Bats and agave share a long-standing evolutionary partnership, since bats are vital to its pollination. They feed on agave nectar and spread pollen while flying across agave landscapes. Industrial agave, especially tequila, harvests the plant before it blooms, thus reducing food resources for bats, while also reducing the agave plants genetic diversity. Rodrigo and his team, created the Bat Friendly Tequila and Mezcal Programme©, in which agave distillate producers allow a proportion of the agave plants to bloom, ensuring the sustainability of agave cultivation and biodiversity and feeding bats in the process.

Rodrigo Medellín is an ecologist and conservationist at UNAM’s Institute of Ecology. Among his many public roles, he was the first non-US, non-European President of the Society for Conservation Biology (2013-15). He founded and presided the Mexican Society of Mammalogists and is founding director of the Programme for the Conservation of Bats in Mexico, and the Latin American Network for Bat Conservation, which today includes 23 countries. He also founded Global South Bats, a network of bat scientists in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In 2004 he received the Whitley Award for Internacional Nature Conservation from HRH Princess Anne.