Large fruit-eating bat

The large fruit-eating bat, Artibeus amplus, is a bat in the family Phyllostomidae, described by Charles O. Handley in 1987. It is recorded from three countries of northern South America: Colombia, Guyana and Venezuela. Although its English name points to fruit, the species is known for a less usual habit: it is one of only a few microbats that eat leaves, a behaviour seen mostly in the megabats, the large fruit bats. Its taxonomic status in northern South America was reviewed in a paper in the Journal of Mammalogy in 1993, and its leaf eating was studied in a paper in Acta Chiropterologica in 2011 that found it to be a non-seasonal phenomenon. The International Union for Conservation of Nature rates the species as Least Concern.