EPISODE 5 TRANSCRIPT
Hey, this is Buzzkill. I’m Teresa Cotsirilos.
There are an estimated 350,000 different pollinator species on this planet. And
over the past few episodes, we’ve only really talked about one of them. Bees.
Bees pollinate about 75 percent of the fruits, nuts, and vegetables grown in
the U.S. And now that farmers have basically turned honeybees into livestock,
about a third of the foods Americans eat are pollinated by honeybees
specifically.
But pollination in our food system relies on a
lot more than just honeybees.
News
clip: The role of moths is increasingly being seen by
scientists as absolutely crucial in terms of pollination.
Nature
documentary clip: In the heart of this grove, half a
billion monarch butterflies lie sleeping.
Nature
documentary clip: Hummingbirds are driven by nectar.
And their specialized bodies are purpose-built for harvesting sugary fuel from
flowers.
Teresa:
There’s an obnoxious little fly called the biting
midge.
Kids’
show clip: Hi, I’m Madge, and people call me a flying
midge.
Teresa: Some people call it the flying midge.
Kids’
show clip: You can hardly see me I’m so small.
Teresa: These midges have been the stars of nature docs. And goofy kids’ shows
like this one.
Kids’
show clip: If it wasn’t for me, you couldn’t have any
chocolate to eat.
Teresa: And that’s because they help provide chocolate. Do I even have to say
that no chocolate would be a buzzkill? Cacao trees are tricky to pollinate. The
flowers are only half an inch or so in diameter, about the size of your
thumbnail. So tiny that many pollinators can’t access them. But biting midges
are about the size of a pinhead. And it’s one of the cacao tree’s most
important pollinators.
Chocolate is a multibillion-dollar global
industry, and it primarily rests on this fly’s teeny-tiny shoulders. And
chocolate isn’t the only food that relies on non-bee pollinators, at least to
some extent. Globally, non-bee insect pollinators provide over a third of all
visits to crop flowers.
Think about how much less food we’d have if
they all disappeared.
Here’s a basic fact that lies at the heart of
this series. Biodiverse ecosystems are more resilient. And when we kill off
pollinator biodiversity through industrial agriculture, we weaken the crops we
produce. In our last episode, we saw that sometimes, you only need a few
committed people to protect a thriving and biodiverse ecosystem.
For this episode, Buzzkill reporter Elliott
Woods takes us to the heart of tequila country, where the future of your
favorite margarita is tied to the survival of migratory bats. From the Food
& Environment Reporting Network, this is Buzzkill Episode 5, Bats and the
Blue Agave.
Elliott: It’s a hot day in late July, and I’ve spent the last four hours hiking
up to a cave in Big Bend National Park in Texas, close to where the Rio Grande
divides the United States from Mexico. The entrance to the cave is about 7,000
feet above sea level. And it’s a big, yawning hole in a sheer rock face. The
air is cool and damp.
There’s water dripping from a crack in the
rock, and the smell of bat poop is overpowering. I can hear squeaks and
wingbeats deeper inside the cave, where hundreds of bats are hanging from the
ceiling. It’s not my idea of cozy, but for the bats, it’s the Four Seasons.
This cave is one of the only known maternity roosts of endangered Mexican
long-nosed bats.
A gray-brown, nectar-eating bat that’s about 3
to 4 inches long. They’re really tiny. And they may just save the tequila
industry someday. You probably don’t think of bats when you think of tequila,
but that spirit comes from a plant called agave tequilana, also known as blue
agave. Over the last century, industrial monoculture practices have caused a
catastrophic loss of genetic diversity on Mexico’s blue agave plantations.
That makes them vulnerable to disease, and
puts them and the global tequila industry they supply, at risk of collapse. And
that’s where the bats come in. Scientists believe that bats can help restore
lost biodiversity to agave plantations, simply by doing their ancient job of
spreading agave pollen far and wide.
Agave pollination is a job that
long-haul-flying, nectar-slurping bats like the ones in this cave do best. But
the bats are in trouble, too. They’ve been on the U.S. endangered species list
since 1988 due to the loss of roosting caves to vandalism and home
construction, the encroachment of agriculture into wild ecosystems, and climate
change.
In Mexico and the United States,
conservationists, small farmers, and tequila producers are working against
industry norms to boost the bats’ food supply so that these tiny, vulnerable
creatures can have a shot at recovery and maybe help save the tequila industry,
too.
I’m walking between neat rows of blue agaves
that stretch up and over the horizon. It’s a stormy day in El Arenal, Jalisco,
in the tequila valley northwest of Guadalajara. And the blue agaves look like
humongous pineapples. When you make tequila, you harvest the heart of the blue
agave plant. Then you roast it to release a sugary liquid that’s distilled into
alcohol.
The agave’s waxy blue spines have serrated
edges, and they’re almost as tall as my shoulders. And as I learn the hard way,
their natural defenses are sharp.
Elliott:
My first stab. I just got stabbed in the chest by an
agave spine.
Rodrigo
Medellín: Welcome to the agave country.
Elliott: My first bite.
That’s Rodrigo Medellin, an ecologist who’s
also known as the Bat Man of Mexico.
Rodrigo’s a legend in the world of endangered
species conservation. And he’s also a bit of an interspecies sex therapist.
Rodrigo:
What you see here is that the agave flowers are almost
finished now.
Elliott: Rodrigo’s been helping blue agaves mate with the aid of their most
loyal pollinators, long-nosed bats. The agaves are dependent on bats for sexual
reproduction. But on blue agave plantations, that relationship has been almost
completely severed by the long-standing practice of cloning. Instead of
planting seeds from pollinated plants, growers plant hijuelos, basically
sprouts that grow from an agave’s underground stems and are genetically
identical to the mother plant.
We're in a field of clones right now that
belongs to Rodrigo’s friend, a biologist and small agave cultivator named
Leobardo Padilla, or Leo for short.
Leo: This field was planted in 2018, May of 2018. Six years and two months.
