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In August 1988, shortly after we returned from Australia, Merlin Tuttle called to welcome me back to the States. After a few minutes of news and gossip,Merlin got to the real purpose of his call.He asked,“How would you like to take a break from your tropical studies and work with me on the lesser long-nosed bat, Leptonycteris curasoae, as it pollinates flowers of columnar cacti in the Sonoran Desert?” He had spent some time in May photographing this bat visiting cactus flowers at a place called Bahía Kino in Sonora, Mexico (see map 4). “It’s an absolutely gorgeous site located right on the Gulf of California,” he enthusiastically continued. “There’s a high density of three night-blooming cacti there, and I’m pretty sure we could get some money from National Geographic to study the role of bats in their pollination biology. Does this sound interesting to you?” Merlin’s suggested study came from out of the blue. At the time, I was planning to continue my work with Carollia bats and Piper plants in Costa Rica. I wanted to move my research to La Selva and study the comparative 185 9 Tracy’s Hypothesis Lesser long-nosed bat approaching a cardón cactus flower. Redrawn by Ted Fleming, with permission, from a photo by Merlin D. Tuttle, Bat Conservation International. ecology of three species of Carollia and nearly fifty species of Piper. In the summer of 1986, I had spent ten weeks at La Selva, gathering preliminary data on this system while assisted by a crew of Earthwatch volunteers. Just before leaving for Australia in 1987, I submitted a new proposal to the National Science Foundation. I had discussed my research plans with Merlin when we worked together with Vampyrum at La Selva in 1987. As we slogged along a muddy trail in pouring rain, he chided me by asking, “Why do you want to work here?” I sometimes wondered about this myself. Although moving up a diversity gradient from Santa Rosa (which has two species of Carollia and five species of Piper) to La Selva made sense scientifically , I really wasn’t sure that I wanted to spend several years working in tropical rain forest again. I was no fonder of getting soaked with rain nearly every day and night, as we did in 1986, than I had been in Panama twenty years earlier. NSF turned down my La Selva research proposal but gave me a strong message that if I fine-tuned it a bit, they would likely fund my next application . I was just about to do this when Merlin called, asking if I would like to study pollination biology in the desert, the antithesis of the rain forest. I ended our conversation by telling Merlin that I would give his suggestion serious thought and would contact him soon. Then I began weighing the pros and cons of making a major shift in my research direction,at least temporarily . At stake was a twenty-year investment in tropical biology and seed dispersal ecology. I had been working in Costa Rica for the past seventeen years and felt comfortable there.I still wanted to pursue many research questions about fruit bats and their food plants. But I had to admit that the thought of working in the Sonoran Desert was appealing. Except for a brief visit to Phoenix in 1969, I had never actually set foot in this habitat, but I had a strong mental image of it that dated from my childhood. In the early 1950s I spent hours poring through old issues of Arizona Highways at my next-door neighbor’s house in Detroit. The spiny stems of teddy bear cholla, the magenta flowers of prickly pear cactus, and the stately silhouettes of saguaro cacti popped into my mind’s eye when I thought of this desert. I also had been fascinated by Walt Disney ’s early nature film The Living Desert, with its close-up pictures of tarantulas , scorpions, kangaroo rats, and rattlesnakes. In graduate school I had cared for a Merriam’s kangaroo rat,a common Sonoran Desert rodent,while my officemate Jim Brown was in the field. It would be fun, I thought, to actually see K-rats in the wild. After a few days’ deliberation,I called Merlin and said,“The idea of working with Leptonycteris in the Sonoran Desert sounds really interesting.How 186 / Chapter 9 [18.116.42.208] Project MUSE (2024...

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