Tiny Nectar Eating Bat

Nectar bats send gentle but very sophisticated calls, which scientists refer to as frequency modulated.
These calls trade distance for detail. Most effective within 12 feet, they reflect back pictures that convey precise informationabout a target's size, texture, angle, depth and other qualities only a nectar bat can interpret.
The darkened Mucuna flower's beacon petal's cup shape acts as a mirror bouncing information back hard and clear. The bat speeds onto the blossom in a high-speed embrace. The bat crams its head inb to the cupped opening, thrusting its snout into it. The bat's long tongue springs a hidden switch, exploding the pea-pod keel. As it laps deep into the flower's nectary, spring-loaded anthers burst from the keel and gild the bat's tiny rump with a spray of golden pollen. The blossom is detonated and licked dry, and the bat is gone.

Each bat makes several hundred flower visits each night. Mucuna holtonii, with their exploding mechanism and generous snort of nectar, are among the rare flowers that warrant actual landings. Nectar bats can empty the flowers of less lavish species in a hovering lasting a mere fifth of a second.

We now know that bats have the ability to see with sounds, and plants themselves have shaped their flowers to be heard, becoming as brilliant to the bat's ear as their brightly colored daytime counterparts are to the eyes of their pollinators.

In such intricate interactions, nature reveals its most profound magic.

Nectar bats evolved in fruitful partnership with specific families of flowering plants, a relationship called chiropterophily-from Chiroptera, the mammalian order of bats, and phily, from philia, Greek for love. But this is no love story. The driving force behind the bat-flowering partnership is not romance but the primary business of life survival and reproduction.

Trading nectar for pollination is a delicate transaction, one that presents plants with a quandry. It behooves night flowering plants to be thrifty with their nectar, because well-fed bats will visit fewer flowers. But if a plant is too stingy, a bat will take its services elsewhere. Over millenia, bat pollinated plants have evolved a neat solution: they sidestep the problem of nectar quantity (as well as Quality) by investing instead in maximizing the bat's foraging efficiency. So plants that flower at nightproffer their wares in exposed, fly-through positions-easy for bats to find and drink from and removed from cover for arboreal predators such as tree snakes and opossums. They spike their flowers' scent with sulphur compounds-long distance signals irresistible to nectar bats, but not to humans. Bat flower perfume has been described as very nasty.The mucuna vine and certain other plants go one step further. They shape their flowers to catch a bat' ear.

Thank you Inda. This looks very interesting. I will get the National Geographic March issue.

The little bat looks so sweet.



Love,
yoko

Thank you for this very interesting post. Like yoko, I want to look at the March 2014 National Geographic issue.
This tiny bat looks like a cute little bear.
I love the way it is covered with pollen.

Thank you yoko and Vicky.

The tiny little bat is sweet, and looks like a little bear.



The day is thanked for the flowers
that blossomed in the night.

Tagore

Thank you Inda.

This is quite an amazing story, and I agree, the bat is very sweet, and does look like a tiny, little bear.

Thank you Inda.

Nice post.

Sincerely,
Gisele