The Philippines do have the largest species of flying fox, apparently, and this looks pretty typical. It’s unusual not because it’s a particularly large specimen, but because the species is endangered due to habitat loss and poaching and they’re rarely seen at all.
All the varieties of flying foxes are pretty adorable and this species is really no exception.
i don’t want to kill it, i just don’t want to be anywhere near it.
You only need fear it if you smell like a durian.
Well, the smallest surviving premature baby is less than 9 oz and the biggest human being was 1400 pounds, so there’s your “human sized” range, technically. The bat’s only about three pounds, though the wingspan on this would be the height of the average local person, so…
~sniffs armpits~ Uh oh.
PS I forgot to post my original comment that the person who took this photo could be described as a “reporter bat large”
You misspelled “compressed clot of anal dandruff”
I’m not quite there, but I’d like to hug myself while it hugs itself and smile warmly at it across a relatively small-ish but safe distance.
When I lived in Australia fruit bats visited the trees in the courtyard every night and it was never scary. Mostly awesome and a little bit messy.
Requisite:
It helps that it’s a fruit bat, and has a face that we find acceptably cute; another species of bat, like a Vampire Bat, or an insect eating variety, like a Little Brown Bat would be less attractive.
Should we prepare for a battery of puns?
There was a theory out there (pushed back on by many scientists?) that megabats (such as the one in the report) are related to primates. On that, this from Quora. Note: Italics are my own comments. Also, I bold here and there.
This is a question [who are bat’s closest relatives] that has vexed biologists for a long time, because bats are so specialized and different from other mammals, and the earliest known bat fossils already look like bats and don’t shed that much light on the origins of their distinctive anatomical features.
We were also misled for a long time by superficial similarities in their brains and genitalia into thinking that bats (or maybe just the larger bats, like flying foxes) were close relatives of primates.
On flying fox genitalia… that I can verify. I recall an especially graphic nature film from long ago; it was on fox bats, and showed a pair of them mating. Even now, I’m still astounded by how incredibly similar the male bat’s genitalia matched that of humans (apart from size, of course) and much, much more so that that of apes and monkeys. Oh… and per wiki, fox bats in general engage in fellatio, cunnilingus, and that also across the sexes.
The answer, derived from comparative DNA studies, appears to be that bats are a single, natural group most closely related to the Artiodactyla (even-toed hoofed mammals, of which whales are a subgroup), Perissodactyla (odd-toed hoofed mammals, today consisting of the horses, tapirs, and rhinos), Pholidota (pangolins or scaly anteaters), and Carnivora (a group of mostly meat-eating mammals that includes cats, dogs, weasels, seals, and bears, among others).
Also, per wiki, fox bats have the same brain size to body size quotient as domesticated dogs.
That’s rather insulting to bats, isn’t it? Unless by “bat” you meant “poop” in which case it’s all good.
I’ve been saving mine for a special (echol)occasion
The only thing scary about bats is their viral load. For reasons that we don’t quite understand yet, bats often have high levels of viruses in their system and yet don’t seem to be affected by them. They can spread the viruses via their feces, though. It is believed that’s how many Ebola epidemics started, and while we still don’t know the full story of Covid-19’s origin, taking a look at the DNA sequence, it certainly looks like coronaviruses that have been found in bats.
I think the driving force behind the theory was that there were the above-mentioned significant morphological differences between micro- and mega-chiroptera (apart from, you know, the wings) so there was the idea that maybe flight had developed twice in mammals. After all, we have a number of gliders, including these guys:
Fun theory, ultimately crushed by DNA analysis. I can’t remember if we meet the guy who came up with it, or some one who knew him.
Still, DNA analysis has given a lot more than it’s taken.
