The lesser long-nosed bat, nicknamed the tequila bat and known to scientists as Leptonycteris yerbabuenae, is the primary pollinator of the blue Weber agave used to make tequila, a role the United States recognized when it removed the species from the endangered list in 2018.

The bat's story has resurfaced in coverage tied to National Pollinator Week, which the U.S. Congress and the nonprofit Pollinator Partnership marked from June 22 to June 28, 2026. Popular Science and outlets citing the U.S. Department of the Interior revisited the bat-agave relationship during that week, and Bat Conservation International, a nonprofit that studies and advocates for bats, says the underlying tension between industrial agave farming and bat pollination has not gone away.

Why agave blooms at night for bats, not bees

Blue Weber agave, the single species permitted for tequila under Mexican regulation, spends years storing sugar in its core before sending up a single flowering stalk, then dies. Agave and its bat pollinators evolved together over thousands of years, and the plant is one of the few crops that opens its flowers after dark, when bees and birds are inactive, according to NPR's 2017 reporting on the relationship. Rodrigo Medellín, an ecologist at Mexico's National Autonomous University who has spent decades studying the species, has said lesser long-nosed bats travel in colonies that can number in the tens of thousands, with each animal feeding at hundreds of flowers in a single night.

Why commercial harvesting cuts bats out of the process

Traditional and industrial agave harvesting removes the plant's flowering stalk, a practice called capón, before it can bloom, in order to keep sugar concentrated at the base for distilling. Bat Conservation International says that practice removes the blooms bats feed on and, because most replanting is done with cloned shoots rather than seed, leaves fields genetically uniform. Micaela Jemison, of Bat Conservation International, has said plainly of the cloned agave used across much of the industry that it is not naturally pollinated. In 2017, Mike Daulton, then the group's executive director, told NPR that the tequila industry had grown 60 percent over the prior decade, with the super-premium segment, bottles priced at $30 or more, growing nearly 400 percent, a surge that pushed demand for agave higher. Coverage published this year, including the Economic Times account that prompted this report, has continued to cite those same 2017 figures without an updated industry estimate.

How the lesser long-nosed bat came off the endangered list

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the lesser long-nosed bat as endangered in 1988, when fewer than 1,000 individuals were believed to survive across its range spanning central Mexico and the American Southwest. Medellín pressed agave growers for years to let a share of their crop flower, an argument that gained traction after disease outbreaks hit fields of cloned, unpollinated agave and some farmers began setting aside roughly 5 percent of their land for flowering plants on his advice. Mexico removed the species from its own list of threatened wildlife in 2015, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service followed in 2018, citing recovered and stable populations, making it the first bat species delisted under the Endangered Species Act.

What the Bat Friendly certification actually checks

Medellín and David Suro, of the nonprofit Tequila Interchange Project, launched the Bat Friendly certification in 2016. Producers seeking the label must show that at least 5 percent of their agave was allowed to flower and that those plants were tracked separately from harvest through bottling, according to the project's published criteria. As of 2021, only two brands carried the label, according to reporting by Nautilus. The project's current site lists five certified tequila brands: Tequila Ocho, Tapatío, El Tesoro de Don Felipe, Siembra Valles Ancestral and Siete Leguas.

What this means

Of the five brands the Bat Friendly project currently lists, Tequila Ocho carries the highest score in Tequila Watch's database: 89 of 95 for its Plata bottling. That figure comes from this publication's own four-pillar assessment and has nothing to do with pollination; the Bat Friendly hologram and the TW Score are separate claims made by separate parties, and one should not be read as evidence for the other. Worth watching is whether the recirculated 2017 growth figures for the super-premium category get an update, since a decade-old estimate keeps standing in for current market size in 2026 coverage.