Australia’s giant bats have long thought to be stay-at-home types, happy to roost in one spot and make life noisy and often pungent for residents of the cities they share.
Research now shows that flying foxes, with a 5ft wingspan, are among the most nomadic species with a penchant for new places to stay.
The fruit-eating bats hang from trees in their thousands in Australian cities. Efforts to move them are often in vain, but scientists believe they may have an answer.
“At all times you have individuals coming in and other individuals moving out, like you would in a youth hostel,” Justin Welbergen, of Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment near Sydney, who led the study, said. “The idea of being able to disperse flying foxes by teaching them they are not welcome in a particular location doesn’t hold, because every morning there will be new flying foxes coming in and they don’t know they’re not welcome.”
“They are not so much migratory as profoundly nomadic,” Dr Welbergen told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
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Satellite trackers on 201 animals in eastern Australia showed that most travel 900 to 3,700 miles a year. One grey-headed flying fox was tracked travelling 7,600 miles in a criss-cross pattern between Melbourne and central Queensland.
Dr Welbergen, the president of the Australasian Bat Society, said the bats were “in the same league as some migratory birds” or even whales, which travel huge distances.
The grey-headed flying fox that travelled 7,600 miles visited 123 roosts across eastern Australia. Dr Welbergen said the next step was to predict their movement by learning what drives them to make the long journeys.
