A team of explorers
for the National Geographic Channel has captured never-before-seen
footage of the tube-lipped nectar bat, a peculiar species discovered in
2005 in the cloud forests of Ecuador. The bat is camera-worthy thanks to
one attribute in particular: its incredibly long, wormlike tongue.
The 2.5-inch bat sports a 3.5-inch tongue — the longest (relative to
body length) of any mammal in the world. If humans were similarly
proportioned, we'd have 9 feet of flesh spilling out of our mouths.
To capture this striking footage of the bat plunging its tongue
into nectar-laden flowers, the NatGeo team cut a tiny hole into the
base of a flower and installed a special slow-motion camera inside,
which slowed the action by 40 times.
On top of upping the tongue length record in class Mammalia, the
discovery of the bat in 2005 also solved a longstanding mystery: The
question of what pollinated the plant Centropogon nigricans,
which stashes its pollen deep within its flutelike bloom. Turns out, the
flower depends solely on the bat and its outsized tongue.
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