Video Shows How Bats Find Their Pups

Lesser long-nosed bats are working
moms.

Scientifically they’re called
Leptonycteris yerbabuenae, but conservationists know them as
the “tequila bats” that pollinate the agave plants used to make the
Mexican liquor.

After spending their nights looking for
nectar, they return to their caves to nurse their pups. It’s no
easy task. The babies are left in large clusters of other pups—all
hungrily waiting in pitch black caves.

Of all the caves these tequila bats call
home, the Pinacate and Altar Desert Reserve in the Sonoran Desert
is the largest of their maternity wards. The bats mate in central
and western Mexico every winter and, in the spring, they migrate
north to the American southwest to give birth.

National Geographic explorer Begoña
Iñarritu^[1] studied the bond between
moms and their pups. Her video footage shows a rare look at how
bats seek out and identify their babies in total
darkness.

The mother bat then maneuvers over the large cluster of babies
to search for her own.

Iñarritu describes it as a multi-sensory process. The bats rely
heavily on a combination of smell and calls to identify which baby
is their’s. Iñarritu suspects the pups may also recognize their
mothers.

“Almost at the moment she lands on the cluster, the pup starts
getting agitated and directs its body to her,” she notes.

Once the mother sniffs out her pup, she licks it until it’s
latched onto her nipple, and they fly away to a different part of a
cave.

By studying the basic daily interactions of how bats raise their
young, Iñarritu says conservation measures will be easier to
identify down the line. Earlier
this year^[2], they were the first bat
species to be removed from the U.S. Endangered Species List, but
their full recovery is tampered by environmental issues like
habitat loss.

The bat is a key pollinator in North America.