeds. They are mostly large trees with large fruit, the ones that form the forest canopy.<\/p>\n

So for the plants you see at the Ebony Forest in Chamarel<\/a> or in the mountain forests, this bat does a job few other animals can still do. Mauritius has already lost two bat species, as well as birds such as the dodo<\/a>, and the flying fox is the last of its genus on the island.<\/p>\n

Why lychee and mango growers complain about it<\/h2>\n

The bats eat ripe fruit straight from the tree, and growers hold them responsible for heavy losses. Growers put the damage at 10 to 35% of the fruit and the cost at around US$5 million a year. The Food and Agricultural Research Council used a lower average of about 10% a year for lychees.<\/p>\n

A study in commercial orchards in 2015 and 2016, published in Oryx<\/em> in November 2018, adds nuance. Total fruit loss from all causes (birds, natural fall, fungus) ranged from 7% to 76% per tree. Across four lychee orchards, bats damaged 25.5% of the fruit on average, against 5.8% for birds. The differences between orchards were large: on tall lychee trees, bat damage ran from 9.4% to 52.8% depending on the estate.<\/p>\n

Tree height mattered a great deal. On tall mango trees bats damaged 31.3% of the fruit, but only 0.4% on small trees. Birds tend to target the lower trees. Researchers from Oxford and Texas Tech wrote in 2020 that birds, often introduced species, cause most of the orchard damage.<\/p>\n

The culls: what is established<\/h2>\n

Hunting the flying fox for food or sport has been banned since 1983. Growers lobbied to have the protection lifted from 2002 onwards, and they succeeded in 2015.<\/p>\n