MEXICO CITY — At a Mexico City university campus, researchers are stringing mesh nets between trees, hoping to capture evidence that a rare bat has begun visiting its favorite plants in this metropolis of 9 million.
The National Autonomous University’s botanical gardens are filled with flowering morning glory, agave plants and cacti that provide the bats with food. Their long tongues and noses have evolved to drink nectar from the blooms.
The protected Mexican long-tongued bat was first sighted this year in an even more unlikely location: a zoo at the Chapultepec park in the city’s center.
Under COVID pandemic rules, the park was closed or placed under strict visitation limits for much of the past year, and experts think that might have encouraged the bats to come and feast.
“It is clear that we have seen that, as human activity declined in the city, wild animals have begun to retake the city,” said Rodrigo Medellín, a biologist at the university’s Ecology Institute. “It is really divine justice that the bats are showing they can coexist with us if only we give them a chance.”
As people across the globe stay home to stop the spread of the coronavirus, animals have been venturing into places they usually aren’t seen. Like coyotes that have been seen meandering downtown along North Michigan Avenue and near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. A puma seen roaming the streets of Santiago, Chile. Or goats that took over a town in Wales. And monkeys entering homes in India and opening refrigerators in search of food.
In Mexico, bioluminescent plankton appeared at some beaches in the normally bustling resort of Acapulco for the first time in memory, though researchers aren’t sure about whether a decrease in human activity was responsible. Some think the decline in manmade lighting might have just made the phenomenon easier to spot.
On a recent night at the botanical garden in Mexico City, one of the researchers shouted, “We got one!”
With carefully gloved hands, a student began to take the four-inch bat from the net. A tiny thing, it could fit in the palm of one hand.
Medellín was certain as soon as he saw it that it was a long-tongued bat, distinguishable by the elongated tip of its nose.
“I never would have thought it,” he said of seeing the bat in Mexico City.
Listed as threatened in 1994, the bat normally lives in dry forests and deserts across a range that extends from the southwestern United States to Central America.
It isn’t clear whether the long-tongued bat has begun recolonizing Mexico City or whether the city is just a seasonal island the bats are visiting when its favorite plants are in bloom.
Scientists don’t know much about the bats’ migration patterns or how far they fly. So they’re trying to learn as much about the bat’s incursion in Mexico City as possible.
Once the tiny bat was freed from the net, one researcher rubbed its wings, back, nose and head with a small cube of gelatin to pick up and preserve any samples of pollen that might help determine which plants the bat had been visiting.
The bat also got a small dose of sugar water from a syringe to help it recover from the stress and also to help obtain stool samples to shed more light on its diet.
Finally, a tiny microchip the size of a grain of rice was inserted into the animal’s back to help track its movements.
There are 140 species of bats in Mexico. They are important pollinators for several species of plants.
Still, the tiny mammals have long been vilified. Bats can harbor a host of viruses, including some that spread among humans.
Scientists believe the coronavirus likely originated in wild horseshoe bats in China before jumping — perhaps through an intermediary species — to humans. That bat species isn’t found in Mexico, though.
Medellín says bats avoid humans and actually help us a lot by doing things like gobbling up insects.
“They are not going to mess with us, they are not going to give us COVID, they are not going to give us rabies,” he said. “They are not going to do anything other than help and benefit us.”
