What If Gone

Species → Rodrigues flying fox

Rodrigues flying fox

Pteropus rodricensis

20,000 individuals
Extinction risk Endangered
Seed disperserTropical forestUmbrella species
Rodrigues flying fox (Pteropus rodricensis)
Photo: Libor4u, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What if it disappeared?

Impact Moderate
At every meal

Without the flying fox to press fruit against its palate and spit out seeds and fibre in pellets, the seeds of the plants it feeds on would largely stay beneath the parent tree rather than being dispersed elsewhere — since the animal then moves on to feed or roost somewhere else.

Documented
Detail

Comptes rendus naturalistes compilés par l'UICN et les programmes de conservation (Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, Mauritian Wildlife Foundation).

This feeding behaviour — pressing fruit and spitting out seeds and fibre — is documented across the genus Pteropus as a whole and confirmed for this species in particular by monitoring programmes carried out on Rodrigues. It mechanically makes the bat a long-distance dispersal agent, unlike seeds that simply fall beneath the parent tree.

In the related Mauritius species

In its close Mascarene relative, the Mauritian flying fox, seed dispersal by the species disproportionately benefits large canopy trees — a plausible mechanism for the Rodrigues flying fox itself, but one that has not been the subject of a dedicated quantitative study on Rodrigues island.

Extrapolated
Detail

Nyhagen, D.F., Turnbull, S.D., Olesen, J.M. & Jones, C.G. (2005). An investigation into the role of the Mauritian flying fox, Pteropus niger, in forest regeneration. Biological Conservation, 122(3), 491–497 — étude sur l'espèce sœur Pteropus niger, pas directement sur P. rodricensis.

The Rodrigues flying fox population fell to around 70 individuals after a cyclone in the 1970s, following decades of earlier deforestation on the island, then recovered to around 20,000 individuals by 2016 thanks to habitat restoration led by the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation — a remarkable recovery that coincides with the return of the forest, without constituting a controlled study isolating the bat's specific contribution.

What's missing to confirm it: A dedicated field study of Pteropus rodricensis on Rodrigues island itself, directly measuring its effect on forest regeneration rather than inferring it from its close Mauritian relative, is still lacking.

Documentation

Last verified: August 14, 2026