Fair warning: This is not a post about ants.
I have been reading quite a few articles about bats recently, mostly because it is the last week of October, and is thus the Bat Appreciation Week. So I thought a few posts about bats and why we need to appreciate them would be appropriate for the week. The ants should not mind sharing the spotlight for a bit, because they have certainly not been abandoned.
Let us begin focusing on the bats. They are the only flying mammals, and they represent about 20% of all classified mammal species that we know about, which is a considerable proportion and that alone should be a reason to learn more about them because we can certainly expect them to have an important role in the earth's ecosystem.
I feel a little underappreciated today!
Source: pixabay
What are the bats doing this week?
Winter is approaching in the northern hemisphere. As trees shed their leaves and we acquire our winter clothing and prepare for gloomy days and skunks, bees, bears, and snakes make plans for their winter sleep, bats have a big decision to make: to hibernate or not to hibernate?
Why can’t they just drink some blood and warm themselves up?
You may have watched enough batty movies to think of bats as blind bloodsucking creatures, or as scary little flying beasts, but the real animals that fly around and sleep upside down all day in caves and abandoned houses are a bit less flamboyant. Out of about 1,240 bat species that live around the world, 3 are actually the so-called vampire bats whereas 70% of the species eat insects and the rest eat just fruits and nectar from flowers.
We shall come back to the vampires later, but the issue about hibernation is mostly a problem of the insectivores. As winter approaches, the insects themselves hibernate, or they are only found as nymphs or larvae or eggs. In other words, food for the bats is scarce and they must decide on whether to hibernate or to move to a warmer place. Some choose one and some do both.
So they sleep all winter or go to a warmer place while I am stuck in the cold and they sleep all day. Why can’t I take this week to appreciate myself instead?
Well, you should certainly appreciate yourself, no doubt about that, but bats also need our attention. In this post, let us focus on the fact that they are important pollinators.
Bats are pollinators
In the wild as well as in our agricultural fields, bats help in pollination which is the process of transfering pollen grains from the male part of a flower to the female part of a flower. Pollination can occur between the male and female parts of the same flower or different flowers of the same plant (which is called self-pollination), or it can occur between flowers of different plants (which is called cross-pollination).
Cross-pollination is better for the survival of plants because it produces genetic diversity which leads to healthier, disease-resistant progenies. This is where bats (and other flower-visiting animals) play an important role. As they visit one flower after another for food, they act as carriers of pollen grains. So the flowers get pollinated, and the animals get the food making this a mutually beneficial process.
Is this really important?
Yes.
As an illustration, allow me to introduce Dr Rodrigo A. Medellín, also known as the Bat Man of Mexico. He has been credited with being a super-hero savior of bats as well as, believe it or not, tequila.
Who took my tequila flowers?
*Source: pixabay
Tequila is made by cooking and fermenting the juice from a cactus-like plant called the blue agave or the tequila agave. When farmers found out that they could produce more juice quickly if they harvested the agave plants before they bloomed into flowers, they proceeded to do exactly that.
During this process of monocropping, the agave roots are left in the fields after harvest so that they will sprout again. The new sprouts are then replanted in the field. When replanting, the sprouts from the plants with the highest yield in the previous harvest are chosen. This results in even more yield in less and less time, but also gets rid of genetic diversity pretty quickly.
And that is what was happening in Mexico until the 1990s.
What about the bats?
Let us also meet the lesser long-nosed bat of North America that survives on the nectar from the flowers of night-blooming cactus and agave plants. So when the agave farmers in Mexico started to practice monocropping and stopped letting the agave plants bloom, the bats suffered due to lack of food, and their number fell to less than 1,000 in 1988.
But that was not the end of the story. The plants were also waiting for a disaster to happen.
In the 1990s, a fungus attacked the tequila fields and it was indeed a disaster as rows and rows of the crop got destroyed by the disease. This was recognized to be the effect of poor land management, overpopulation, and the lack of genetic diversity resulting from the monocropping.
That was a wake-up call.
Since then, Rodrigo Medellin has been working with organizations and farmers and things have been improving. On his advice, some farmers have started letting 5% of their crops grow and flower before harvesting them. Bats have started visiting the flowers again, and this article from May 2017 mentions that the number of these bats has increased to 200,000 and is about to be taken off the list of endangered animals. The agave crop is also getting more diverse, and you can now find bat-friendly tequilas in the market.
I think this story is a nice demonstration of the delicate balance present in an ecosystem, and it also shows us why bats are worthy of appreciation.
Along with the agave plants, over 500 species of plants including mango, guava, cocoa, and durian also rely on bats for pollination.
In some of my future posts, I will focus on a few other appreciable traits of bats such as their role in seed dispersion in the wild and their role in pharmaceutical research. I will also try to write a little about their ultrasonic navigation and about the evolution of flight in bats.
This page on the U.S. National Park Service website has some suggestions if you would like to end the week with some bat-related activities.
Links to references and image sources are provided in the text.
I never knew bats played a pollinator function... So this was a really interesting and informative post for me. Your ant posts are fantastic, glad to see that you are equally skilled at writing about other topics. Looking forward to what you share next!
I'm glad you find the posts interesting. You have been very encouraging about the ant posts too, and I'm thankful for that. I hope I will be able to keep up with it. As always, thanks for reading. :)
The article is very thought-provoking and interesting . Bats have undeservedly bad reputation, so it's very important inform people about this amazing animals and their interesting ethology. Few days ago I saw a nice document about Bev Brown, who lives in Australia, near downtown Melbourne and has dedicated her life to rescue bats. @kukang
Thanks for reading and for the comment. I will have to look into what Bev Brown is doing. :)
I have to admit I changed my mind on bats after reading your post :)
So far I thought they only ate mice and other small animals.
Yeah, things in nature seem to always have interesting, intricate roles if we just go a bit deeper. I'm glad the post managed to change your mind. I'm sure the bats are glad too. Thanks for reading. :)
Wow... this is really enlightening. I never knew bats played so many other roles in the eco system. I know they hibernate, but i didnt know bats are also pollinators. I thought they only eat insects and suck blood... I'll definitely begin to appreciate them more, they do play much more important roles than they are credited for... thanks for sharing.
I am glad you found it informative. Thank you for reading. :)
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Well, there was tequila but it was more expensive. I found an article from 2000 here It's not 1990s, but it talks about how the fungus (and other things) led to a "skyrocketing" of tequila price.
I am worried that tequila would become scarce due to the difficult of harvesting blue agave. Good thing they found some help from bats, that I never thought would be so involved in the ecosystem.
Oh yeah, that would be a problem. :) They do seem to be working hard to not let that happen.
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Thanks! Good to know.
Genial la historia, entre la plantas de agave y su relación con el murciélago. Es importante, este tipo de post puesto que da a conocer que estos animales no son los que nos venden en los cuentos de terror o películas. Sino que contribuyen con un equilibrio ecológico. Saludos y feliz día.
I used google translate to read this. Thanks for the comment! You have a good day too. :)
Wonderful post.Don't stop sharing.i want to see more.
I'm flagging this because it appears that you post the same comment everywhere.
follback mr please
I think all creations are with purpose and interesting it's just a matter of time and a large dose of research to find out how marvelous all creations are. In fact I think by studying them we can improved human life as a whole. Bats have high end echo technology that we as humans have not yet been able to replicate
nice
pls my post comment @anisullah