Every now and then a picture goes viral on social media simply because it has utterly captured our collective imaginations in such a way that we as human beings immediately do two things: share it, and then demand to know if it's actually real.
I'm thinking of that absolutely massive cow that went viral a little while back, of those trick-of-the-light pictures that mean we all see different colors when we look at that cursed dress on Twitter, and those images where there's a predatory animal hidden and you have to try and spot them.
Watch this video all about the biggest bat in the world:Well, dear reader, allow me to throw another scarcely believable viral photograph atop the creaking mass of predecessors, because an image of a truly gigantic bat has been doing the rounds on Twitter, and frankly it's left everyone flabbergasted.
"Remember when I told y'all about the Philippines having human-sized bats? Yeah, this was what I was talking about,"the image is captioned, and while "human-sized" might be something of a stretch, there's no getting away from the fact that this is one utterly colossal bat.
One commenter replied to the original tweet, writing, "Heya, from the Philippines here. I can confirm this, they have a huuuuuge wingspan but the bodies are not really that big, more or less like the same body as a medium (bit smaller) sized dog. And yeah they only eat fruits, guavas most particularly. They're really gentle too."
Another Twitter user wrote, "The idea scared me at first, but now that I think about it I'd probably have a fruit basket ready for them just in case."
While the images are indeed real, as confirmed by Snopes last year, they may still give a slightly unrealistic perspective on just how big these giant bats are, given that social media posts labelled them as "human-sized." Nevertheless, the flying fox bat species - one of the largest in the world - have a wingspan growing to nearly 5 1/2 feet.
Many news outlets have reported that the bat in question is a Giant Golden-Crowned Flying-Fox, a species that is hunted by poachers and sadly in danger of going extinct.