Spix's disk-winged bat
Thyroptera tricolor
— Where the name comes from
Thyroptera is “shield wing”, from the Greek thyreós, the long shield of the hoplites, and pterón: the round discs it carries at wrists and ankles. Tricolor describes the fur, brown above and white below with a band between. It is one of the rare cases in which a genus name describes an organ that exists in no other mammal.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Bats
- Habitat
- Rainforest, inside the still-furled leaves of Heliconia and banana
- Range
- From southern Mexico to Brazil and Peru
- Size
- 3.4–5.2 cm of body, 25 cm wingspan, 4–5 g
- Diet
- Insectivore — small insects of the understorey
- Lifespan
- Little known
— Characteristics
- 01
It has true suction cups at wrists and ankles, worked by muscles.
- 02
It roosts head up, not head down as almost all bats do.
- 03
It must move house every day, because the leaf that shelters it unfurls.
— What sets it apart
It moves house every twenty-four hours, and its social life is built on that. It sleeps inside young Heliconia leaves, still rolled into a cone, which within a day open out and become useless: the group must find a new one every evening. To keep from scattering it has developed a double call — whoever has found the leaf calls from inside, whoever is in flight answers from outside — and the members of a group stay together for years while changing address every night. A stable friendship with no fixed abode.
