The Chronicles of the Fanihy

An old description of the fanihy calls it a creature the size of a capon, hanging by day from bare trees wrapped entirely in its own wings, nursing its young folded between them, its body furred and its nose pointed like a fox’s. Strip away the antique phrasing and the description still holds up: Pteropus rufus, the Madagascar flying fox, is the island’s largest bat and one of the largest in the world, a wingspan reaching 1.25 metres and a weight over 750 grams, with a rust-brown body, a paler golden head and shoulders, and a face built to be mistaken, at a glance, for something that hunts on the ground rather than flies.

A fox with wings, and no tail at all.

It is not Madagascar’s only fruit bat, only its largest. Eidolon dupreanum, the straw-colored fruit bat, ranks second and is the only fruit bat found on the central highlands, distinguished by its duller coloring, narrower wings built for distance flight, and a small tail the fanihy entirely lacks. Smaller again is Rousettus madagascariensis, a cave-dwelling species barely a third the fanihy’s weight, notable for a rare trait among fruit bats: a rudimentary echolocation of its own, used to navigate the total darkness deep inside caves the fanihy never enters.

A fanihy manages its own temperature the way few mammals do: fanning its wings to shed heat, or licking the thin membranes and spreading them to cool by evaporation, a behavior mothers use often with young clinging nearby. At dusk it leaves its roost for feeding grounds that can lie 34 kilometres away, cruising at roughly 32 kilometres an hour and covering up to 50 kilometres in a night, guided entirely by excellent eyesight rather than echolocation, which the species, unlike its smaller cave-dwelling cousin, does not use at all.

Its diet runs 60 to 65 percent pressed fruit juice, drawn from more than thirty-five native species alongside cultivated mango, papaya, lychee, and guava, supplemented by leaves when fruit runs short and by flowers and pollen, baobab and kapok included, that make it one of the more important pollinators in a fragmented forest landscape. Reproduction adds its own oddity: an apparent nine-month pregnancy that conceals only about four months of actual embryonic development, delayed by a pause scientists still don’t fully explain, ending most often in December or January with a single fifty-gram pup and a life expectancy, for the mother, of twenty years or more.

Nine months of pregnancy. Four months of actual growth.

Malagasy folklore offers its own explanation for the animal’s most famous habit. In one telling, God and the Earth quarreled over the bat at the moment of its creation, God finding it hideous and wanting it destroyed; the Earth defended the creature, and God agreed to spare it on one condition, that it never look at him again. That is why, the story goes, the bat hangs head-down to this day, forever facing the Earth that saved it, never the sky.

The fanihy belongs to a genus, Pteropus, that includes more than sixty species of flying fox, some reaching wingspans of 1.7 metres and weights over 1.5 kilograms, making them the largest bats on Earth. The genus originated in Southeast Asia, Australasia, and the western Pacific, and spread west across the islands of the Indian Ocean, Mauritius, Réunion, Rodrigues, the Seychelles, the Comoros, Anjouan, Mohéli, and Pemba among them, in a slow island-to-island radiation that, for reasons still debated, never once reached the African mainland only a few hundred kilometres away.

Madagascar’s population has fared better than most of its island cousins. The Mauritian flying fox has been culled by the thousands in government-sanctioned crop-protection campaigns; Rodrigues and the Seychelles hold relict populations a fraction of their historic size; and Pemba’s flying fox survives today only on that single small island off Tanzania. Against that record, the fanihy’s Vulnerable status reads less like an isolated warning and more like the shared condition of an entire genus that made it nearly everywhere in the western Indian Ocean and then struggled to hold its ground once it arrived.

The fanihy occupies a strange legal position: it is the one Malagasy bat species specifically protected by law, while every other bat on the island is classified as game. Protection has not stopped the hunting. Fanihy are taken with nets and slingshots at their daytime roosts, and by one especially destructive method, felling the entire roost tree and clubbing the grounded animals to death, a technique that can erase a colony in a single afternoon rather than thin it gradually.

The toll shows in the numbers: an estimated 200,000 individuals remained in 2019, a decline of roughly 35 percent over twenty years, driven by habitat loss, roost disturbance, and bushmeat hunting that runs higher in urban areas than rural ones, evidence of a genuine commercial trade rather than only subsistence use. Traditional roosts across the island are being abandoned faster than new ones form.