Dobsonia chapmani

The Philippine naked-backed fruit bat or Philippine bare-backed fruit bat (Dobsonia chapmani) is a megabat that mostly lives on Negros Island. Two small populations were also found on Cebu Island in the Philippines. Like other bare-backed fruit bats, its wings meet along the midline of their bodies, making it a very agile flier. It roosted in caves, in areas where little light penetrated the gloom. It was so abundant once that it left piles of guano, which were used by miners as fertilizer. By the mid-1980s, the lowland forest was replaced by sugar cane plantations and the bat vanished. In 1996 the species was declared extinct by the IUCN, as none had been sighted since 1964, but the bat was rediscovered in 2000. The species now survives in very small numbers. The bat lives in caves and comes out at night to eat fruits from local rainforests. After the forests were cut down to make way for sugar plantations the bat population dropped drastically, and the few remaining ones are still hunted for their meat. Now the bats reside in the few areas of remaining forest, and if these are cut down, the species is likely to go extinct. The forest where the bats live in Cebu is protected in that it cannot be cut down, but there are no conservation measures on Negros.

No narrative description available for this taxon yet.