Bats are known in popular culture for transforming into vampires, those mythical creatures that feed on blood, causing fear and disgust among people because they’re believed to pass on disease to cattle. Vampire bats do exist, but from the 1100 species that exist on earth only 3 are bloodsuckers while the rest feed on insects, fruits, fish or nectar.

Nectarivorous bats are responsible for cross pollination in a wide variety of plants and even if they’re just as important as other pollinators, they are not as recognized for its labour and a lot of species are endangered.

It’s not very known that bats and agaves maintain a close relationship, but actually the nectarivorous bats from the genre Leptonypteris yerbabuenae, L. nivalis and Choeronycteris Mexicana are the main agave pollinators. Here it is important to differentiate between seed dispersion and pollination since they’re totally different processes but they’re very often confused. While seed dispersion is done by fruit-eating bats, by eating the fruits and its seeds, their digestive does not break down the seeds and when they defecate disseminate the fruit seed in their feces. Pollination on the other hand consists in moving the pollen from a flower to another that will receive it in a special organ for pollen reception, this will fecundate the flower producing offspring (seeds) with different genetic information.

Sexual reproduction is being affected by the intensive monoculture in the tequila production and the growing industrialization of mezcal. If the agaves flower they’re no good for agave spirit production since they have to be harvested before blooming breaking the reproductive cycle resulting in scarce food for the nectarivourous bats.