Bats: 10 Essential Bat Facts, Plus Photo Gallery!
Bat fact 7: Megachiroptera (megabats) such as flying foxes do not use echolocation.
Flying foxes – a group of Old World bats found in Australia, Africa, and Asia – find their diet of ripe fruit using eyesight and an excellent sense of smell.
Pictured: Spectacled flying fox
Image: flickr.com/shekgraham/ / CC BY 2.0
This is actually not true. Recent studies have shown that bats belong to a clade called Laurasiatheria, that includes moles, shrews, cetaceans, ungulates, carnivores, pangolines, etc. Primates, on the other hand, are more closely related to lagomorphs and rodents than to bats. A good review of the higher-level phylogeny of mammals is “The new framework for understanding placental mammal evolution” BioEssays (2009) 31: 853-864
I didn’t realize bats pollinated! This is especially good since I had heard that honeybees are disappearing (I guess due to insecticides or other reasons – I’m not sure why).