The Redpath Museum offered a screening of the documentary The Bat Man of Mexico this past Sunday, inviting viewers deep into the Mexican wilderness. The documentary features Mexican ecologist Rodrigo Medellin and his passion: Bats. Medellin is personally saving tequila, one bat at a time. While the link between tequila and bats is not immediately clear, the existence of one relies heavily on the existence of the other. 

“[Bats] pollinate the agaves, which is the plant from which we extract tequila,” explained Medellin. “So no bats [means] no tequila.”

When considering bats, Medellin’s specialty is the lesser long-nosed bat, a medium-sized bat found in Central and North America. His efforts in preserving the habitat and populations of the lesser long-nosed bat won him worldwide attention and recognition. In 2012, Rodrigo was awarded the Whitley Gold Award for his work. This event, Medellin explained, is what catalyzed the production of The Bat Man of Mexico.

“During the ceremony, I [had] the incredible honour of meeting David Attenborough and spending two golden hours […] talking to him,” Medellin said. “At the end of those two hours, he said, ‘I don’t have any more power in BBC, but whatever little power I have left, I’m going to invest in doing a documentary with you.’” 

Attenborough narrates Medellin’s story, and even managed to make wading through guano—bat excrement—seem delightful. But as the story progressed, the initial curiosity about this man and his bats evolved into something much deeper: Medellin’s love for the lesser long-nosed bat was incredibly contagious.  

Understanding and studying bats involves following them into their habitat; caves. Viewers are brought deep inside the caves, and thanks to cameras equipped with infrared and high-speed technologies, the experience is startlingly real. It is only when we are deep inside these caves, however, that the extent of Medellin’s passion is witnessed. Here, while surrounded by cockroaches, snakes, and obviously, bats, he is at his happiest. 

“The peacefulness in here is really overwhelming, it’s really nice,” he says in The Bat Man of Mexico, as he is surrounded by hundreds of bats flying over his head. “The only sound around you [is] the bats flying around you. I could just lie here and take a nap and it’d be a very nice nap.”

The curiosities possessed by these bats, while seemingly random, serve a very distinct purpose. Their heads, characteristic snouts, and tongues, are ideal for eating the nectar from agave flowers—the perfect key to a complex lock. After licking out the nectar, the bat flies off, completely covered in pollen. This bat will then visit another plant to feed off of, completing the process of pollination. The process is well-known and deceptively easy; in the U.S., if humans were to replace bees as pollinators, the annual cost would be $90 trillion.

While the figure is less when applied to bats, the idea is the same, and considering that over 500 species of flowers rely on bats for their pollination—including the beloved agave—preserving their existence is paramount. 

Relative to honeybees, garnering support for bats proves to be a more challenging problem. Especially in Mexico, some bats, like vampire bats, are not only considered pests—spreading diseases and damaging crops—but they are also frequently stigmatized by myths that are hundreds of years old. But this is a challenge Medellin is willing to meet.

 “All I want is for people to get the right information about bats,” explained Medellin. “If that entails [the people of Mexico] calling me the Bat Man, so be it, I am the Bat Man.”