Elliott: Rodrigo and Leo brought me here to show me something really important
that you rarely see on a blue agave plantation.
Rodrigo: It’s a flowering stalk. It’s a beautiful, massive, massive column
growing from the center of the plant.
Elliott: Flower stalks like this one are essential for sexual reproduction.
Leo: The quiotes, well, they have only, hmm, since March that the agaves
started to bloom now.
Elliott: Known as a quiote in Spanish, the flower stalk looks like a
10-foot-tall piece of asparagus with a half dozen dinner plate-sized disks of
yellow flowers sticking out from branches near the top.
Rodrigo: Agaves grow and grow, and they accumulate sugar and accumulate sugar
year after year after year until sexual maturity comes to them. And then when
sexual maturity comes, every last ounce of those agaves is invested in this
amazing, massive flowering stalk.
Elliott: Those gigantic flowers contain capsules of nectar that open at night
to lure in bats. Their furry little faces and bodies get covered from head to
toe in pollen, which they carry to the next flowering plant.
Growing the flower stalk takes every last bit
of the agave’s stored-up energy.
Rodrigo: They’re going to die right after this. You grow for six to eight
years, and then you’re going to have sex once and die. That’s it. That’s the
story.
Elliott: But it’s not the whole story. Agave growers almost never let flower
stalks grow.
Rodrigo: If we harvest the plant before the flowering stalk starts growing,
then you maximize the amount of sugar that the agave has and therefore you
maximize the amount of alcohol that you produce from it.
Elliott: For producers, more alcohol means more profit. But since the plants
never flower, the bats never have a chance to pollinate them. No pollination
means no seeds, which is why growers have been relying on clones grown from
rhizomes. And that’s a major problem. After so many generations of cloning, the
gene pool has gotten so small that nearly all the blue agaves in Jalisco are
copies of just a handful of mother plants, which puts them at severe risk of
infestation.
Rodrigo: And since your plants are very close siblings, brothers, sisters from
each other, twins from each other, because they share 99.9 percent of their
genome with each other, then that is the perfect recipe for these pests and the
diseases to affect your entire field.
Elliott: The most pernicious pest is known in tequila country as a picudo, in
English, a weevil.
Rodrigo: The weevil is a black bug, the size of maybe your fingernail, maybe a
little bigger, um, that has a long tubelike mouthpiece. That is used to go and
dig into the core of the agave, and then they lay the eggs in that hole. And
then the larvae start feeding on the inside of the agave core. The problem is
not necessarily the weevil itself, but the weevil is the vector of a fungus and
a bacteria that has been killing agaves for 10 years and more.
Elliott: The near total lack of biodiversity in blue agave plantations also
means the plants lack the capacity for adaptation.
Rodrigo: One plant is affected by the disease, all the plants are going to be
sick. So there’s like 40 percent of the agave fields that have been already
affected by the disease, and this is growing.
Elliott: According to Rodrigo, the monoculture plantations in tequila country
could be one plague away from annihilation. And this is not some abstract
threat. It’s already happened more than once.
Between 1993 and 1999, a pest infestation
wiped out an estimated 25 percent of the agaves in Jalisco. Dozens of
distilleries were forced to close down, and the industry fell into a yearslong
slump. The cycle repeated again in 2010, when a fungal infection killed off an
estimated 35 percent of blue agaves in Mexico.
These plagues are bad news for companies like
Jose Cuervo and Sauza, and they’re even worse for thousands of people whose
livelihoods depend on the industry, from small planters, to the laborers who
work the agave fields, to production and distillery workers.
Worse still, each plague has provoked agave
growers to deploy larger and larger arsenals of chemicals to protect their
clones, which scientists say may actually increase the likelihood of future
plagues, and which turns agave cultivation into a truly industrial and
intensive monoculture.
Rodrigo: Now monoculture is an invitation for diseases or for predators or for
whatever, uh, best insect to come and have a feast because you have thousands
of plants that are defenseless there and they are next to each other. That is
what does away with biodiversity.
Elliott: And so how does that relate to the requirement to apply, uh, megatons
of atomic loads of chemicals and, and other artificial substances?
Rodrigo: The only way to control that pest is putting agrochemicals, putting
pesticides, massive amounts of pesticides to kill every last one of those bugs.
Elliott: But massive application of chemicals kicks off an arms race that the
bugs will eventually win.
Rodrigo: The populations of the bugs are so big that they are also evolving and
adapting to all of these chemicals, generation after generation after
generation. So we’re making superbugs in the process, and therefore we have to
apply super chemicals that are more and more toxic every time.
Elliott: Rodrigo and Leo have a better idea: more pollination, which means more
bats.
Rodrigo: The flowers of agave open at night, number one. And number two, the
pollen becomes alive, like at 9 p.m. That pollen is going to live for the next
12 hours. So it doesn’t matter if a hummingbird or a bee comes here at 8 a.m.
They will be moving pollen, but the pollen that they're moving is dead.
Elliott: Okay.
Rodrigo: That’s why it’s only the bats that are moving the living pollen at
night …
Elliott:
When they swoop in to feed, bats not only get a belly
full of supersweet nectar, but they also deliver pollen from wild plants that
could be dozens of miles away, which may help generate seeds with genetic
resistance to pests and plagues.
Rodrigo: Bats have domesticated agaves into producing a lot of nectar. That is
what the bats want. But agaves have enslaved bats, so that bats have to come
back and come back and come back and come back to the flower to get as much
nectar as they can.
Elliott:
The idea is simple. Instead of poisoning the air and
soil in an attempt to fend off armies of superbugs, working against nature and
destroying biodiversity on the road to mutually assured destruction, why not
work with nature?
Rodrigo: These things have been coexisting with, with bats for more than 10
million years, and they have connected their natural history very, very tightly
knit.
Elliott:
Why not help long-nosed bats play their ancient role
of matchmaker between far-flung agaves?
