Bats comprise two very different ecological groups. The flying foxes are large and rely on good nocturnal vision and heightened sense of smell to navigate and locate their food on flowering and fruiting trees at night.

Flying-foxes are Australia’s only nocturnal, long distance pollinators and seed dispersers of native forests and cultivated plants, and also the most efficient pollinators and seed dispersers of native Australian forest trees.

Grey-headed flying fox have been observed skimming the surface of Manly Dam to drink on warm nights and feeding on flowering species such as Banksia ericifolia

Image: A Grey Headed Flying Fox, Pteropus poliocephalus, feasting on pollen. Image credit: Andrew Mercer

Small insectivorous bats (often referred to as ‘microbats’) primarily use echolocation to hunt and capture small insects, either in mid-air or on the foliage of vegetation.

Microbats play an important role in controlling insect numbers, including a range of pest species and disease carrying mosquitoes, by eating around 40% of their body weight of insects each night. That is the equivalent of an average human that weighs 70kg eating 117 Big Macs each night.

Among insectivorous bats, species can be divided into those that day-roost in hollows of old trees or those that roost in caves or artificial structures. Many are listed as threatened species in NSW.

Image: Chocolate Wattled Bat, Chalinolobus morio
Image credit: Patrick Kavanagh

Large-footed Myotis (Fishing bat),
Species: Myotis macropus
Conservation status: Threatened

Detected at Manly Dam, the Large-footed Myotis, is a specialist bat that forages for fish and aquatic insects over waterways. Fishing bats are vulnerable to destruction or disturbance of roost sites (caves and tree hollows) by development, clearing and visitation by humans and to water pollution and changes to waterways they feed from.

Pictured: Large-footed Myotis
Image credit: recorded on 2018-04-06 Image: Ansonia CC-BY-NC

During our 2020 Biodiversity Survey, Ultrasonic Anabat detectors were spread across the catchment for recording echolocation calls of microbats as they flew past a microphone. The frequency of the call of each species has it’s own unique signature that can be analysed and identified with software.

Pictured: Sonya Elwood, Northern Beaches Council, displays echolocation readouts from passing microbats on an ipad during a community bat and spotlighting walk, guided by Ecologist Dr Brad Law.


For more information about our remarkable Australian Bats and their importance to our ecosystems visit here.

Different microbat species have different preferred roosting requirements. Dependent on the species they can be found in varying numbers in caves, mines, tree hollows and/or logs, under bridges and in the roof cavity of people’s homes. Land clearing and habitat loss, invasive weeds, inappropriate fire regimes and extreme bush fires all destroy feeding and roosting sites for many microbat species.

Pictured above is the threatended Large-eared Pied Bats, Chalinolobus dwyeri, roosting in sandstone honeycomb in Manly Dam reserve. These bats roost and have their babies in caves, mines and unused bird nests.

Image credit: B. Law