Flying Foxes Threatened: Illustrates “vermin theme,” weak implementation, and limited power of CITES:

Vincenot, Christian E., Florens, F.B. Vincent, & Kingston, Tigga. Can we protect island flying foxes? Science, 1368 31 MARCH 2017 • VOL 355 ISSUE 6332 1368-1370
 
Flying foxes play key ecological roles on tropical islands, yet face rising threats
Flying Foxes Threatened: Illustrates “vermin theme,” weak implementation, and limited power of CITES:

​Flying foxes (fruit bats) illustrate three major problems I discuss in  my Wildlife Politics book: (1) Wildlife that harm the economic interests of humans are viewed as vermin; (2) The difficulty of protecting species through international bodies such as CITES, (3) the weakness of implementation due to the failure to enforce wildlife conservation laws. A science article by the following authors is the basis of this blog post: Vincenot, Christian E., Florens, F.B. Vincent, & Kingston, Tigga. Can we protect island flying foxes? Science, 1368 31 MARCH 2017 • VOL 355 ISSUE 6332 1368-1370.

Vincenot et al. state that 31 species of the bat are threatened with most of them residing on islands where it is especially difficult for them to hide from human threats. Because they feed on fruits, they are viewed as a nuisance and actually labeled as vermin in nations such as India but they also perform valuable ecoservices of pollination and seed dispersal but these positive functions are, of course, not valued by the humans whose fruit is preyed upon by them. Actually, their major threat is hunting—they are used for hunting both for consumption and their supposed medicinal benefits. Habitat loss is another major cause of threats to them. The country of the island nation, Mauritius, conducted a major cull of flying foxes. Even where they are protected, laws are not enforced by nations such as Japan and the Phillipines according to Vincenot et al. There are potential solutions such as nets over fruits and “green labeling of flying-fox friendly fruits” to compensate humans for economic losses. The authors also advocate educational efforts—they predict that unless action is taken, the threats will inevitably increase because “land-use change reduces native food resources and tropical fruit markets expand, human-bat conflicts over fruit crops are likely to increase.” The authors do cite 2 fruit bats that have been the subject of successful, prolonged conservation measures as evidence that conservation efforts can succeed.  The increasing threat to the flying foxes again shows the limited power of CITES enforcement—the species “have been listed in Appendix I or II of CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), restricting legal international trade in hunted bats” since 1989.