My dear friend Ed Kanze, naturalist and writer extraordinaire, just wrote a column so informative I have to share it.
We think we are such hotshots. Without bats, where would we be? Lunch as we know it would be greatly diminished. Tequila would vanish. And domestic ease would shortly follow it, if I had to live without chocolate.
Here is Ed's latest All Things Natural article: BANANAS FOR BATS
Sink your teeth into a banana. Savor the sweet, soft flesh. Now is a good time to think about bats. Together, bats and tall leafy plants worked in concert over a vast stretch of time to invent the long yellow fruits we enjoy.
Yes, we'd have no bananas without bats, or at least banana plants. Bats pollinated the original wild ones, but commercially grown bananas require no such services. Without bats, other food plants might not exist, too, or exist in such diminished quantity that market forces would push up their costs. We are all beholden to bats, whose wings are really their hands.
There would be no Tequila Sunrises in a world without bats. Bats are chief pollinators of the agave plants whose fermented floral parts give rise to the alcoholic drink.
We think we are such hotshots. Without bats, where would we be? Lunch as we know it would be greatly diminished. Tequila would vanish. And domestic ease would shortly follow it, if I had to live without chocolate.
Here is Ed's latest All Things Natural article: BANANAS FOR BATS
Sink your teeth into a banana. Savor the sweet, soft flesh. Now is a good time to think about bats. Together, bats and tall leafy plants worked in concert over a vast stretch of time to invent the long yellow fruits we enjoy.
Yes, we'd have no bananas without bats, or at least banana plants. Bats pollinated the original wild ones, but commercially grown bananas require no such services. Without bats, other food plants might not exist, too, or exist in such diminished quantity that market forces would push up their costs. We are all beholden to bats, whose wings are really their hands.
There would be no Tequila Sunrises in a world without bats. Bats are chief pollinators of the agave plants whose fermented floral parts give rise to the alcoholic drink.
In the original draft of this story, I explained that bats have much to do with the production of mangoes, avocados, dates, coconuts, peppercorns, cloves, vanilla, and chocolate. I gleaned my information from internet sources one would be inclined to trust: websites maintained by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bat Conservation International, for example, and ones not quite so reliable but still often excellent, such as Wikipedia. Yet a tropical biologist friend who read the early draft passed it along to Neotropical bat biologist friends, and egad! They tell me that nearly all the claims I relayed from my sources were wrong.
While the bats in our part of North America specialize in catching bugs, it's those bats of warmers parts of the world that serve plants as pollinators and seed-dispersers. In addition, their droppings, or guano, are sometimes used to enrich soil, and more remarkably, to produce saltpeter, an essential ingredient of gunpowder.
While the bats in our part of North America specialize in catching bugs, it's those bats of warmers parts of the world that serve plants as pollinators and seed-dispersers. In addition, their droppings, or guano, are sometimes used to enrich soil, and more remarkably, to produce saltpeter, an essential ingredient of gunpowder.
Some of the bats of the tropics and subtropics that contribute to our cuisine are known as flying foxes and fruit bats. Some are as large as red-tailed hawks. The best-looking, which are exceedingly handsome indeed, look like well-bred, well-groomed Chihuahuas in black capes, perhaps out for a night at the opera.
If you're a plant and you want to attract flying animals as big as miniature dogs to pollinate your flowers and to carry away your fruit, it's in your best interests to be sturdy and large. A great many plants that have such relationships with bats are trees or tree-like, and their flowers tend to be big, too. Flowers pollinated by hummingbirds are brightly colored and trumpet-shaped, at least for the most part. Flowers pollinated by flying foxes are often white or blandly colored and shaped like bells or dinner plates. They tend to radiate a strong sweet or musky smell suggestive of overripe fruit.
If you're a plant and you want to attract flying animals as big as miniature dogs to pollinate your flowers and to carry away your fruit, it's in your best interests to be sturdy and large. A great many plants that have such relationships with bats are trees or tree-like, and their flowers tend to be big, too. Flowers pollinated by hummingbirds are brightly colored and trumpet-shaped, at least for the most part. Flowers pollinated by flying foxes are often white or blandly colored and shaped like bells or dinner plates. They tend to radiate a strong sweet or musky smell suggestive of overripe fruit.
Not all bat-pollinated plants provide humans with food. South American balsa trees, the source of the buoyant trunks explorer Thor Heyerdahl used to build his raft Kon Tiki, are pollinated at least partly by bats. Bats also play Cupid to the flowers of kapok trees, whose fruits yield fibers used to stuff bedding, pillows, and life jackets. Africa's baobab trees, which bear great aggregations of stamens likely adapted for dusting bats with pollen, are also bat pollinated. So are saguaro and organpipe cactuses.
Bats are widely credited on bat-related websites with the pollination or distribution of the seeds of chocolate, almonds, cashews, figs, and allspice. But the bat scientists who wrote me say this isn't true. This serves as a reminder that that facts can be slippery, and we must be careful where we get them. It also goes to show that while scientists are doing an extraordinary job of learning about bats, they're keeping most of the information to themselves and not sharing it effectively with we who pay their salaries.
Remember when Ronald Reagan cried, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" I say, Tear down the barriers of arcane and thorny language that separate science from the rest of us, and let's have a free and democratic exchange of learning and ideas.
Bats are widely credited on bat-related websites with the pollination or distribution of the seeds of chocolate, almonds, cashews, figs, and allspice. But the bat scientists who wrote me say this isn't true. This serves as a reminder that that facts can be slippery, and we must be careful where we get them. It also goes to show that while scientists are doing an extraordinary job of learning about bats, they're keeping most of the information to themselves and not sharing it effectively with we who pay their salaries.
Remember when Ronald Reagan cried, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" I say, Tear down the barriers of arcane and thorny language that separate science from the rest of us, and let's have a free and democratic exchange of learning and ideas.
Ed has so many talents they're hard to list. His wildlife photography rivals and sometimes accompanies the books he has published on the Adirondacks, Australia and New Zealand. I deeply love his photo-biography The World of John Burroughs. Burroughs, not John Muir, was THE naturalist writer of his time. Makes me want to build my own log house and chronicle its wildlife and seasons.
P.S. I am both glad and sad to report that Ed's richly illustrated hardcover The World of John Burroughs, while out of print, can be purchased for .33 cents on Amazon. To quote Ed regarding Nobel Prize winner Patrick White's forgotten books—"the fate of great literature these days."
P.S. I am both glad and sad to report that Ed's richly illustrated hardcover The World of John Burroughs, while out of print, can be purchased for .33 cents on Amazon. To quote Ed regarding Nobel Prize winner Patrick White's forgotten books—"the fate of great literature these days."
