Skip to main content

Givnology Wellness Arts
May you find yourself in the world…and may you enjoy the company!
Most of this information comes from "National Geographic",March 2014.

There is a nectar-drinking bat and a night flowering vine whose lives intertwine in Central America.

There is a tiny winged bat whose body is no bigger than your thumb, laps nectar from flowers like the hummingbirds do. In exchange it pollinates the plant. In daylight the flowers have very bright colors such as scarlet and fuchsia, but at night they the brightest hues turn to a silver. The Mucuna flowers resort to sound to catch the ear of the nectar bats.

Attachments

Images (1)
  • bat2
Original Post

Replies sorted oldest to newest

Nectar bats send gentle but very sophisticated calls, which scientists refer to as frequency modulated.
These calls trade distance for detail. Most effective within 12 feet, they reflect back pictures that convey precise informationabout a target's size, texture, angle, depth and other qualities only a nectar bat can interpret.
The darkened Mucuna flower's beacon petal's cup shape acts as a mirror bouncing information back hard and clear. The bat speeds onto the blossom in a high-speed embrace. The bat crams its head inb to the cupped opening, thrusting its snout into it. The bat's long tongue springs a hidden switch, exploding the pea-pod keel. As it laps deep into the flower's nectary, spring-loaded anthers burst from the keel and gild the bat's tiny rump with a spray of golden pollen. The blossom is detonated and licked dry, and the bat is gone.

Attachments

Images (1)
  • bat
Last edited by Inda
Each bat makes several hundred flower visits each night. Mucuna holtonii, with their exploding mechanism and generous snort of nectar, are among the rare flowers that warrant actual landings. Nectar bats can empty the flowers of less lavish species in a hovering lasting a mere fifth of a second.

We now know that bats have the ability to see with sounds, and plants themselves have shaped their flowers to be heard, becoming as brilliant to the bat's ear as their brightly colored daytime counterparts are to the eyes of their pollinators.

In such intricate interactions, nature reveals its most profound magic.

Attachments

Images (1)
  • bat3
Nectar bats evolved in fruitful partnership with specific families of flowering plants, a relationship called chiropterophily-from Chiroptera, the mammalian order of bats, and phily, from philia, Greek for love. But this is no love story. The driving force behind the bat-flowering partnership is not romance but the primary business of life survival and reproduction.

Attachments

Images (1)
  • bat5
Trading nectar for pollination is a delicate transaction, one that presents plants with a quandry. It behooves night flowering plants to be thrifty with their nectar, because well-fed bats will visit fewer flowers. But if a plant is too stingy, a bat will take its services elsewhere. Over millenia, bat pollinated plants have evolved a neat solution: they sidestep the problem of nectar quantity (as well as Quality) by investing instead in maximizing the bat's foraging efficiency. So plants that flower at nightproffer their wares in exposed, fly-through positions-easy for bats to find and drink from and removed from cover for arboreal predators such as tree snakes and opossums. They spike their flowers' scent with sulphur compounds-long distance signals irresistible to nectar bats, but not to humans. Bat flower perfume has been described as very nasty.The mucuna vine and certain other plants go one step further. They shape their flowers to catch a bat' ear.

Attachments

Images (1)
  • bat4
Last edited by Inda

Add Reply

Post
Content may be subject to copyright. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
"..for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.."

If you wish to contact us or join, Please go to our E-Learning site and fill out the contact us form!

Follow Givnology on Twitter

books
Click to see our books


Submit Site - Web Site Promotion Submit Your Site To The Web's Top 50 Search Engines for Free! Search Engine Submission and Internet Marketing Search Engine Submission & Optimization
Put Site Submit link here Put Site Submit link here LAUNCH FREE and FAST Search Engine SubmissionLiving Well Blogs - Blog Catalog Blog Directory

Google
WWW Givnology

×
×
×
×
Link copied to your clipboard.
×