agave

With industrial tequila farms switching to cloned agave plants, the bats that pollinate them are disappearing. “You can't have tequila without agave, the spiky desert plant used as its base,” says NPR. “And it's hard to have agave without bats — because a few species of these winged creatures are the plant's primary pollinators. Agave co-evolved with bats over thousands of years. As a result, it's one of the very few plants that pollinates at night.”

Adolfo Murillo jokes about his two vocations as optometrist and tequila producer: "I help people see twice as well during the week and then I help them see double on the weekends," writes Ted Genoways. Murillo was a pioneer in choosing to cultivate organic agave in the high desert near his home town of Agua Negra.