Jeremy Hance - World’s most controversial fruit depends on giant bats for pollination
Durian. Depending on
whom you talk to it’s either the most beloved or the most despised fruit on the
planet. It suffers no moderation, no wishy-washiness. It is the king of fruits
or the worst thing you’ve ever tasted. Due to its potent odour – delicate and
sweet to its advocates and sewage-like to its detractors – durian has been
banned from airplanes, subways, and hotels (though punishments appear light if
non-existent). But a recent
study in Ecology and Evolution finds there may be no
durians at all without bats: big, threatened bats.
The scientists found that
flying foxes – bats in the Pteropus and Acerodon genus
and the largest in the world – are likely vital pollinators for the polarising
durian. “We already knew that
flying foxes feed on durian flowers, but there was this unsubstantiated belief,
even among some researchers, that flying foxes just destroyed the flowers,”
said Sheema Abdul Aziz, the lead researcher on the project that was done as part
of her PhD at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in France. “It doesn’t
help that a durian flower only blooms for one night, then falls off the tree
naturally, regardless of whether it’s been pollinated or not. When people see
all the flowers on the ground in the morning, they think it’s the bats.”
It’s not. By setting
up camera traps high in durian trees on Tioman Island off the coast of
peninsular Malaysia,
Aziz and her colleagues exploded the myth that flying fox were damaging the
flowers. Instead, the researchers watched the large winged-mammals – in this
case the Island flying fox – hang upside down over the flowers and bow down
their long snout into them, lapping up the nectar while leaving the flower
unruffled.
“The video footage
showed without a doubt how delicately flying foxes feed without destroying the
flowers, and it also showed how tough and hardy these durian flowers really
are,” Aziz said, who is also the founder and president of Rimba, a local NGO devoted to getting
hard science out to the government and the public... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2018/feb/19/durian-flying-fox-bats-pollination-pollinators-deforestation-hunting-conservation
