New research shows some of Australia’s flying foxes face a grave threat from extreme temperatures expected to become more frequent with climate change.
Flying foxes, among the largest species of fruit bats, are a cornerstone species in native forests, says co-author Dr Nicola Markus, an Australian expert on their ecology.
“The role they play in pollination and seed dispersal is unique,” she said.
But in early 2002, she and an international team of researchers led by Dr Justin Welbergen from the University of Cambridge witnessed an event that brought home how vulnerable these bats are to very high temperatures.
On January 12 of that year, a record heatwave struck a colony of grey-headed flying foxes and black flying foxes at Dallis Park in northern New South Wales.
“On that day, what we saw was, very simply, that the flying foxes died of heat stress,” Dr Markus said.
The temperatures, which exceeded 42 degrees Celsius, killed more than 1,300 of the animals, most of them females and their dependent young, the researchers reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
State-wide, more than 3,500 flying foxes fell to the soaring temperatures in that single heatwave, the report says.
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Black flying foxes, which are less able to adapt to temperature fluctuations, were worst hit.
Their deaths should serve as a warning of what could happen as global warming makes such scorchers more common, Dr Markus says.
“We know that we’re going to get more heat events and more extreme heat events,” she said.
“It bodes extremely badly for the black flying foxes.”
Any climate changes that harm flying foxes will have knock-on effects throughout all coastal forest ecosystems, she says.
Certain species of eucalypt, for example, rely heavily on the bats for pollination.
“They are a keystone species for forest environments,” Dr Markus said. “There are lots of other species whose fate may also be in serious doubt.”