SCIENCE STUDENTS' SCIENCE : FLYING FOXES AUSTRALIA

The grey-headed flying fox is one of the world's largest bats. It can weigh more than two pounds [ about a kilogram ] and have a wingspan of more than five feet [ 1.5 meters ].

And as it migrates along Australia's eastern coastal regions, watch out for what bat scientists call its seed rain : The animals defecate in the air without stopping to roost.

BATS don't have the best reputation - the flying mammals - have been blamed for pandemics like Ebola and Covid. The Australian  authorities once considered them to be pests and used napalm to kill their colonies.

But people may need bats like the flying fox more than they realize. In a new study, a team of scientists have quantified the animals'  economic benefits.

The study was based on data from over 1,200  flying fox roosting sites gathered by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Australia's national science agency.

Researchers calculated that the flying foxes were responsible for the curation of more than  91 million trees, a majority of them eucalypts.  For Australian economy, that means somewhere in the range of $195 million to $673 million per year contributed by the the bats.

Other studies have shown that the benefits of bats range from protecting cotton and corn crops in Texas to safeguarding the tequila industry in Mexico.

As with many bat species, Australia's flying foxes benefit the ecosystem they inhabit because they serve as pollinators while roosting and feeding on trees, and as seed spreaders when they release their waste or otherwise drop the seeds as they fly.

Many of Australia's tree species have in this way become dependent on flying foxes in what an author of the study, Alfredo Ortega Gonzales of the University of Sydney, described as '' a co-evolution pathway between certain bat species and certain plants.''

'' Flying foxes are mega-dispersers,'' said Alexander Braczkowski, also an author of the study. '' When compared with other Australian pollinators, such as birds and bees, they fly significantly longer distances on average. But they can also handle proportionally much larger seed sizes.''

The researchers coined the term '' the bat ripple effect '' to describe the flying foxes' impact across multiple ecosystems as they travel hundreds of miles in a few days.

'' Australian flying foxes are quintessential Australian character - they range across the landscapes of droughts and flooding rains,''  said Dr. Welbergen, who was not involved in the new study.

'' With their extreme mobility, bats are a glue that keeps the increasingly fragmented Australian forest landscapes together.''

!WOW! thanks Anthony Ham.