First fruit bat babies

A mother fruit bat, in the College’s nocturnal room, protecting its baby

Hopwood Hall College students have gone batty with the announcement of the safe arrival of the College’s first fruit bat babies.

The College, which took on 10 Egyptian fruit bats earlier this year, is delighted with how the bats have settled in, and was excited to find out four months ago that some of the females were pregnant.

This month, three fruit bat babies have been born and the students and staff couldn’t be happier.

The bats live in the College’s nocturnal room where, thanks to clever lighting, day is turned to night and night turned to day so that the animal management students are able to study the bats behavior during the day time. And now the students will be carefully monitoring the development of the three new babies.

The mother bats protect their baby from disturbance by other bats within the colony by surrounding each baby with her wings, which means only the young bat’s head can be seen resting under her wing. In six weeks’ time the bat babies will be making their first flight.

Egyptian fruit bat facts:

• They can live for over 20 years in captivity. 
• The males are larger than the females. 
• They have a wingspan that averages 60cm, with a body length of around 15cm, and weigh around 160g. 
• The bats feast on fruit kebabs hanging in their enclosure and get through about 2.5kg of fresh fruit each day. 
• In the wild they live in caves rather than trees and roost all cuddled together. 
• They use rudimentary echo location (sound) for navigation through darkness. 
• Females give birth normally to a single young. The average weight at birth is 0.8 ounces.