Jamaican+Fruit+Bat

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Notes on Enrichment & Training


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Potential Messaging

 * Bats are peaceful animals that provide many vital services to humans and to the rest of the ecology. Fruit-eating bats are important seed-dispersers for many plants including avocados, cashews, dates, and figs; that’s the scientific way of saying that they eat the seeds with the rest of the fruit and then poop them back out in little piles of fertilizer as they fly around, helping new plants to grow. When bats take nectar from flowers, pollen gets transferred from one flower to another on their fuzzy faces in a process called cross-pollination. A few of the commercial products that depend on bat pollinators for wild or cultivated varieties include: bananas, peaches, durian, cloves, carob, balsa wood, and the agave cactus which is used to make sweeteners and tequila. Small, insect-eating bats eat many damaging night-flying pests such as the cotton bollworm which attacks important crops like cotton, artichokes, and watermelons. Basically, if you like eating food, thank a bat. There are 32 species of bats that live in Texas. To help them find a place to live, install a bat house on your property. []
 * Shade-grown coffee: The original coffee plants that were cultivated could not withstand much sunlight and were therefore grown beneath the canopy of the forest. Due to the popularity of coffee, most strains of coffee plants have been cultivated over time to withstand full sunlight. This has created large-scale deforestation for coffee plantations. Please ask guests to choose organic shade-grown coffee in which the plants are grown beneath the forest canopy, preserving arboreal habitat for tamarins, marmosets, sakis, binturongs, and birds while the forest floor is being used for human purposes. Look for coffee that is Rainforest Alliance Certified or marked “Organic Shade-Grown”. [] []

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=__Comments from the Rating System__=
 * Zoo America: We can't handle her on a glove, but she's good in our observation box.

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Threats and Conservation Status
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=__Contributors and Citations__=
 * Houston Zoo, Natural Encounters

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 * //Activity Schedule: diurnal, nocturnal, crepuscular//
 * //Continent of Origin//
 * //Diet Requirements: carnivore, herbivore, omnivore, etc.//
 * //General Habitat/Biome: deserts, forests, mountains, etc.//