Here's a photograph of a large fruit bat that I took in an undisclosed location. I don't know its exact length, but it's certainly longer than a foot which is a lot bigger than the bats I've encounter in my cave exploration days. Unlike most other bats, the fruit bat has good eye sight, but it can't land very well. Most of the time, they sort of crash into the tree or bush they're trying to land on. As for what they eat, their name says it the best.
It was a very overcast day (actually it was raining fairly hard) when I took this photograph. The lighting on the bat was dim as you can see from the exposure information and I was hand holding the camera at its extreme telephoto setting. This is an excellent example of how well the anti-shake technology used in this camera works.
I used my Minolta DiMAGE A1 digital camera for this photograph. The exposure was 1/10 of a second at f/4.0 with the camera set for ISO 100 in RAW mode. The lens focal length was set to 50.8mm which is equivalent to about 200mm on a 35mm film camera. I used Adobe Photoshop CS to perform the raw conversion and processing. Photograph by Rick Scott.
Updated: 18 November 2004