We say goodbye to the flower stalk and pile
into Leo’s truck just as a summer thunderstorm lets loose.
On the drive back to Arenal, Leo tells me that
some of his fellow agave planters think he’s nuts to waste perfectly good
agaves.
Leo: They’ve grown up with a conventional monoculture plantation, and
they’ve told me, you’re stupid.
Elliott:
But Leo has a big presence on social media, and he
says some of the younger growers are more open to the idea.
Leo: But now, I put out my publications, and they’re watching. And they’re
like, ah, what are you doing?
Elliott:
The younger growers aren’t so stuck in their ways. Leo
says they understand the value of sustainable agriculture, and they also see
the marketing advantage of eco-friendly products.
Leo: They’re now seeing change is coming. Changing how to sell more easily.
So, you’re going to have to bring them along from that side.
Elliott:
For now, the movement’s still small. But Rodrigo and
Leo are determined to help it grow. The flower stalks bristling up from Leo’s
field are more than they seem. They’re flags in a movement to save bats and
agaves, and in the process, to protect farmers and laborers in the towns that
have grown up around the industry.
But Leo’s only a small grower, and if the idea
is going to spread throughout tequila country, big tequila producers will have
to get on board. Rodrigo’s working on it.
The next morning, Rodrigo and I drive to a
town in the Jalisco Highlands called Arandas. The plan is to meet up with a
tequila producer who has some very special blue agaves to show us.
Rodrigo: What we’re going to see is the first generation of six-year-old
agaves. These agaves, different from the gazillion other blue agaves that we’ve
been seeing all over, these are the result of seeds sprouting. And those seeds
came from the bats pollinating the flower of agaves and waking up genes that
have been dormant for more than a hundred years.
Elliott:
The seed-born agaves were grown as part of Rodrigo’s
Bat Friendly project, which requires tequila producers to let a certain number
of their plants live out their natural lifecycle.
In other words, to grow flower stalks, get
pollinated, and die.
Rodrigo: If you let 5 percent of agaves in one hectare, you are feeding 100
bats in one hectare. That is a hell of a lot of bats.
Elliott:
The project launched in 2016. It’s still in its
infancy, but Rodrigo has big dreams.
Rodrigo: So when you multiply that by the thousands and thousands of hectares
of agave tequilana, if and when the industry adopts this as the standard, we’re
going to be feeding millions of bats in all of this area.
Elliott:
And along with feeding bats, those pollinated agaves
would produce seeds that could unleash a revival of genetic diversity.
On the two-hour drive to Arandas, we pass
endless fields of clones.
Rodrigo: Those in the back were five- and six-year-olds. This is
four-year-olds.
Elliott:
How can you tell how old they are?
Rodrigo: This species is harvested at age seven or eight, uh, depending on, on
the size of the, of the core.
Elliott:
Signs for herbicides and fertilizers are posted at the
edges of the fields.
Here’s a sign for Mustang Max Insecticida.
That’s probably the third or fourth sign I’ve seen for insecticides or
herbicides or …
Rodrigo: Oh yes, lots of, lots of agrochemicals here. Every one of these fields
is pumped full of pesticides and fertilizers and weed killers and so on and so
forth.
Elliott:
The application of massive amounts of chemicals to
fertilize depleted soil and protect clones from pests has polluted tequila
country and set the industry up for a potential collapse. But one thing Rodrigo
says the industry is not responsible for is driving the Mexican long-nosed bats
toward extinction.
Rodrigo: Some people have said that the tequila industry is partly, uh, guilty
for putting these bats in danger of extinction. And that is not true. That is
not true.
Elliott:
Rodrigo helped get the bats onto the U.S. endangered
species list in 1988. And he says the destruction of critical roosting sites
has been the heaviest blow to the bats, not a lack of food.
Rodrigo: The bats are going to find food no matter what because of their
incredible flying powers. The diet of these bats is very diverse. More than a
hundred species of plants, from columnar cacti to tropical trees to all kinds
of different plants.
Elliott:
We finally arrive at a tequila distillery called Los
Alambiques. It belongs to Carlos Camarena, one. of three tequileros who’ve
signed on to Rodrigo’s Bat Friendly project. When we stop at the gate to check
in with the guard, the aroma of roasting agave fills the car.
Rodrigo: This is, this is, oh, you can smell the beautiful fermentation of
agave juices that are in there.
Elliott:
Smells like molasses.
Rodrigo: It opened, it opened not a year ago …
Elliott:
Carlos meets us outside.
Cross
talk in Spanish: It’s always a pleasure. Hello. Hello.
Good afternoon. My name is Elliott. Elliott.
Elliott:
He’s a slender man in his 60s with a thin mustache.
He’s wearing jeans, a plaid button-down shirt, and plain leather shoes. You’d
never guess that he’s a tequila tycoon.
Carlos is a master distiller and a
fifth-generation tequilero whose brands include El Tesoro, Tapatío, and Tequila
Ocho. He’s small compared to giants like Jose Cuervo and Patrón, but his
tequilas are top-shelf.
We hop in his red Toyota pickup and head out
to the fields where Carlos is growing the bat-friendly agaves Rodrigo told me
about.
And where are we pulling up to now, Carlos?
Carlos
Camarena: This is my personal property. It’s called
Rancho El Nacimiento. As I was mentioning, this is the ranch where we have the,
the vast majority of our agaves in, I would say, in my sanctuary, in the place
where I come to relax every time that I get stressed.
Elliott:
But these peaceful fields are under threat.
Carlos: Because we have one major concern regarding the health state of our
agaves. And that concern, it is one little bug that is called, in Spanish,
picudo, because it has a beak.This little animal, it is a disease transmitter.
Elliott:
The picudos, or weevils, thrive in neglected fields.
Carlos: There’s nobody taking care of it, and therefore they become, I would
say, very easy prey for those bugs to be there, because nobody is trying to get
rid of them somehow.
