Mezcal is more popular than ever?why that?s bad news for bats

It’s led to an overharvesting of the agaves before they produce nectar, which in turn imperils the plant’s main pollinator, the lesser long-nosed bat.Tiny but mighty, these one-ounce mammals fly over 750 miles each year—from their winter roosts in central Mexico to birthing caves along the U.S.-Mexico border—in search of flowering cacti and agaves, a large desert plant with spiky leaves. (See more pictures of desert flora.)Because mezcal derives its flavor from this sugar, the best time to harvest agave is right before the stalk shoots up.A hundred years of such unregulated harvesting has caused a serious decline in Sonora’s agave population and urban and agricultural development has wiped out almost 50 percent of total native agave habitat in the past half century on top of that.Making bacanora in a way that benefits people, bats, and agave is a goal of Colectivo Sonora Silvestre, which friends Lea Ibarra and Valeria Cañedo founded in 2018 as biology students.“We thought that it was a really cool thing to connect those bacanora producers with pollinators and bats,” says Ibarra. National Geographic Explorer Kristen Lear, of Bat Conservation International, also works on saving bats and promoting sustainable agave harvesting.Her organization's agave initiative "focuses on restoring critical foraging habitat for threatened pollinating bats, and sustainable bacanora certification is a great step towards achieving this," Lear says by email.