The Dispersal of Plants by Bats (Chiropterochory)

The bats which play a role in the dispersal of plants belong to two different groups, a) the Phyllostomidae, a family of the Microchiroptera of which three subfamilies deviated from the general habits of this suborder and specialized in this direction and b) the whole suborder of the Megachiroptera. The first group lives in the warmer parts of the New World, the second in those of the Old World. The ecology of the Megachiroptera has recently been reviewed by Eisentraut (1945) from the zoological point of view, so that I may refer to his compilation for this aspect. Of special importance for our purpose is his distributional map, reproduced here in part as Fig. 1. It embraces the group of the Macroglossinae (nectar feeders), which is here of no interest, and the Pteropinae, on the whole true fruit-eaters, though some of its members also have a tendency towards nectar feeding. The distributional area of the Pteropinae is larger than that of the Macroglossinae.