A recent picture shared on Twitter of a “human-sized” bat from the Philippines is taking the internet by storm and netizens are thoroughly spooked out.
A Twitter user from the Philippines @AlexJoestar622 shared the image of what looks like a giant bat and claimed that it is a giant golden-crowned flying fox, and the post has gone viral.
Remember when I told y'all about the Philippines having human-sized bats? Yeah, this was what I was talking about pic.twitter.com/nTVIMzidbC
— Alex is a 🙁 🌴 (@AlexJoestar622) June 24, 2020
He wrote in a June 24 tweet: “Remember when I told y’all about the Philippines having human-sized bats? Yeah, this was what I was talking about.”
The post has since gotten over 109,000 retweets, over 260,000 likes and thousands of comments.
Many reacted to the post saying that they did not know the mammal existed before and some are just spooked out.
Many netizens posted comments trying to give more information on the mammals and clarified doubts people had.
Twitter user @louistenantIV wrote: “Hey, from the Philippines here. I can confirm this, they have a huge wingspan but the bodies are not really that big, more or less like the same body as a medium (bit smaller) sized dog. And yeah they only eat fruits, guavas most particularly. They’re really gentle too.”
In another tweet, the user added: “There are smaller ones hanging around trees and sometimes under roof eaves of some houses back in the provinces, these bigger ones hang around taller trees (but we rarely see them), at least the ones near our old house but last time I saw one in person was almost five years ago.”
Also known as the golden-capped fruit bat, the animal belongs to the megabat family which contains the largest bat species in the world. Megabats have the longest forearm length of any species, measuring up to 215 millimeters (8.5 inches). Its wingspan comes at an impressive 1.5–1.7 meters (4.9–5.6 feet), which is enough to cover an average-sized human. The giant golden-crowned flying fox itself could weigh up to 1.40 kilograms (3.1 pounds).
While many would consider the bats terrifying, they’re quite harmless. Their diets consist mostly of fruit and plant leaves, their main food source being figs. They spend most of the day sleeping as they are also nocturnal like other bat species.