December 8, 2006: Tongue bat

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Pie points to this New Scientist article on the bat with the incredibly long tongue. xoB also found a copy.

A rare South American bat turns out to have a spectacularly long tongue. At up to 150% the length of its body, it is proportionally the longest of any mammal.

The bat appears to have evolved its incredible tongue in order to feed exclusively from a tubular flower found in the cloud forests of Ecuador.

Nectar bats' tongues have tiny hairs on the end, which they use to mop up nectar and pollen from within flowers. The plants gain from this relationship by depositing pollen on the bat's head, which it spreads from flower to flower.

Anoura fistulata is only the size of a mouse, but its tongue is around 8.5 centimetres long -- more than double the tongue-length of similar nectar bats. Compared with its body, a tongue of this size is second only to the chameleon in terms of vertebrates, and it is the longest of all the mammals.

"It's like a cat being able to lap milk from two feet away," says Nathan Muchhala of University of Miami, Florida, US, who first discovered the species in 2003.