Grey-headed flying fox

The grey-headed flying fox (Pteropus poliocephalus) is a highly mobile nectivorous and frugivorous bat that is endemic to eastern Australia. They forage across a wide range of habitat types, travel thousands of kilometres each year, and exhibit preference for particular foods despite their generalist and adaptive foraging habits.  

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Like many other threatened species, habitat loss and fragmentation are key threats to the grey-headed flying fox, whose habitat often overlaps with areas facing high levels of urban development pressure. Human-wildlife conflict also plays a role, particularly in areas where urban development is encroaching on preferred roosting habitat or where large influxes of flying foxes occur in response to local availability of preferred food resources.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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To understand the drivers of flying fox movement, we need to understand how their use of food resources and foraging habitat changes through time and in response to environmental cues. Our research focuses on examining diet of grey-headed flying foxes roosting in the Toowoomba local government area with a high level of temporal replication and developing spatially and temporally explicit models to examine the relationship between rainfall, temperature and grey-headed flying fox roost occupation across Queensland. If we can better predict mass movement of flying foxes, we can implement proactive management strategies to mitigate human-wildlife conflict and ensure the persistence of these important pollinators and seed dispersers.

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Over the life of the project, 1,440 faecal samples will be collected over 24 months and genetically sequenced to identify diet species. Since flying foxes respond strongly to fluctuating resource availability, we are focussing on a high level of temporal replication in one regional location to understand fine-scale changes in the species’ diet through time. This study will identify the key diet species and how this shifts across resource fluctuations, enabling us to locate the key foraging resources accessed during periods of food shortage. These will feed into local-scale foraging habitat mapping to support local government conservation and development planning and vegetation management.​​​​​​

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