Fruit bats are sometimes called flying foxes. One glance at their foxy faces will tell you why. But they don't EAT like foxes. Foxes hunt meaty meals. Not fruit bats. The furry flyers have a serious taste for fruit. Bananas, mangos, dates, avocados—just about every kind of fruit is good food for these bats.
Sometimes fruit bats eat their snacks seeds and all. Later they poop wherever they happen to be. Their poop is chock-full of seeds. Some of those seeds take root and grow to become new fruit trees.
Fruit bats also slurp a sweet liquid called nectar from fruit blossoms. What happens next makes them very important for healthy forests—and for fruit-loving humans. When fruit bats stop to eat, sticky yellow grains ofpollen get caught on their fur. Some of the pollen rubs off onto other flowers that the bats visit. That's how bats pollinate flowers, which allows the trees to develop fruits and seeds. Those fruits and seeds feed animals from insects to birds to monkey
Can you spot the differences between the Indian flying fox (above) and the little brown bat (top left)? The little brown bat is an insect-eating microbat. (Check out the moth that's about to become a meal.) The Indian flying fox eats fruit.
And see the open mouth on the little brown bat? It's using echolocation. It lets out a call, then uses the echoes that bounce back to find its prey. Most fruit bats don't use echolocation. Instead, they use their big eyes, and great sense of smell to find food.