Elliott:
During boom times in the tequila industry, there’s a
mad rush to plant agaves on every available patch of ground. And when that
results in a glut, prices collapse, and lots of the get-rich-quick growers
abandon their crops.
And that’s when the pest populations
explode.
Carlos: And from there, they are attacking all of the neighboring fields, and
that is a …
Elliott:
As it happens, the industry is in the midst of a glut
right now. Prices for agave have fallen from a record high of almost two U.S.
dollars a kilo in November 2022 to about 50 cents a kilo at the beginning of
2024.
And according to Carlos, the cycle of
abandonment is starting all over again.
Carlos: Clones, they all have exactly the same genetic information, but if we
get a, a serious disease, it could wipe out the blue agaves in the country, and
therefore it could wipe out the whole tequila industry. So …
Elliott:
That industry was worth more than $16 billion globally
in 2023 and employed tens of thousands of people in Mexico.
For Carlos, just like with Leo, growing
bat-friendly agaves cuts into the bottom line, but he says the potential
long-term benefits for his family’s company and for the industry are worth
it.
Carlos: We are providing food for them, and what we want in exchange from the
bats, it is to bring pollen from other agave species in order to have a
cross-pollination that could eventually also lead us to have a genetic
difference …
Elliott:
We park near a stone fence flanked by huge trees.
Carlos jumps out and leads us over to a row of agaves, where some of the
seed-born plants are mixed in with the clones.
Carlos: You see the plants, you will say, well, this is not a blue agave. It
doesn’t even look like a blue agave. I can tell you it was born from a blue
agave seed. So to me, it is a blue agave. So you can witness what a crazy
project we have in our hands.
Elliott:
Let’s, uh, let’s do it.
There’s a blue agave right here. And then
there’s another one, three plants down, that looks way different. Tell me how
it looks different.
Carlos: The base, it is thicker. The leaves are thicker than the blue agave.
The blue agave has kind of thin leaves. And these, you see, they are completely
thick. The spikes are completely different. So it is, it is like looking at an
individual from a completely different species. But it is born from a seed of
blue agave. And this is just one example, because they went in all completely
different directions. There are some plants that are taller, shorter, fatter,
skinnier. And to me it is exciting, because hey, we are getting into something
…
Elliott:
The Bat Friendly project is part of Carlos’ plan to
hand a healthy company over to his daughters.
Carlos: When we started with this project, I thought that I would never see
any result in my lifetime. I thought that maybe my kids or my grandkids would
see something 80 years from now, 10 generations, 8 years, 80 years. But the
surprising part is to see, even with the first generation, how visually you
start looking that there’s some difference. So the hope is that among those
changes, eventually, we may have some plants that are resistant to the attack
of a common disease that will come to affect the agave tomorrow or in 100 years
from now. And out of those survivors, we can keep on doing what we do. Keep on
growing agaves and produce tequila.
Elliott: Back at the distillery, Carlos leads us up onto a catwalk between rows
of cylindrical steel tanks, where I get to sample the latest batch of tequila.
Cross
talk in Spanish: Salud. Salud.
Elliott:
Tequila fresh out of the still.
Carlos: At 110.2 proof.
Elliott:
What do you smell, Carlos?
Carlos: I smell some cooked agave. I’m smelling some minerality. I smell some
herbaceous, but to me this is sweet. I’m smelling a lot of the cooked agave
coming out of the oven.
Elliott:
Your family has been doing this for well over a
century. You know everybody in the business at this point. Do you think the Bat
Friendly program can grow to a bigger scale? What are your hopes for the future
of Bat Friendly?
Carlos: Yeah, I mean, what I can see regarding my daughters, they are very
interested, and I’m sure that they will continue with this. So the next
generation is getting involved with this. But I hope that there will be more
people involved, the more they know about it.
Elliott:
It’s raining and almost dusk when we say goodbye to
Carlos outside the distillery.
On the drive back to Guadalajara, Rodrigo
explains how Carlos’ seed-born agaves, which are the offspring of mothers that
were pollinated by bats, are proof that the Bat Friendly program is already
working.
Rodrigo: Waking up genes that have been dormant for more than a hundred years,
you don’t know what to expect. But you are absolutely certain that the
diversity is going to incorporate some really interesting and hopeful and
helpful, uh, characteristics into the agave.
Elliott:
Not only did the flower stalks in Carlos’ fields turn
a historic food desert into an all-night diner for bats, but the seeds that
resulted from all that pollination grew up to express an astonishing variety of
new traits.
Rodrigo: That is what’s giving me hope. There’s a lot of all of these genes
that have been dormant, that the bats can help us rescue and re-express in the
future little agave plants. That is the nature, the gist, the substance …
Elliott:
Rodrigo doesn’t imagine a future in which all blue
agaves are grown from the seeds of bat-pollinated plants. But introducing new
genetic material to even a small fraction of the plantation agaves could lead
to important adaptations.
Rodrigo: That is the nature, the gist, the substance of the Bat Friendly
program. Rescuing those dormant genes and selecting the best ones for survival,
for …
Elliott:
As for the bats, Rodrigo hopes the program will one
day transform tequila plantations from dead zones into major feeding areas for
Mexican long-nosed bats and other nectarivorous bats.
Rodrigo: I do dream of a future in which the common practice for production of
tequila is bat-friendly. That I dream. That is something that I can see even in
my lifetime to happen.
This episode was reported by Elliott Woods and
produced by Buzzkill’s senior producer, Alyssa Jeong Perry. Special thanks to
Dr. Loren Ammerman at Angelo State University and Gustavo Martinez. Buzzkill is
a production of the Food & Environment Reporting Network and is distributed
by PRX. Adizah Eghan, Theodore Ross, Brent Cunningham, and Tom Laskawy are
Buzzkill’s executive producers.
The music arrangement and audio engineering
were done by Sound Sanctuary. Our theme song is by Sandra Lawson Ndu. Naomi
Barr is our fact-checker. Funding for this podcast is provided in part by the
BAND Foundation, and I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Thanks for listening.
