Egyptian Fruit Bats: The Efficient Foragers

摘要

As the sun sets, hundreds of Egyptian fruit bats begin to stretch their wings, inch towards their cave opening and make short warm-up flights in anticipation for nightfall.Then,when the time comes, one after the other they leave their cave and fly out into the night.Their goal: trees bearing ripe fleshy fruit.They must consume up to 250% their own ～ 150 gram body mass of this relatively uncommon resource each night, to meet their high energetic demands for flapping flight and thermoregulation, and to offset some of its low nutritional values (Korine et al. 1996).They return home to their colony every morning rather than spend the day on trees within their foraging home range. An efficient strategy for locating these fruit trees is, therefore, highly beneficial. And what they do is indeed very efficient - but we will get back to that.