BATS AND THE IROKO TREE

Many bat trees are very valuable spiritually, commercially, nutritionally and medically. The iroko tree of Africa is no exception.

Long before its timber had achieved its present commercial star status, the iroko tree was revered by the people who lived with it.

Perhaps trees achieve sacred status because their wood builds rot-free boats and houses, because a preparation from bark, roots or leaves cures human maladies, because the trees' twig toothbrushes prevent tooth decay, because their branches burn slowly and warmly on cooking fires and their fruit destroys hunger.

Perhaps for these reasons and for others, the iroko tree is a sacred tree.

There is an African tribe, the Yoruba,who live in Nigeria and Benin among iroko trees. Immense masks standing nearly five feet tall (1.52 metres) and weighing from 40 to 60 pounds (18 to 27 kilograms) were carved from iroko tree wood. These masks were worn by strong men and paid tribute at festivals to family forebears of great importance; mothers, kings and warriors.

Descendants of African slaves from the Yoruba tribe live in Cuba, where they are also known as Lukumi. Members of Lukumi can achieve insight into humanity and the unknown by Odu.

Buddha was divinely instructed while he meditated beneath a bat-planted fig tree. A Lukumi child of the gods, Orula, was divinely instructed in the practice of Odu while he meditated, buried to the neck, beneath a bat-pollinated tree, the iroko tree.

So prized are the insights of Orula, so prized is the iroko tree that references to the tree figure in contemporary African writing.

"We live by hope but a reed never becomes an iroko tree by dreaming."

"It is from a small seed that the giant iroko tree has its beginnings.

Straw-coloured flying fox (Eidolon helvum)
Photograph: David Liebman, Lubee Bat Conservancy

The iroko tree provides food with its finger length mulberry-like fruit for bats, birds, monkeys and flying squirrels. The straw-coloured flying fox, migrating almost 1000 miles (1600 kilometres) annually in west and central Africa, feasts on iroko fruit. The bats disperse the scores of tiny seeds in each fruit far from the parent tree and thus accomplish another task on behalf of the earth.

The bats plant a colonizing tree, the iroko, whose strong seedling will reintroduce life to devastated logged-off, burnt land by its rapid germination and growth.

Dan Taylor discovered, by a carefully devised and executed experiment, that straw-coloured flying foxes from a 400,000 strong colony in Ghana could pepper hundreds of square miles, perhaps thousands, with more than 300,000,000 seeds during one night.

The iroko tree is a national treasure in Africa. It provides jobs for people and a high quality wood for the world. The iroko tree is being over-harvested. Its future is threatened.

The straw-coloured flying foxes who disperse the iroko tree seeds are also national treasures of west and central Africa.

The future of the iroko tree depends in part upon the well-being of Africa's straw-coloured flying fox colonies. Elimination of tree poaching and over-harvesting as well as protection of the pollinating bats depends on cooperation between the timber industry, the forestry department and the ministers of natural resources in the African countries that are home to the iroko tree and the straw-coloured flying foxes.

Bat Conservation International, Meet Our Flying Foxes, http://www.batcon.org/home/index.asp?idPage=80&idSubPage=74

Fujita, M.S. Tuttle, Merlin D. 1991. Flying Foxes (Chiroptera:Pteropodidae): Threatened Animals of Key Ecological and Economic Importance, Conservation Biology, Volume 5, No. 4

Fujita, M.S. 1991. Flying Fox (Chiroptera:Pteropodidae) Pollination, Seed Dispersal, and Economic Importance: A Tabular Summary of Current Knowledge, Resource Publication No. 2, Bat Conservation International

Global Tree Campaign, Tree Conservation Information Service, Milicia excelsa; http://www.unep-wcmc.org/trees/trade/mil_exc.htm

Hoch, Judith, Ph.D., The Sacred Forest:Part Two, CLBA JOURNAL 2005; http://www.church-of-the-lukumi.org/sacredtwo.htm

Neuberger Museum of Art; http://neuberger.org/africanArtDetail.php?pid=102&catname=COMMEMORATION

Written by ML Alley-Crosby who thanks Lubee Bat Conservancy (http://www.lubee.org)for their permission to use David Leibman's photograph of the straw-coloured flying fox.