Bats And Tequila: A Once Boo-tiful Relationship Cursed By Growing Demands

At a Halloween happy hour recently in Washington, D.C., a small crowd gathered to celebrate the relationship between bats and spirits.

Not spooky spirits. Instead, think tequila and mescal.

“We’re here at a bar tonight to talk about [bats], because they are intimately tied to agave,” announced Mike Daulton, the executive director of Bat Conservation International, a nonprofit devoted to the well-being of bats.

You can’t have tequila without agave, the spiky desert plant used as its base. And it’s hard to have agave without bats — because a few species of these winged creatures are the plant’s primary pollinators. Agave co-evolved with bats over thousands of years. As a result, it’s one of the very few plants that pollinates at night. Daulton says industrial agave farming adversely affects both plants and bats.

Bats And Tequila: A Once Boo-tiful Relationship Cursed By Growing Demands

Photo: Merlin Tuttle/Bat Conservation International