{"id":832,"date":"2013-10-24T20:45:24","date_gmt":"2013-10-25T03:45:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/ssantana\/wordpress\/?p=832"},"modified":"2014-04-04T22:27:48","modified_gmt":"2014-04-05T05:27:48","slug":"ectophylla-alba-a-unique-specialist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/ssantana\/wordpress\/ectophylla-alba-a-unique-specialist\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes from the field: Ectophylla alba"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Ectophylla alba,<\/em> the Honduran white bat, is a unique species of Neotropical leaf-nosed bat. Not only they are among the very few species of bats that are almost completely white, but they are extremely specialized in their diets and roosting ecology. Males and females of the species skillfully construct delicate tents from the leaves of\u00a0<em>Heliconia<\/em> plants, and their diet is restricted to fruits of\u00a0<em>Ficus<\/em><em> colubrinae\u00a0<\/em>plants. During our most recent trip to Costa Rica, we had the opportunity to record and measure these bats as they frantically fed from a\u00a0<em>F.<\/em><em>\u00a0colubrinae\u00a0<\/em>fruiting tree (below). Fruiting events in <em>Ficus\u00a0<\/em>plants\u00a0occur in short bursts and are scattered throughout the landscape, and <em>E. alba <\/em>likely choose places to &#8220;camp out&#8221; according to the potential for food availability.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Honduran white bat eating fig\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9W5eNxBzOKw?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ectophylla alba, the Honduran white bat, is a unique species of Neotropical leaf-nosed bat. Not only they are among the very few species of bats that are almost completely white, but they are extremely specialized in their diets and roosting ecology. Males and females of the species skillfully construct delicate tents from the leaves of\u00a0Heliconia [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1121,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[29,39,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/ssantana\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/ssantana\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/ssantana\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/ssantana\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/ssantana\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=832"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/ssantana\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1741,"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/ssantana\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832\/revisions\/1741"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/ssantana\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/ssantana\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/ssantana\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/faculty.washington.edu\/ssantana\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}