“…Whilst significant efforts have been made to conserve Pteropus species of the western Indian Ocean islands through population surveys (Reason & Trewhella, 1994;Entwistle & Corp, 1997b;Powell & Wehnelt, 2003), ecological research (Entwistle & Corp, 1997a;Granek, 2002) and environmental education initiatives (Trewhella et al, 2005), attention has only recently been drawn to the conservation of the endemic Madagascar flying fox Pteropus rufus, despite decades of research and conservation on endemic Malagasy mammals. There are estimated to be 300,000 P. rufus in Madagascar (MacKinnon et al, 2003), two orders of magnitude more than some other Pteropus species in the western Indian Ocean (Powell & Wehnelt, 2003).…”