At a Halloween happy hour recently in Washington, D.C., a small crowd gathered to celebrate the relationship between bats and spirits. Not spooky spirits. Instead, think tequila and mescal. "We're here at a bar tonight to talk about [bats], because they are intimately tied to agave," announced Mike Daulton, the executive director of Bat Conservation International , a nonprofit devoted to the well-being of bats. You can't have tequila without agave, the spiky desert plant used as its base. And it's hard to have agave without bats — because a few species of these winged creatures are the plant's primary pollinators. Agave co-evolved with bats over thousands of years. As a result, it's one of the very few plants that pollinates at night. Daulton says industrial agave farming adversely affects both plants and bats. "The tequila industry has seen a 60 percent growth over the past 10 years," he says. "At the super-premium level, where you're spending $30 a bottle or more, it's more like 400
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