Pteropodid fruit bats have a short, fast gut suited to liquid nutrition. Rather than digest fibre, they extract juice mechanically. Fruit is crushed against ridges on the hard palate, the liquid is swallowed, and the dry residue, along with seeds too large to pass, is spat out in a pellet.
The seed-dispersal consequence is significant and often misdescribed. Small seeds do pass through the gut and are voided in flight, sometimes kilometres from the parent tree. Larger seeds are dropped as spat pellets, usually closer to the feeding perch but still away from beneath the parent canopy, where seedling survival is poor. Flying foxes carry fruit away from the source tree before processing it, which spreads both routes of dispersal.
One widely repeated claim needs care. Indian flying foxes are a known reservoir for Nipah virus in South Asia, but transmission to people in documented outbreaks has been linked to contaminated raw date palm sap and to person-to-person spread, not to casual proximity to a roost.