Meet Weber A Fruit Bat That Calls Lake Superior Zoo Home

If you have been to the Lake Superior Zoo Nocturnal building then you most likely have seen Weber and his friends hanging around ( no pun intended) Weber is 16 years old and lives in the Griggs Learning Center at the Zoo!

He is an African straw-colored fruit bat who live in Central and South Africa, and get their name from the yellow fur on their back! These bats can grow between 6-9 inches from head to tail and have a wingspan of 2 ½ feet. They prefer tall trees for roosting. A bat’s wing is composed of the same four fingers as a human hand with a hook-like thumb and a skin membrane connecting the digits. Yikes, the visual of this gives me chills.

These particular bats  eat bark, flowers, nectar, leaves, and fruit, and are important seed dispersers in their ecosystem. Some other fun facts about these bats they can be found in a colony size can vary from 100,000 to 1,000,000. Over 8 million straw-colored fruit bats migrate to Kasanka National Park in Zambia in November each year, this migration is the largest mammal migration in the world!

Bats are the only true fliers in the mammal family. The bat family can be separated into two groups: mega bats and micro bats. Mega bats are usually larger in size with big eyes and an elongated snout, do not use echolocation, and eat fruit (straw-colored fruit bats are mega bats). Micro bats are like the bats we have in Minnesota and Wisconsin—they use echolocation, eat insects, and are usually quite small.

Either way I would freak out I am terrified of bats. One time when I was in the nocturnal building they were feeding the fruit bats and I saw a bunch of them crawling across a bunch of rocks to get t the food and I had to run out of the building. Yes I understand they are in a glass enclosure but I am a giant baby.