Endangered
Spectacled flying fox
Pteropus conspicillatus
The spectacled flying fox, also known as the spectacled fruit bat, is a megabat that lives in Australia's north-eastern regions of Queensland.
Appearance
A large spectacled flying fox has pale yellow or straw-colored fur around its eyes. The mantle is pale yellow and goes across the back, neck, and shoulders. Some have pale yellow fur on the face and top of the head.
The head and body length is 22–25 cm, forearm 16–18 cm, weight 400–1000 g.
Range and habitat
Spectacled flying foxes are forest dwellers and rainforests are their preferred habitat. Colonies of the spectacled flying fox can be found in rain forests, mangroves, and paperbark and eucalypt forests. It is also found in New Guinea and on the offshore islands among them Woodlark Island, Alcester Island, Kiriwina, and Halmahera.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The spectacled flying fox's natural diet is rainforest fruits, riparian zone flowers, and flowers from Myrtaceae (primarily Eucalyptus and Syzygium species) and fruits from the Moraceae (figs) and Myrtaceae (primarily Syzygium). Females are capable of breeding at one year of age.
Males probably do not breed until three to four years of age.
In crisis
The spectacled flying fox was listed as a threatened species under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. The species was classified as endangered by the IUCN in 2020. In February 2019, the Australian government upgraded the threatened status from vulnerable to endangered, after almost a third of the bat population died in a severe heatwave in Queensland in late 2018.
In 2012, the Queensland Government reintroduced the issuing of permits that allows farmers and fruit-growers (with permits)to kill limited numbers of flying foxes in order to protect crops. In February 2019, the Australian Department of the Environment and Energy announced that the national status of the spectacled flying fox was going to be revised from vulnerable to endangered.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Spectacled flying fox is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Spectacled flying fox, Wikidata item Q426636. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
