A human-sized bat on the roof in the Philippines.
A photograph of the human-sized bat hanging upturned has gone viral on the internet.
Viral picture of a giant bat hanging upturned:
The photo of this giant bat went viral on the Reddit app in the year 2018. The picture of this bat got viral again last month, which a Twitter user, “alexjoestar622, tweeted”. The image posted appears to illustrate a giant and, to be more precise, a human-sized bat hanging upside down on a wire outside the building.
The tweet consists of the message and the picture like “remember when I told you all about the Philippines having human-sized bats? Yeah, this was what I was talking about.”
Many people liked this photo, and the post got thousands of likes and hundreds of striking comments. Most people found this picture horrifying, while some raised questions about the bat’s genuineness.
The wingspan of this human-sized bat is 1.7 meters which are 5.58 feet. Although the size of the bat is enormous, this bat is a vegetarian and feeds on fruit for the most part. As per the fact-checking Snopes website, the photograph of this bat illustrates a real existing animal of the world.
There is a debate going on about the species of this bat which has been captured in the photograph in the Philippines. The general agreement between people is that the image illustrates a “giant golden-crowned flying fox”. Such species of megabat are also known as “golden-capped fruit bats”; these species are solitarily found in the Philippines.
The reality of viral giant bat:
This giant golden-crowned flying fox partakes a wingspan of 5.5 feet. Although this animal only grows about a foot tall. This is what differentiates the fruit-eating bat from any other bat. Hence, these bats are not human-sized, as was affirmed in the tweet that went viral on the internet.
However, as per the Daily Mail, there has been a use of trick photography in order to make the bat look more massive in appearance than its actual size. This viral image is an instance of forced perspective photography. This photography is used to make the objects in the photo look larger, closer, smaller or a distance than their actual position. The forced perspective photography can be seen in images of tourists holding the “taj mahal” or the tourists handling the “leaning tower of Pisa”.
Moreover, the Reddit user also posted one more photo of the bat, in which it was yawning, depicting that it was awoken from a night of sleep-in daytime slumber. However, flying foxes are classically nocturnal.