Name: Love tequila, love pollinating bats!
Uploaded: 2025-03-12T13:18:07.000Z
Duration: 3 min 1 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

That little golden liquid that many of us associate with a good night out.

Did you know that in America over 50 million liters of tequila are drunk every year?

There are lots of interesting facts about this little liquid, but one in particular has something to do with where I am right now.

Here in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, in the largest bat collection in the world.

And I know just the right person to talk to.

Uh, it involves this little bat right here, Leptonycteris nivalis, which is a species of nectar feeding bat that occurs in Mexico and migrates up into the southwestern US every year.

Tequila liquor is made from agave plants and this little species of bat, Leptonycteris.

Has evolved to feed on the nectar of agave flowers.

And in the process of doing that, it pollinates agaves.

Moves the pollen from one plant to the other by sticking its long muzzle and a very long tongue, which can be up to about a third the body length of the bat.

Into that flower to the base of the flower where the nectar is, gets its meal and in the process the fur gets covered with pollen from the agave flower.

So, do bats only pollinate agave or does it get other?

They, they pollinate lots of species of plants.

This is just one species of nectar feeding bat, but there's actually hundreds of nectar feeding bats.

And many of them feed on many, many different species of of flowers, uh, during the course of the year.

So, probably all told bats are responsible for pollinating.

And so we know like, you know, bees and birds might be attracted to flowers because of the way they smell.

Do bats get attracted to the flowers in the same way?

Yes, they do, so the all of the flowers, all of the plants that are bat pollinated, the flowers are open at night.

They have a whole series of morphological adaptations to attract bats.

Since they're open at night, they're usually whitish or greenish in color.

They're not very brightly colored like plants that are trying to attract.

Uh, birds, for instance, are frequently red.

Bat pollinated flowers usually white, they usually do have an odor, but the odor is frequently not terribly attractive to us.

It's not the normal sweet smelling flowers, roses and the like that we're used to.

Rather it has a very intense, almost overripe smell to it and so it's kind of like a rotten smell.

Yeah, almost a rotten smell in many cases.

Well, so we definitely wouldn't want those in our house then.

Our thanks to Dr. Don Wilson, Mammal Curator Emeritus, Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, Merlin Tuttle, Wildlife Photographer, Bat Conservation International, Michael Quinn, National Park Service.

Produced by Micaela Jemison, Smithsonian Science.