Some bats are nectar feeders, rendering valuable service as pollinators. Hovering over blossoms like hummingbirds, their long tongues, tipped with brushlike bristles, mop up nectar and pollen. They are tropical animals and migrate between Mexico and the southwestern United States. Those that eat fruit spread the seeds over wide areas. Tuttle says: “Fruit and nectar-eating bats that disperse seeds and pollinate flowers are vital to the survival of rain forests and to the production of associated crops worth millions of dollars annually.”

New Scientist magazine, September 1988, said: “Farmers who slaughter fruit bats because they consider them to be pests may suffer still greater losses in production because the bats cross-pollinate their fruit trees.” Fruit for shipment is harvested five to seven days before ripening, for local use two to four days early, but bats eat only the unharvested ripe fruit​—worthless to farmers. Bat pollination and dispersal of seeds is crucial for more than 500 species of plants and trees.

In Australia, thousands of flying foxes, fruit bats, have been wiped out, “despite the fact that some of the area’s most ecologically and economically important trees rely on them” and that “the government’s own investigative findings that crop damage by the bats does not warrant control.”