Hey, this is Buzzkill. I’m Teresa Cotsirilos.
There are an estimated 350,000 different pollinator species on this planet. And
over the past few episodes, we’ve only really talked about one of them. Bees.
Bees pollinate about 75 percent of the fruits, nuts, and vegetables grown in
the U.S. And now that farmers have basically turned honeybees into livestock,
about a third of the foods Americans eat are pollinated by honeybees
specifically.
But pollination in our food system relies on a
lot more than just honeybees.
News
clip: The role of moths is increasingly being seen by
scientists as absolutely crucial in terms of pollination.
Nature
documentary clip: In the heart of this grove, half a
billion monarch butterflies lie sleeping.
Nature
documentary clip: Hummingbirds are driven by nectar.
And their specialized bodies are purpose-built for harvesting sugary fuel from
flowers.
Teresa:
There’s an obnoxious little fly called the biting
midge.
Kids’
show clip: Hi, I’m Madge, and people call me a flying
midge.
Teresa: Some people call it the flying midge.
Kids’
show clip: You can hardly see me I’m so small.
Teresa: These midges have been the stars of nature docs. And goofy kids’ shows
like this one.
Kids’
show clip: If it wasn’t for me, you couldn’t have any
chocolate to eat.
Teresa: And that’s because they help provide chocolate. Do I even have to say
that no chocolate would be a buzzkill? Cacao trees are tricky to pollinate. The
flowers are only half an inch or so in diameter, about the size of your
thumbnail. So tiny that many pollinators can’t access them. But biting midges
are about the size of a pinhead. And it’s one of the cacao tree’s most
important pollinators.
Chocolate is a multibillion-dollar global
industry, and it primarily rests on this fly’s teeny-tiny shoulders. And
chocolate isn’t the only food that relies on non-bee pollinators, at least to
some extent. Globally, non-bee insect pollinators provide over a third of all
visits to crop flowers.
Think about how much less food we’d have if
they all disappeared.
Here’s a basic fact that lies at the heart of
this series. Biodiverse ecosystems are more resilient. And when we kill off
pollinator biodiversity through industrial agriculture, we weaken the crops we
produce. In our last episode, we saw that sometimes, you only need a few
committed people to protect a thriving and biodiverse ecosystem.
For this episode, Buzzkill reporter Elliott
Woods takes us to the heart of tequila country, where the future of your
favorite margarita is tied to the survival of migratory bats. From the Food
& Environment Reporting Network, this is Buzzkill Episode 5, Bats and the
Blue Agave.
Elliott: It’s a hot day in late July, and I’ve spent the last four hours hiking
up to a cave in Big Bend National Park in Texas, close to where the Rio Grande
divides the United States from Mexico. The entrance to the cave is about 7,000
feet above sea level. And it’s a big, yawning hole in a sheer rock face. The
air is cool and damp.
There’s water dripping from a crack in the
rock, and the smell of bat poop is overpowering. I can hear squeaks and
wingbeats deeper inside the cave, where hundreds of bats are hanging from the
ceiling. It’s not my idea of cozy, but for the bats, it’s the Four Seasons.
This cave is one of the only known maternity roosts of endangered Mexican
long-nosed bats.
A gray-brown, nectar-eating bat that’s about 3
to 4 inches long. They’re really tiny. And they may just save the tequila
industry someday. You probably don’t think of bats when you think of tequila,
but that spirit comes from a plant called agave tequilana, also known as blue
agave. Over the last century, industrial monoculture practices have caused a
catastrophic loss of genetic diversity on Mexico’s blue agave plantations.
That makes them vulnerable to disease, and
puts them and the global tequila industry they supply, at risk of collapse. And
that’s where the bats come in. Scientists believe that bats can help restore
lost biodiversity to agave plantations, simply by doing their ancient job of
spreading agave pollen far and wide.
Agave pollination is a job that
long-haul-flying, nectar-slurping bats like the ones in this cave do best. But
the bats are in trouble, too. They’ve been on the U.S. endangered species list
since 1988 due to the loss of roosting caves to vandalism and home
construction, the encroachment of agriculture into wild ecosystems, and climate
change.
In Mexico and the United States,
conservationists, small farmers, and tequila producers are working against
industry norms to boost the bats’ food supply so that these tiny, vulnerable
creatures can have a shot at recovery and maybe help save the tequila industry,
too.
I’m walking between neat rows of blue agaves
that stretch up and over the horizon. It’s a stormy day in El Arenal, Jalisco,
in the tequila valley northwest of Guadalajara. And the blue agaves look like
humongous pineapples. When you make tequila, you harvest the heart of the blue
agave plant. Then you roast it to release a sugary liquid that’s distilled into
alcohol.
The agave’s waxy blue spines have serrated
edges, and they’re almost as tall as my shoulders. And as I learn the hard way,
their natural defenses are sharp.
Elliott:
My first stab. I just got stabbed in the chest by an
agave spine.
Rodrigo
Medellín: Welcome to the agave country.
Elliott: My first bite.
That’s Rodrigo Medellin, an ecologist who’s
also known as the Bat Man of Mexico.
Rodrigo’s a legend in the world of endangered
species conservation. And he’s also a bit of an interspecies sex therapist.
Rodrigo:
What you see here is that the agave flowers are almost
finished now.
Elliott: Rodrigo’s been helping blue agaves mate with the aid of their most
loyal pollinators, long-nosed bats. The agaves are dependent on bats for sexual
reproduction. But on blue agave plantations, that relationship has been almost
completely severed by the long-standing practice of cloning. Instead of
planting seeds from pollinated plants, growers plant hijuelos, basically
sprouts that grow from an agave’s underground stems and are genetically
identical to the mother plant.
We're in a field of clones right now that
belongs to Rodrigo’s friend, a biologist and small agave cultivator named
Leobardo Padilla, or Leo for short.
Leo: This field was planted in 2018, May of 2018. Six years and two months.
