Lesser long-nosed bat

A natural pollinator of agave, the plant tequila is made from. Each spring it follows a corridor of blooms from Mexico into southern Arizona, drinking nectar from agaves and columnar cacti such as the saguaro and dusting the next flower with pollen as it goes. Its tongue is roughly as long as its body. It is also a rare comeback story. About a thousand were thought to remain in the late 1980s; by 2018 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated around 200,000, and it became the first bat taken off the U.S. endangered list because it had recovered. The catch is that agave grown for tequila is harvested before it flowers, to keep its sugars in the plant, so producers who let some plants bloom matter for both bat and plant.