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Over the years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time staring at the phosphorescent green screen of night vision scopes, waiting to see bats interact with plants. These devices, originally called snooper scopes when they were first used in the Vietnam War, amplify ambient light thousands of times to form a bright image under low-light conditions. With a little supplementary light—for example, from infrared light, which is invisible to mammals— the viewing scene at night can be as bright as day. I first used a night vision scope to watch bats harvest fruit from plants in the mid-1970s at Santa Rosa National Park in Costa Rica.On different nights,I trained our scope on fruiting Piper bushes or fig or Cecropia trees to watch short-tailed fruit bats and their relatives grab fruits. More recently, I have spent many nights watching lesser long-nosed bats visit cactus flowers in Mexico and Arizona. No matter what the situation,I have always been impressed with how little time most plant-visiting bats spend in contact with their food plants. Except for large flying foxes, which often camp out for hours in the canopies of flowering or fruiting trees, these bats harvest their food literally in the blink of 254 11 In the Blink of an Eye Common tent-making bat grabbing a fig fruit. Redrawn by Ted Fleming, with permission, from a photo by Merlin D. Tuttle, Bat Conservation International. an eye. About all you see on the screen during this process is a brief flurry of wings.Then they are off again to visit another flower or to take their fruit to a night roost to eat. Viewed individually, these brief encounters might easily be dismissed as having little or no ecological or evolutionary importance. But viewed collectively , these fleeting interactions, repeated night after night throughout the world’s tropics and subtropics, are far from insignificant. Because they affect the reproductive success of plants, these contacts play an exceedingly important role in the economy of tropical nature. But these brief interactions are highly vulnerable to human interference. In the blink of an eye, they can be disrupted.In many instances,all it takes is the drop of one match to destroy a roost of plant-visiting bats. Whenever this happens, batdependent plants suffer reduced seed set or seed dispersal. Whenever they lose their chiropteran allies, these plants are also imperiled. I personally became aware of the vulnerability of cave-dwelling bats to human destruction during my second field season at Kino Bay. In 1990 we were still getting to know the area and were asking local Mexicans if they knew the locations of bat caves. Other than the Sierra Kino cave and another one they had taken us to in 1989,they really didn’t know of any other caves in the area. As we talked, one of the men pulled a color photo of a char-broiled Leptonycteris out of his back pocket. It turned out that he and a friend had hauled some old tires up to the entrance of the Sierra Kino cave last summer (after we had left the field), doused them with gasoline, and set them on fire.They ended up asphyxiating dozens of lesser long-nosed bats, whose bodies they tossed behind a rock. When we checked out their story, sure enough we found many Lepto skulls and wing bones right where they said they’d be.“Why did you kill the bats?” we asked.Because they thought they were vampiros, they answered. Once they understood the ecological importance of lesser long-nosed bats, the men promised to spread the word about these beneficial bats and to stop burning out bat caves. Since then, I have not found overt evidence of bat destruction at the Sierra Kino cave. In June 1999,my Mexican colleague Pancho Molina and I visited another reported Lepto roost along the Sonoran coast about halfway between Kino Bay and Guaymas. Located in an abandoned mine just outside the village of El Colorado, the roost currently housed a few California leaf-nosed bats. But the mine floor was covered with dusty guano containing thousands of shiny black cactus seeds—a sure sign that Leptonycteris bats roost here, probably in the summer after bats have left their maternity roosts. At the mine’s entrance was a series of circular steel cables, the remnants of a pile of steel-belted tires. When asked why people had burned tires at this...

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