05 April 2020

Pollinator bat after a busy night

Lesser Long-nose bats are connoisseurs of cactus. With tongues as long as their bodies, lesser long-nosed bats (Leptonycteris yerbabuena) are unsung heroes in maintaining fragile desert ecosystems...

Being agile fliers, the bats hover over the blossoms as they poke their slender noses deep within. Using their long, brush-tipped tongues to lap up sweet nectar, the bats then emerge from their banquet with heads covered in pollen.
Photo and text from the National Park Service, via.

2 comments:

  1. It reminds me of a cartoon that I saw 40 or 50 years ago in either Playboy, the New Yorker or the National Lampoon, where a woman fairy is lying in bed up in a plant leaf in the forest, a man fairy is flapping in from the left of the frame on butterfly wings, he's really just dangling limply from his wings, with a goofy, bleary expression on his face, and the woman fairy is pissed off at him; she says, "It's 3 a.m. and you've got pollen all over you!"

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