Bat Pollinators of the Americas Lecture

Merlin presented his lecture, Bat Pollinators of the Americas, to an enthusiastic, sold-out audience today at the Texas Pollinators PowWow, hosted by the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas, despite a winter weather advisory and freezing rain. He introduced a wide variety of nectar-feeding bats and their ecological and economic contributions to habitats from the Sonoran Desert of the North American Southwest to Central American rain forests, Caribbean Islands and the Andean páramo of South America, ending with a summary of bat contributions worldwide. His next speaking engagement, titled The Amazing World of Bats and a Novel View of Conservation, will be given to a plenary session of the 2015  Asia-Pacific Biodiversity Conference in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on April 1.