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
1 year

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

10 years

After roughly a decade without the flying fox, large canopy trees would likely be hit hardest: in its close Mascarene relative, the Mauritian flying fox, seed dispersal by the species disproportionately benefits these trees — a plausible mechanism here too, though no dedicated quantitative study has been carried out on Rodrigues itself.

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 fell to around 70 individuals after a cyclone in the 1970s, then recovered to around 20,000 by 2016 thanks to habitat restoration — but nothing in that recovery isolates the bat's specific effect on large trees. The study on its Mauritian sister species provides the most precise mechanism available: a disproportionate benefit for canopy trees, extrapolated here by analogy.

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.

100 years

Over a century without the flying fox, Rodrigues's forest would gradually lose the large trees that depend on it most as a disperser: without it, their seeds would stay clustered near the parent tree, more vulnerable to disease and competition, and would struggle more to recolonize ground after a disturbance such as a cyclone.

Hypothesis
1000 years

Over a thousand years, this loss of dispersal could reshape the very composition of the island's forest: tree species most dependent on the flying fox would lose ground to those dispersed some other way, by wind or by other animals, and the original forest would never quite reassemble the way it was.

Hypothesis

Documentation

Last verified: August 16, 2026