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If you build it, will they come? Maybe, but it could take a while. Bats are very discriminating house hunters.More >

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It takes more than a village to save an endangered species, but it's a good place to start. The Rodrigues fruit bat has benefited tremendously from local reforestation efforts, yet a genetically viable future continues to be dependent upon international captive breeding programs. Critically endangered, and cute as a button, these rare bats have had no trouble catching the eye of conservationists and villagers alike.

When their population plummeted to below 100 in 1975, world-renowned naturalist Gerald Durrell was prompted to collect 23 of the last remaining Rodrigues fruit bats from the wild and establish two emergency breeding colonies as a hedge against their extinction. Thirty years later these amazingly resilient animals have come back from the brink, with wild numbers currently in excess of 5,000. The Philadelphia Zoo's role in the story of the Rodrigues fruit bat began with a field study that led to the creation of an awarding-winning conservation program.

It was the mid-1990s when Philadelphia Zoo senior curator of mammals Kim Lengel and former Philadelphia Zoo director of international projects, Heidi Jamieson traveled to Rodrigues, a small volcanic speck of an island in the southwestern Indian Ocean east of Madagascar. Virtually impossible to spot on a map, Rodrigues measures only 11 miles long and 5 miles wide. Smaller still are the patches of secondary forest which are all that remain of the island's once lush native plant life. Despite severe habitat loss, the fruit bat population had grown to approximately 550 individuals from the less than 100 that were left in the wild twenty years before Kim and Heidi's arrival. The task that lay ahead of these two ambitious researchers was twofold; (1) assess the level of genetic diversity in the wild bat population and (2) establish an environmental education program on Rodrigues to raise local awareness of the issues they face.

Spending two months on a tropical island surrounded by white sandy beaches and coral reefs may sound like a dream vacation; but when sunbathing and snorkeling are replaced with mist netting and collecting skin samples from the wings of bats, it begins to sound more like work — but still a dream vacation for some. In addition to the skin samples taken from wild Rodrigues fruit bats, Durrell's captive colony on the neighboring island of Mauritius was also sampled.

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