The Honduran White Bat
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The Honduran White Bat
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About this listen
If you’ve never seen the Honduran white bat (Ectophylla alba), you’re not alone.
These tiny cloud-colored bats (barely larger than a cotton ball, by the way) are almost impossibly elusive.
But their story? It’s one of the most magical I know.
These bats don’t roost in caves or crevices. They’re architects. They chew through the midribs of giant Heliconia leaves, collapsing them just enough to create a shelter, or tent, where they huddle together, hidden from predators, glowing green in the filtered jungle light.
And what powers this whole operation?
Figs.
Specifically, Ficus colubrinae, a night-fruiting fig that may have co-evolved with these bats.
It offers high energy fruit with hundreds of tiny seeds—perfect for a hungry bat colony that feeds under cover of darkness and, in the process, helps plant the next generation of trees.
The relationship between bats and figs is one of the most important—and least appreciated—ecological dynamics in tropical ecosystems.
Bats pollinate fig trees. Fig trees feed bats. Figs support more bird and mammal species than almost any other plant. When fig trees thrive, the forest follows.
And so do we.