Elliott: Rodrigo and Leo brought me here to show me something really important
that you rarely see on a blue agave plantation.
Rodrigo: It’s a flowering stalk. It’s a beautiful, massive, massive column
growing from the center of the plant.
Elliott: Flower stalks like this one are essential for sexual reproduction.
Leo: The quiotes, well, they have only, hmm, since March that the agaves
started to bloom now.
Elliott: Known as a quiote in Spanish, the flower stalk looks like a
10-foot-tall piece of asparagus with a half dozen dinner plate-sized disks of
yellow flowers sticking out from branches near the top.
Rodrigo: Agaves grow and grow, and they accumulate sugar and accumulate sugar
year after year after year until sexual maturity comes to them. And then when
sexual maturity comes, every last ounce of those agaves is invested in this
amazing, massive flowering stalk.
Elliott: Those gigantic flowers contain capsules of nectar that open at night
to lure in bats. Their furry little faces and bodies get covered from head to
toe in pollen, which they carry to the next flowering plant.
Growing the flower stalk takes every last bit
of the agave’s stored-up energy.
Rodrigo: They’re going to die right after this. You grow for six to eight
years, and then you’re going to have sex once and die. That’s it. That’s the
story.
Elliott: But it’s not the whole story. Agave growers almost never let flower
stalks grow.
Rodrigo: If we harvest the plant before the flowering stalk starts growing,
then you maximize the amount of sugar that the agave has and therefore you
maximize the amount of alcohol that you produce from it.
Elliott: For producers, more alcohol means more profit. But since the plants
never flower, the bats never have a chance to pollinate them. No pollination
means no seeds, which is why growers have been relying on clones grown from
rhizomes. And that’s a major problem. After so many generations of cloning, the
gene pool has gotten so small that nearly all the blue agaves in Jalisco are
copies of just a handful of mother plants, which puts them at severe risk of
infestation.
Rodrigo: And since your plants are very close siblings, brothers, sisters from
each other, twins from each other, because they share 99.9 percent of their
genome with each other, then that is the perfect recipe for these pests and the
diseases to affect your entire field.
Elliott: The most pernicious pest is known in tequila country as a picudo, in
English, a weevil.
Rodrigo: The weevil is a black bug, the size of maybe your fingernail, maybe a
little bigger, um, that has a long tubelike mouthpiece. That is used to go and
dig into the core of the agave, and then they lay the eggs in that hole. And
then the larvae start feeding on the inside of the agave core. The problem is
not necessarily the weevil itself, but the weevil is the vector of a fungus and
a bacteria that has been killing agaves for 10 years and more.
Elliott: The near total lack of biodiversity in blue agave plantations also
means the plants lack the capacity for adaptation.
Rodrigo: One plant is affected by the disease, all the plants are going to be
sick. So there’s like 40 percent of the agave fields that have been already
affected by the disease, and this is growing.
Elliott: According to Rodrigo, the monoculture plantations in tequila country
could be one plague away from annihilation. And this is not some abstract
threat. It’s already happened more than once.
Between 1993 and 1999, a pest infestation
wiped out an estimated 25 percent of the agaves in Jalisco. Dozens of
distilleries were forced to close down, and the industry fell into a yearslong
slump. The cycle repeated again in 2010, when a fungal infection killed off an
estimated 35 percent of blue agaves in Mexico.
These plagues are bad news for companies like
Jose Cuervo and Sauza, and they’re even worse for thousands of people whose
livelihoods depend on the industry, from small planters, to the laborers who
work the agave fields, to production and distillery workers.
Worse still, each plague has provoked agave
growers to deploy larger and larger arsenals of chemicals to protect their
clones, which scientists say may actually increase the likelihood of future
plagues, and which turns agave cultivation into a truly industrial and
intensive monoculture.
Rodrigo: Now monoculture is an invitation for diseases or for predators or for
whatever, uh, best insect to come and have a feast because you have thousands
of plants that are defenseless there and they are next to each other. That is
what does away with biodiversity.
Elliott: And so how does that relate to the requirement to apply, uh, megatons
of atomic loads of chemicals and, and other artificial substances?
Rodrigo: The only way to control that pest is putting agrochemicals, putting
pesticides, massive amounts of pesticides to kill every last one of those bugs.
Elliott: But massive application of chemicals kicks off an arms race that the
bugs will eventually win.
Rodrigo: The populations of the bugs are so big that they are also evolving and
adapting to all of these chemicals, generation after generation after
generation. So we’re making superbugs in the process, and therefore we have to
apply super chemicals that are more and more toxic every time.
Elliott: Rodrigo and Leo have a better idea: more pollination, which means more
bats.
Rodrigo: The flowers of agave open at night, number one. And number two, the
pollen becomes alive, like at 9 p.m. That pollen is going to live for the next
12 hours. So it doesn’t matter if a hummingbird or a bee comes here at 8 a.m.
They will be moving pollen, but the pollen that they're moving is dead.
Elliott: Okay.
Rodrigo: That’s why it’s only the bats that are moving the living pollen at
night …
Elliott:
When they swoop in to feed, bats not only get a belly
full of supersweet nectar, but they also deliver pollen from wild plants that
could be dozens of miles away, which may help generate seeds with genetic
resistance to pests and plagues.
Rodrigo: Bats have domesticated agaves into producing a lot of nectar. That is
what the bats want. But agaves have enslaved bats, so that bats have to come
back and come back and come back and come back to the flower to get as much
nectar as they can.
Elliott:
The idea is simple. Instead of poisoning the air and
soil in an attempt to fend off armies of superbugs, working against nature and
destroying biodiversity on the road to mutually assured destruction, why not
work with nature?
Rodrigo: These things have been coexisting with, with bats for more than 10
million years, and they have connected their natural history very, very tightly
knit.
Elliott:
Why not help long-nosed bats play their ancient role
of matchmaker between far-flung agaves?
We say goodbye to the flower stalk and pile
into Leo’s truck just as a summer thunderstorm lets loose.
