AUSTRALIAN FRUIT-BATS.
In their roosting-places these bats hang all over the trees in enormous numbers, looking like great black fruits. Although shot in thousands, on account of the damage they do to fruit orchards, their numbers do not appear to be reduced.
Photo by A. S. Rudland & Sons.
TUBE-NOSED FRUIT-BAT.
The tubular nostrils distinguish this and a species of insect-eating bat from all other living mammals.
The Fruit-bats.
These represent the giants of the bat world, the largest of them, the Kalong, or Malay Fox-bat, measuring no less than 5 feet from tip to tip of the wing. The best known of the fruit-bats is the Indian Fox-bat. Sir J. E. Tennent tells us that a favourite resort of theirs near Kandy, in Ceylon, was some indiarubber-trees, "where they used to assemble in such prodigious numbers that large boughs would not infrequently give way beneath the accumulated weight of the flock." An observer in Calcutta relates that they occasionally travel in vast hordes, so great as to darken the sky. Whether they are performing some preconcerted migration or bent only on a foray to some distant feeding-ground is a matter for speculation. These hordes are quite distinct from the "long strings" which may be seen every evening in Calcutta on their way to neighbouring fruit-trees.
One of the most remarkable of this group is the Tube-nosed Fruit-bat, in which the nostrils are prolonged into a pair of relatively long tubes. Strangely enough, a group of insect-eating bats has developed similar though smaller tubes. Except in these bats, such tubes are unknown among mammals. Their function is not known.
