Seychelles Flying-fox

Fascinating facts about the Seychelles Flying-fox

• A flying-fox's wings are actually elongated arm and finger bones wrapped in leathery skin — making them the only mammals that truly fly rather than glide. The Seychelles flying-fox has a 1-metre wingspan but weighs less than 700 grams, with hollow bones like a bird. This design trades strength for lift, which is why they're so vulnerable to cyclones and why a single storm in 2006 killed roughly 30% of the entire wild population.
• Unlike most bats, flying-foxes navigate by sight, not sonar — their eyes are as large as a dog's relative to body size, positioned forward like a primate's. They hunt at dusk and dawn when there's still light, scanning the canopy for fruiting trees from kilometres away. This adaptation made them devastatingly vulnerable when the Seychelles cleared its forests: they could see the food was gone, but there was nowhere left to find it.
• A single Seychelles flying-fox can pollinate 20,000 flowers in one night while feeding on nectar and fruit, distributing pollen across vast distances as it commutes between feeding trees. The island's endemic plants evolved flowers and fruits perfectly timed to the bat's nightly schedule — bell-shaped blooms that open at dusk, soft pulp that attracts no seed-dispersing birds. Remove the bat, and these plants have no way to reproduce.
• The Seychelles flying-fox roosts in colonies of up to 200 individuals, hanging upside-down in mangrove and coconut trees where they spend daylight hours grooming, vocalising, and digesting. Mothers give birth to a single pup once per year, carrying it clinging to their chest for the first three weeks before leaving it in the roost — a parenting strategy more similar to primates than to most other bat species.
• In the 1970s, fewer than 50 Seychelles flying-foxes existed in the wild after centuries of hunting and habitat loss had erased them from nearly every island. A protected reserve on Mahé and a ban on commercial hunting brought the population back to around 10,000 today — making it a rare conservation success story where a mammal came back from the edge of extinction through legal protection alone, without captive breeding.

At a glance

About the Seychelles Flying-fox

As dusk descends upon the lush islands of the Seychelles, the flying-foxes stir, their leathery wings unfolding like dark silken sails as they take to the evening skies. With a gentle whoosh, they glide effortlessly, their large eyes scanning the landscape below for the ripe fruits and nectar that sustain them, their nocturnal wanderings a testament to their adaptability and resilience. In this crepuscular world, the Seychelles flying-fox reigns supreme, a majestic creature of the night, its very existence a reminder of the beauty and wonder that still awaits us in the uncharted hours of darkness.

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