On the drive back to Arenal, Leo tells me that
some of his fellow agave planters think he’s nuts to waste perfectly good
agaves.
Leo: They’ve grown up with a conventional monoculture plantation, and
they’ve told me, you’re stupid.
Elliott:
But Leo has a big presence on social media, and he
says some of the younger growers are more open to the idea.
Leo: But now, I put out my publications, and they’re watching. And they’re
like, ah, what are you doing?
Elliott:
The younger growers aren’t so stuck in their ways. Leo
says they understand the value of sustainable agriculture, and they also see
the marketing advantage of eco-friendly products.
Leo: They’re now seeing change is coming. Changing how to sell more easily.
So, you’re going to have to bring them along from that side.
Elliott:
For now, the movement’s still small. But Rodrigo and
Leo are determined to help it grow. The flower stalks bristling up from Leo’s
field are more than they seem. They’re flags in a movement to save bats and
agaves, and in the process, to protect farmers and laborers in the towns that
have grown up around the industry.
But Leo’s only a small grower, and if the idea
is going to spread throughout tequila country, big tequila producers will have
to get on board. Rodrigo’s working on it.
The next morning, Rodrigo and I drive to a
town in the Jalisco Highlands called Arandas. The plan is to meet up with a
tequila producer who has some very special blue agaves to show us.
Rodrigo: What we’re going to see is the first generation of six-year-old
agaves. These agaves, different from the gazillion other blue agaves that we’ve
been seeing all over, these are the result of seeds sprouting. And those seeds
came from the bats pollinating the flower of agaves and waking up genes that
have been dormant for more than a hundred years.
Elliott:
The seed-born agaves were grown as part of Rodrigo’s
Bat Friendly project, which requires tequila producers to let a certain number
of their plants live out their natural lifecycle.
In other words, to grow flower stalks, get
pollinated, and die.
Rodrigo: If you let 5 percent of agaves in one hectare, you are feeding 100
bats in one hectare. That is a hell of a lot of bats.
Elliott:
The project launched in 2016. It’s still in its
infancy, but Rodrigo has big dreams.
Rodrigo: So when you multiply that by the thousands and thousands of hectares
of agave tequilana, if and when the industry adopts this as the standard, we’re
going to be feeding millions of bats in all of this area.
Elliott:
And along with feeding bats, those pollinated agaves
would produce seeds that could unleash a revival of genetic diversity.
On the two-hour drive to Arandas, we pass
endless fields of clones.
Rodrigo: Those in the back were five- and six-year-olds. This is
four-year-olds.
Elliott:
How can you tell how old they are?
Rodrigo: This species is harvested at age seven or eight, uh, depending on, on
the size of the, of the core.
Elliott:
Signs for herbicides and fertilizers are posted at the
edges of the fields.
Here’s a sign for Mustang Max Insecticida.
That’s probably the third or fourth sign I’ve seen for insecticides or
herbicides or …
Rodrigo: Oh yes, lots of, lots of agrochemicals here. Every one of these fields
is pumped full of pesticides and fertilizers and weed killers and so on and so
forth.
Elliott:
The application of massive amounts of chemicals to
fertilize depleted soil and protect clones from pests has polluted tequila
country and set the industry up for a potential collapse. But one thing Rodrigo
says the industry is not responsible for is driving the Mexican long-nosed bats
toward extinction.
Rodrigo: Some people have said that the tequila industry is partly, uh, guilty
for putting these bats in danger of extinction. And that is not true. That is
not true.
Elliott:
Rodrigo helped get the bats onto the U.S. endangered
species list in 1988. And he says the destruction of critical roosting sites
has been the heaviest blow to the bats, not a lack of food.
Rodrigo: The bats are going to find food no matter what because of their
incredible flying powers. The diet of these bats is very diverse. More than a
hundred species of plants, from columnar cacti to tropical trees to all kinds
of different plants.
Elliott:
We finally arrive at a tequila distillery called Los
Alambiques. It belongs to Carlos Camarena, one. of three tequileros who’ve
signed on to Rodrigo’s Bat Friendly project. When we stop at the gate to check
in with the guard, the aroma of roasting agave fills the car.
Rodrigo: This is, this is, oh, you can smell the beautiful fermentation of
agave juices that are in there.
Elliott:
Smells like molasses.
Rodrigo: It opened, it opened not a year ago …
Elliott:
Carlos meets us outside.
Cross
talk in Spanish: It’s always a pleasure. Hello. Hello.
Good afternoon. My name is Elliott. Elliott.
Elliott:
He’s a slender man in his 60s with a thin mustache.
He’s wearing jeans, a plaid button-down shirt, and plain leather shoes. You’d
never guess that he’s a tequila tycoon.
Carlos is a master distiller and a
fifth-generation tequilero whose brands include El Tesoro, Tapatío, and Tequila
Ocho. He’s small compared to giants like Jose Cuervo and Patrón, but his
tequilas are top-shelf.
We hop in his red Toyota pickup and head out
to the fields where Carlos is growing the bat-friendly agaves Rodrigo told me
about.
And where are we pulling up to now, Carlos?
Carlos
Camarena: This is my personal property. It’s called
Rancho El Nacimiento. As I was mentioning, this is the ranch where we have the,
the vast majority of our agaves in, I would say, in my sanctuary, in the place
where I come to relax every time that I get stressed.
Elliott:
But these peaceful fields are under threat.
Carlos: Because we have one major concern regarding the health state of our
agaves. And that concern, it is one little bug that is called, in Spanish,
picudo, because it has a beak.This little animal, it is a disease transmitter.
Elliott:
The picudos, or weevils, thrive in neglected fields.
Carlos: There’s nobody taking care of it, and therefore they become, I would
say, very easy prey for those bugs to be there, because nobody is trying to get
rid of them somehow.
