It is opportunistic in its eating habits, feeding on whatever is available. Little yellow-shouldered bat (Sturnira lilium) is another frugivore, critical for seed dispersal. The Mexican fruit bat also has harems, and can live as long as nine years. Because it carries its food all the way back to its roost, it is an important seed disperser. It loves figs, which don’t grow in the Parque Nacional in Huatulco, but does eat other fruit and vegetation. Its range is Mexico to northwestern South America. This is a large, stout bat that roosts in caves, hollow trunks, and under palm leaves. Jamaican, common, or Mexican fruit bat (Artibeus jamaicensis). They change their feeding behavior with the position of the moon, decreasing feeding time when it is full, most likely to avoid predators that hunt by moonlight, like owls. They are polygamous with groups called harems, one male and two to five females. Obviously, this bat eats fruit, and occurs from Mexico through southern Brazil, and on some islands in the Caribbean. Great fruit-eating bat (Artibeus lituratus). The National Commission on the Protection of National Areas finds that here on the Oaxacan coast, and more specifically in the Parque Nacional de Huatulco, have six species of bats in the park. Bat species that eat insects have an extraordinary capability – they hunt by “echolocation,” that is, they emit high frequency sounds that bounce off their prey (e.g., swarms of mosquitoes) and bounce back to the bats’ highly sensitive ears. The two traits in combination that uniquely characterize bats are that they have “colonized” the air and they are nocturnal they fly and feed at night. The rotundus part of the name, which means “portly,” comes from the fact that they get so fat after drinking blood they can’t fly again until they pee away a substantial amount of urine. There are over 1,400 species of bats – among them is the much maligned but well named common vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus, which occurs from Uruguay to Mexico, including our lovely Parque Nacional de Huatulco. They are the second most diverse group of mammals following rodents (mice, rats, rabbits, and other chewing animals). By one estimate, from 2011, bat predation on insects was saving $23 billion annually for agriculture in the United States.”īats are a hugely diverse group of mammals, varying in habitat, behavior, diet, morphology, longevity, you name it. Mexican free-tailed bats eat cotton bollworm moths in Texas. According to science writer David Quammen, “A single colony of big brown bats in the American Midwest, by consuming 600,000 cucumber beetles in a year, prevents 33 million cucumber beetle larvae from feeding on the next year’s crop. Besides insects, nectar, pollen, and fruit, some species also eat vertebrates. They consume insects that would otherwise damage crops, and pollinate numerous species of plants, including agave, or maguey, as it is called here in Mexico. This is unfortunate, because bats are extremely important in many ecosystems.

Humans have passed a nasty fungus to bats, called the white nose syndrome, most likely from Europe, that has led to huge die offs of this essential mammal, particularly when they are hibernating and vulnerable. It can happen in reverse as well, as COVID-19 is known to have recently passed from humans to the mountain gorillas of the equatorial African rainforest in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Spillovers generally occur when we humans encroach on a wild animal’s habitat. Bats carry a huge assortment of viruses to which they are not susceptible. Bats were also responsible for the SARS virus outbreak in 2002 and are notorious vectors of rabies. It’s apparently very difficult to track bat migratory patterns, so there’s only one bat that’s well known for migrating south to winter in Mexico.īats have been getting a lot of bad press these days, given that they were the most likely source of the spillover, the technical term for pathogens jumping from animals to humans, of the COVID-19 outbreak that started near Wuhan, China last year. In cooler climates, the majority of bats just hibernate for the winter.

Bats? Maybe not so much, but it’s hard to tell. Mexico is well-known for hosting migrating birds and butterflies on their seasonal journeys north and south.

Bats hibernate or migrate