Philippine naked-backed fruit bat

Philippine bare-backed fruit bat
Conservation status
Critically Endangered  (IUCN 3.1)[1]
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Order:	Chiroptera
Family:	Pteropodidae
Genus:	Dobsonia
Species:	D. chapmani
Binomial name
Dobsonia chapmani Rabor, 1952
Philippine naked-backed fruit bat range

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.