For tequila, just add bats

Bats sometimes look like flying rodents with sharp, scary teeth. “In most photos, bats have their mouths open because they’re using their sonar, trying to figure out who’s in front of them with that camera,” says Margaret Griffiths, a biology professor at Illinois Wesleyan University and organizer of a four-day bat summit that starts Wednesday in Salt Lake City. About 200 of the nation’s top researchers and bat enthusiasts share their insights into the world’s only flying mammal (sorry, Rocky, flying squirrels only glide) at the 34th annual North American Symposium on Bat Research. Topics include the truly insider “A Complex Inter-Species Phylogeny Reveals Distinctive Biogeographic Patterns of Diversification in Triple Nose-Leaf Bats (Triaenops) in Madagascar” to the truly seasonal “What Makes Vampires Such Great Crawlers?” A workshop Saturday ratchets down the wonk factor with activities such as examining a live bat. Some myth-busting facts: Bats are not blind, not rabid (fewer than 0.01% are infected) and don’t enjoy getting tangled in your hair. Fruit-eating bats disperse seeds in their guano, which helps tropical forests recover from clear-cutting. Insect-eating bats, which can munch up to about a thousand bugs during 2-hour nocturnal noshing, favor mosquitoes and moths, including pests like the corn borer. And if that isn’t enough to earn them respect, consider this: Bats pollinate the agave, which is used in the production of tequila. Go to www.nasbr.org.

-- Veronique de Turenne