"We wouldn't have coffee, we wouldn't have chocolate. We wouldn't have tequila without bats. That should be enough,” one biologist says.
Bats get a bad rap but the people who study them want to revamp their image.
“They're not only cute, but they do these amazing roles like for our ecosystem," Joseph Curti, a bat biologist at UCLA, tells CBS News.
Their roles include pest control and pollination.
Scientists tell CBS News that 300 species of fruit depend on bats to spread their seeds.
The creatures also save farmers billions of dollars on pesticides because of their big appetites.
“Bats can eat like up to half their body weight in insects per night. They can alter the insect communities that exist here. Bats can exert a suppression effect on insects just by flying around," Rachel Blakey, an assistant professor at Cal Poly Pomona, tells CBS News.
But like many wild animals, the number of bats are on the decline because of deforestation and climate change. Conservationists hope to get others interested in saving the bat population by spreading the word about all the good things they are responsible for growing.
"We wouldn't have coffee, we wouldn't have chocolate. We wouldn't have tequila without bats. That should be enough,” Curti says.
