Bat pollination is a pan-tropical phenomenon, performed in the Old World by small megachiropterans (Pteropodidae) and in the New World by microchiropterans of the leaf-nosed bat family Phyllostomidae (Dobat 1985). Flower-visiting bat species total about 50 worldwide, while Dobat (1985) listed about 750 bat-pollinated plant species in 270 genera (590 for the Neo- and 160 for the Palaeotropics). Since then, many more cases have been found.

Although plants independently enlisted “megabats” and “microbats” as pollinators, it is likely that both systems have links to one common root: pollination by ancient, nocturnal, non-flying mammals dating to the late Cretaceous (Sussman & Raven 1978). The extinction of most of these early mammalian flower visitors coincided with the radiation of bats from the Eocene onward in the Old World, and during the Miocene in South America (Sussman & Raven 1978). Genera like Parkia may have developed mammal pollination before the separation of African and South American plates; they still retain this trait (Vogel 1969, 1980). Of the plant species found to attract bats today, however, the vast majority evolved their adaptative traits more recently (Vogel 1990).

In the Neotropics, it is useful to consider a continuum ranging from less specialized “fruit-bat” flowers to true “glossophagine” flowers (von Helversen 1993; cf. Johnson & Steiner 2000). For Costa Rica, we estimate that two-thirds of the bat-pollinated plant species are glossophagine specialists.