Rodrigues flying fox
Pteropus rodricensis
— Where the name comes from
Rodricensis names Rodrigues, the remotest of the Mascarene islands, six hundred kilometres from Mauritius — the same island that saw the extinction of the Rodrigues solitaire, cousin of the dodo. The genus name is that of all the flying foxes, Pteropus, “winged foot”. This species lives nowhere else in the world, and its name is also its only address.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Bats
- Habitat
- Remnant fragments of native forest and sheltered valleys on the island
- Range
- Endemic to Rodrigues, Mauritius
- Size
- 15–20 cm of body, 75–90 cm wingspan, 250–350 g
- Diet
- Frugivore — the fruit of native trees, flowers, leaves
- Lifespan
- 10 years in the wild, over 25 in captivity
— Characteristics
- 01
In 1979 fewer than seventy individuals were left, all on a single island.
- 02
A tropical cyclone can sweep away an enormous fraction of them in one night.
- 03
The male has a brighter golden collar than the female.
— What sets it apart
It is the case on which the modern idea of a reserve population was built. When in the 1970s it fell below a hundred animals, Gerald Durrell took some to his zoo in Jersey and began breeding them; from that nucleus have come colonies in dozens of zoological gardens, and today there are more in captivity than on the island. They have served to restock after cyclones, and are the reason the species has moved from “critically endangered” to “endangered” — a rare improvement, achieved by keeping a lifeboat ten thousand kilometres away.