Elliott:
During boom times in the tequila industry, there’s a
mad rush to plant agaves on every available patch of ground. And when that
results in a glut, prices collapse, and lots of the get-rich-quick growers
abandon their crops.
And that’s when the pest populations
explode.
Carlos: And from there, they are attacking all of the neighboring fields, and
that is a …
Elliott:
As it happens, the industry is in the midst of a glut
right now. Prices for agave have fallen from a record high of almost two U.S.
dollars a kilo in November 2022 to about 50 cents a kilo at the beginning of
2024.
And according to Carlos, the cycle of
abandonment is starting all over again.
Carlos: Clones, they all have exactly the same genetic information, but if we
get a, a serious disease, it could wipe out the blue agaves in the country, and
therefore it could wipe out the whole tequila industry. So …
Elliott:
That industry was worth more than $16 billion globally
in 2023 and employed tens of thousands of people in Mexico.
For Carlos, just like with Leo, growing
bat-friendly agaves cuts into the bottom line, but he says the potential
long-term benefits for his family’s company and for the industry are worth
it.
Carlos: We are providing food for them, and what we want in exchange from the
bats, it is to bring pollen from other agave species in order to have a
cross-pollination that could eventually also lead us to have a genetic
difference …
Elliott:
We park near a stone fence flanked by huge trees.
Carlos jumps out and leads us over to a row of agaves, where some of the
seed-born plants are mixed in with the clones.
Carlos: You see the plants, you will say, well, this is not a blue agave. It
doesn’t even look like a blue agave. I can tell you it was born from a blue
agave seed. So to me, it is a blue agave. So you can witness what a crazy
project we have in our hands.
Elliott:
Let’s, uh, let’s do it.
There’s a blue agave right here. And then
there’s another one, three plants down, that looks way different. Tell me how
it looks different.
Carlos: The base, it is thicker. The leaves are thicker than the blue agave.
The blue agave has kind of thin leaves. And these, you see, they are completely
thick. The spikes are completely different. So it is, it is like looking at an
individual from a completely different species. But it is born from a seed of
blue agave. And this is just one example, because they went in all completely
different directions. There are some plants that are taller, shorter, fatter,
skinnier. And to me it is exciting, because hey, we are getting into something
…
Elliott:
The Bat Friendly project is part of Carlos’ plan to
hand a healthy company over to his daughters.
Carlos: When we started with this project, I thought that I would never see
any result in my lifetime. I thought that maybe my kids or my grandkids would
see something 80 years from now, 10 generations, 8 years, 80 years. But the
surprising part is to see, even with the first generation, how visually you
start looking that there’s some difference. So the hope is that among those
changes, eventually, we may have some plants that are resistant to the attack
of a common disease that will come to affect the agave tomorrow or in 100 years
from now. And out of those survivors, we can keep on doing what we do. Keep on
growing agaves and produce tequila.
Elliott: Back at the distillery, Carlos leads us up onto a catwalk between rows
of cylindrical steel tanks, where I get to sample the latest batch of tequila.
Cross
talk in Spanish: Salud. Salud.
Elliott:
Tequila fresh out of the still.
Carlos: At 110.2 proof.
Elliott:
What do you smell, Carlos?
Carlos: I smell some cooked agave. I’m smelling some minerality. I smell some
herbaceous, but to me this is sweet. I’m smelling a lot of the cooked agave
coming out of the oven.
Elliott:
Your family has been doing this for well over a
century. You know everybody in the business at this point. Do you think the Bat
Friendly program can grow to a bigger scale? What are your hopes for the future
of Bat Friendly?
Carlos: Yeah, I mean, what I can see regarding my daughters, they are very
interested, and I’m sure that they will continue with this. So the next
generation is getting involved with this. But I hope that there will be more
people involved, the more they know about it.
Elliott:
It’s raining and almost dusk when we say goodbye to
Carlos outside the distillery.
On the drive back to Guadalajara, Rodrigo
explains how Carlos’ seed-born agaves, which are the offspring of mothers that
were pollinated by bats, are proof that the Bat Friendly program is already
working.
Rodrigo: Waking up genes that have been dormant for more than a hundred years,
you don’t know what to expect. But you are absolutely certain that the
diversity is going to incorporate some really interesting and hopeful and
helpful, uh, characteristics into the agave.
Elliott:
Not only did the flower stalks in Carlos’ fields turn
a historic food desert into an all-night diner for bats, but the seeds that
resulted from all that pollination grew up to express an astonishing variety of
new traits.
Rodrigo: That is what’s giving me hope. There’s a lot of all of these genes
that have been dormant, that the bats can help us rescue and re-express in the
future little agave plants. That is the nature, the gist, the substance …
Elliott:
Rodrigo doesn’t imagine a future in which all blue
agaves are grown from the seeds of bat-pollinated plants. But introducing new
genetic material to even a small fraction of the plantation agaves could lead
to important adaptations.
Rodrigo: That is the nature, the gist, the substance of the Bat Friendly
program. Rescuing those dormant genes and selecting the best ones for survival,
for …
Elliott:
As for the bats, Rodrigo hopes the program will one
day transform tequila plantations from dead zones into major feeding areas for
Mexican long-nosed bats and other nectarivorous bats.
Rodrigo: I do dream of a future in which the common practice for production of
tequila is bat-friendly. That I dream. That is something that I can see even in
my lifetime to happen.
This episode was reported by Elliott Woods and
produced by Buzzkill’s senior producer, Alyssa Jeong Perry. Special thanks to
Dr. Loren Ammerman at Angelo State University and Gustavo Martinez. Buzzkill is
a production of the Food & Environment Reporting Network and is distributed
by PRX. Adizah Eghan, Theodore Ross, Brent Cunningham, and Tom Laskawy are
Buzzkill’s executive producers.
The music arrangement and audio engineering
were done by Sound Sanctuary. Our theme song is by Sandra Lawson Ndu. Naomi
Barr is our fact-checker. Funding for this podcast is provided in part by the
BAND Foundation, and I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Thanks for listening.
