Bats lives are deeply implicated in bioethics. They are being widely blamed for COVID-19, and face escalating persecution as a result. Many bat species have also been pushed to the brink of extinction due to the anthropogenic spread of White-nose syndrome, deadly climate change induced heat waves, and large-scale habitat destruction.
While bats are intimately connected to crucial bioethical dilemmas and discourses, most humans know very little about bats themselves. Bats are incredibly diverse. They are part of the second-most diverse order of mammalia on the planet—Chiroptera—and they can range in size from human-length wingspans to roughly the size of bumblebees (Laird 2018, 7). They can be divided into the suborders of microbats and megabats. Microbats are primarily small insect-eaters who use echolocation to navigate and who can be found on every continent, except for Antarctica (Laird 2018, 10). Megabats, or flying foxes, are large fruit-eaters who don’t echolocate, with a few exceptions, and who can be found in Africa, Asia, and Indo-Australia (Laird 2018, 10).
Today, I want to focus on Australian flying-fox species – Black, Grey, Spectacled, and Little Reds – who the anthropologist and environmental humanities scholar Deborah Bird Rose discusses in her posthumously published book, Shimmer: Flying-fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril. I have drawn heavily from this wonderful book in making my Animal Highlight and this blog post.
Female Flying-Foxes give birth to only one baby per year. The little babies have thin chest hair so that they can absorb the warmth of their mother. The close bond between mother and baby is perhaps most evident in the fact that mothers carry their young everywhere for the first several weeks of their life, even while flying out at night for food. Later, the babies are left in a nursery while the mothers go on search for food. At around three months, the flying foxes are ready to live more independently from their mothers, learning important life skills within peer groups. Adult males take out groups of adolescent flying foxes, showing them how to fly, forage, and navigate. Rose quotes the bat researchers and conservationists Hall and Richards as they describe these excursions in relatable detail:
“They do not have the purpose or direction of adults, and are reminiscent of a group of school kids going home from school and exploring the environment. Progress is slow as they carry out aerial bombs on each other, explore vegetation and duck from imaginary predators” (26-27).
It is not just babies and juveniles who are incredibly social. Flying fox adults prefer to live in large camps. At camp, these bats will literally hang out together all day before they fly out to forage for food at night. At camp they sleep and socialize. Flying-foxes have at least thirty different vocal calls, all audible to humans. Deborah Bird Rose notes that “from a human point of view…[they are] very noisy folk” (27).
Not only do Australian flying foxes have deep relationships with each other, but they also have magnificently longstanding, complex, and intimate relationships with plants, waters, and Australian Indigenous communities. In particular, flying foxes love eating from trees and shrubs in the Myrtacea Family. Many of these plants produce pollen and nectar at night, and are most receptive to pollination at night, when flying foxes feed.
Incredibly, flying foxes have tongues that are adapted, species by species, to the specific Myrtaceous plant on which they depend. Myrtaceous trees flower sequentially, and this means that they can provide a constant food supply to flying foxes. They require pollen exchanges from distant trees, and flying foxes, who can travel incredible distances, do this crucial work of long-range pollination and seed dispersal. Rose offers up the following passage that captures some of the magic of this mutualistic and deeply-attuned relationship:
“In Australia, Eucalypt blossoming takes place sequentially; flying-foxes are readily able to know when trees start to bloom hundreds of kilometers from where they are camping, and so they fly to find the nectar; scientists do not know how they do this. Parry-Jones reported on a camp of about 80, 000 individuals in New South Wales where on one night in June 1989 almost the whole mob left the camp, flying away to destinations unknown. Where did they go? We don’t know. Why or how did they all decide to leave on the one night? We don’t know.” (30).
I can only imagine how spectacular watching their mass flyout must have been.
Australia is marked by starkly contrasting dry and wet seasons. The Indigenous Yarralin and Lingara communities have intimate matrilineal kin relationships with flying foxes and they understand that flying foxes are persons who are deeply connected to rain (81). The Yarralin and Lingara people understand that flying foxes call to the spiritual figure, The Rainbow Snake, who is the driver of rains and the generation of life; they call to the Rainbow Snake to bring rain and to end the dry season (Rose).
Flying foxes call forth water, rely on it for survival, and also delight in it. Tim Pearson describes watching flying-foxes belly dip at a lagoon in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden one late afternoon:
“They skim over the water, get the water on their belly, then fly up to a tree and lick the water off and have a wash in it. Occasionally you’ll see some belly dipping over the other side in the salt water. We think it’s because they need a bit of salt…You can tell the ones that are the older bats that really know what they’re doing. They approach beautifully, flap in and just glide with enough speed, do it perfectly, and fly off. Some of them have a few goes at it, they don’t quite have the courage to commit. We’ve occasionally seen very young ones miscalculate and just totally face-plant…One very hot day we saw one juvenile come in and misjudge, and woomph! His little head popped up and he swam ashore and climbed ashore very wet and obviously a lot cooler.” (27-28).
I love how this quote captures these astonishing but also relatably clumsy beings as they interact with the water, engaging with it for both practical reasons and for pleasure!
I hope that in sharing some of the wonderful work of Deborah Bird Rose with you, I have been able to give you a little glimpse into the rich emotional, relational, and sensory worlds of Australian flying foxes.
Amanda (Mandy) Bunten-Walberg was a PhD Candidate at Queen's University's School of Environmental Studies where her research explored more-than-human ethics in contagious contexts through the case study of bats and COVID-19. In particular, Mandy is interested in how more-than-human ethics, critical race theory, queer theory, and biopolitical theory might guide humans towards developing more ethical relationships with bats and other (human and more-than-human) persons who are dominantly understood as diseased. Learn more about our team here.
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