The staff of MLP is better at natural history than I thought

[profbutters]

Spoilers for S4E7:

[Spoiler (click to open)]There were a bunch of arguments about Applejack being right, the bats were bad, and even questions about bats spitting, as opposed to shitting, the seeds.

Turns out the Cayman Islands National Trust website answers all those questions.

The Wikipedia article is pretty damned informative, too. Turns out some of them do suck

Comments

[insaneladybug]

Hmm, I wish they'd brought some of this stuff into the episode more, especially the eating too-ripe fruit and insects bit. Seemed like they focused more on the seeds growing new trees part, and since it takes years to grow more trees, that wasn't the best part to accentuate.

Of course, on the other hand, Applejack said that the regular fruit bats lived in the West Orchard, whereas these things were vampire fruit bats. In real-life, there's fruit bats, and there's vampire bats, but I'm not sure there's such a thing as a vampire fruit bat. Who knows what a (likely fictitious) creature like that would do.

Intriguing that some fruit bats actually do suck the fruit, though!

[profbutters]

Oh, but there is such a thing as a vampire fruit bat! They're called giant flying foxes--Pteropus vampyrus. But they don't really live anywhere that grows apples. They mostly like things like mango and durian. (Durian actually needs bat pollination.) They can be a pain in the butt to farmers, plus some people like to eat them, so they're not doing that well. And they're LOUD. But they have sweet faces. (I was looking for a video, but I keep nodding off

[insaneladybug]

Huh. Wow. That's definitely interesting!

**snarks.** I was actually surprised when the barn falling over was treated in a serious manner in the family reunion episode, since it's happened so much. I figured it would just be a silly visual gag again.