How many baby Thomas’s fruit-eating bats are in a litter?
A Thomas’s fruit-eating bat (Artibeus watsoni) usually gives birth to around 1 babies.
Upon birth, they weight 56 grams (0.12 lbs) and measure 1.7 cm (0′ 1″). They are a member of the Phyllostomidae family (genus: Artibeus). An adult Thomas’s fruit-eating bat grows up to a size of 51.6 cm (1′ 9″).
To have a reference: Humans obviously usually have a litter size of one ;). Their babies are in the womb of their mother for 280 days (40 weeks) and reach an average size of 1.65m (5′ 5″). They weight in at 62 kg (137 lbs), which is obviously highly individual, and reach an average age of 75 years.
Thomas’s fruit-eating bat (Dermanura watsoni), sometimes also popularly called Watson’s fruit-eating bat, is a species of bat in the family Phyllostomidae. It is found in southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia. Its South American range is to the west of the Andes. The species name is in honor of H. J. Watson, a plantation owner in western Panama who used to send specimens to the British Natural History Museum, where Oldfield Thomas would often describe them.
Other animals of the family Phyllostomidae
Thomas’s fruit-eating bat is a member of the Phyllostomidae, as are these animals:
- Short-headed broad-nosed bat weighting only 14 grams
- Pale spear-nosed bat with 1 babies per pregnancy
- Honduran white bat with 1 babies per pregnancy
- Miller’s long-tongued bat weighting only 13 grams
- Buffy flower bat with 1 babies per pregnancy
- Micronycteris nicefori with 1 babies per pregnancy
- Gnome fruit-eating bat weighting only 10 grams
- Greater broad-nosed bat weighting only 37 grams
- Handley’s tailless bat with 1 babies per pregnancy
- Southern long-nosed bat with 1 babies per pregnancy
Animals that share a litter size with Thomas’s fruit-eating bat
Those animals also give birth to 1 babies at once:
- Moose
- Eisentraut’s shrew
- Ruwenzori otter shrew
- Black-bearded tomb bat
- Linnaeus’s two-toed sloth
- Gray-bellied night monkey
- Hottentot golden mole
- Harp seal
- Western red colobus
- Rufous soft-furred spiny rat
Animals with the same weight as a Thomas’s fruit-eating bat
What other animals weight around 11 grams (0.02 lbs)?
- Mindanao shrew weighting 10 grams
- Hildegarde’s shrew weighting 10 grams
- California leaf-nosed bat weighting 11 grams
- Coastal sheath-tailed bat weighting 12 grams
- Short-tailed shrew tenrec weighting 9 grams
- Mexican free-tailed bat weighting 12 grams
- Acuminate horseshoe bat weighting 12 grams
- Orinoco sword-nosed bat weighting 9 grams
- Northern bat weighting 10 grams
- Drouhard’s shrew tenrec weighting 10 grams