moddeydhoo asked:

I'm curious about your beautiful flying foxes, if you don't mind questions. How much time do they typically spend flying, compared to other things - are they usually hanging, like in your photos? And what sorts of enrichment do they enjoy?

koryos answered:

Don’t mind at all! (Also these aren’t my bats- they’re from at the Lubee Bat Conservancy. I only had an internship there.)

Most of the time I spent observing these bats was between 8-4 PM, so I can’t give you an accurate activity budget considering that they are least active around midday and most active at dawn and dusk. This lined up with the behavior that I saw- in the early morning and around feeding time was when the bats were most likely to be flying. The exhibits are designed as octagons so that the bats can have a curved, continuous flight path if they choose, though usually the only times I would see the bats fly extensively was when they were startled/frightened. Otherwise they would just take short flights to get away from a conspecific or just to get around the enclosure more quickly. Younger bats were more likely to spend time flying than older ones.

Overall, flights during the day were infrequent and most locomotion was achieved by crawling. But again, I wasn’t there to observe the bats during dawn, dusk, and at night.

As far as enrichment goes, the bats received different enrichment items daily, both sensory and behavioral. Scent enrichment could be paprika rubbed on wooden ‘pickup sticks’ (sticks in a basket or bucket that the bats like to lift and manipulate), while auditory enrichment could be the sound of wolf howls or an instrument like a wind chime to manipulate. Most of the time, however, their enrichment revolved around foraging behavior, such as putting fruit in a suet feeder or juice in a nectar feeder. Baby food and honey would also be smeared on astroturf or mesh wrapped around a PVC pipe. Some specialized primate puzzles, like grenade feeders, also work well with bats.

If you’re interested in reading a much more detailed description of the enrichment provided to the bats at Lubee, there is actually an entire paper on it which you can read here: Fruit Bat Enrichment at the Lubee Foundation.

Anyway, hope that answered your question! Please enjoy these bat enrichment pictures:

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