Fruit bats play an important role in the ecology of the rainforest by dispersing – or spreading - seeds and pollen. What do bats eat? Macaws, monkeys, fruit bats, grasshoppers secondary consumers: Food chain of the amazon rainforest. W hat eats a possum (or opossum?) and many plants choose to hitch a ride with fruit bats. The birds then drag the bats outside and eat them. Fruit bats are a kind of large bat that eats fruit, but not the way you do. Most eat insects. Fruits are a plant’s way of enticing animals to eat and disperse their seeds. They have small ears, long noses and resemble foxes. Rainforest animals eat a wide and varied diet, including fruit, leaves, insects, nuts, seeds, bark, grasses and other animals. Ninety percent of their food is fruit, coming from at least 400 different types of plants and trees. Bats disperse seeds by either eating fruits with small whole seeds and releasing them in their droppings or by spitting out larger seeds in pieces of chewed up fruit. The rainforest is estimated to contain approximately half the world's animal species. What do possums eat? The scientific name for bats (Chiroptera) originates from the Greek words of kheir (meaning hand) and pteron (meaning wing). After that, a fruit grows and inside the fruit it has seeds. Orangutans are another mammal with a fruit-filled diet. Rainforest relationships are better described as a web — a rainforest food web. The pollinators are the carpenter bees, hummingbirds, bumble bees, wasps, and bats. Fruit bat, any of numerous tropical bat species belonging either to the Old World fruit bats (family Pteropodidae), such as flying foxes, or to fruit-eating genera of the American leaf-nosed bats (family Phyllostomidae), especially those of the genus Artibeus (see Jamaican fruit . Bats sometimes are even eaten by fish that grab them when they are skimming over bodies of water as they try to catch insects. by Donald W. Thomas From the low hillock where I sat at the LAMTO Tropical Ecology Research Station in Ivory Coast, West Africa, the savanna appeared unusually sharp in the cool early – dawn air. Some of these species are vegetarians, … Seven subfamilies include species that feed on fruit, nectar and/or insects, plus carnivores that eat small frogs, birds, rodents and even other bats. First off, possums are marsupials, which means the mothers carry their young in a pouch, just like that other marsupial, the kangaroo.Different species of opossums are found throughout North and South America. Average rainfall = 50 to 260 inches. The seeds from the fruit are distributed through the bats' excrement. Distribution: Queensland is home to a recorded 52 species of bats … Rainforest Bats. . Fruit bats are distinct from their insect-eating cousins. Phyllostomidae (New World leaf-nosed bats) is an amazingly diverse family of at least 160 species that share little beyond a leaflike structure atop their noses. 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