Rare Cuban Bat Found in Key West Botanical Garden
By Carol Shaughnessy
Florida Keys News Bureau
KEY WEST, Florida Keys — Its body is just 2.5 inches long, it’s at least
90 miles away from home and its skunk-like aroma prompted researchers to
dub it “Stinky Phil.” But the unprepossessing Cuban fig-eating bat
(Phyllops falcatus) that has taken up residence in the Key West Tropical
Forest & Botanical Garden has made history as the first of its species
ever sighted in the continental United States.
The bat was discovered by students from Duke University’s Nicholas
School of the Environment and Earth Sciences who were surveying for
moths in the botanical garden, and was identified by Dr. Ted Fleming of
the University of Miami. Cynthia Marks, executive director of the
nonprofit Florida Bat Center, captured it, recorded its presence and
confirmed its identity before returning it to the garden.
“Stinky
Phil” is a resident of the Key West Tropical Forest & Botanical Garden.
The tropical forest and botanical garden,
the only frost-free tropical moist forest garden in the continental
United States, offers a particularly rich environment for fauna
including bats. The 7.5-acre tract contains more than 170 species of
trees and plants, including more than 30 endangered species, and the
dense foliage that provides the protected roosts bats prefer.
Because the lower Florida Keys are so close to the Caribbean islands and
only 90 miles from Cuba, Marks said, rare specimens of Neotropical bats
occasionally show up in Key West and adjoining Stock Island.
Marks and other researchers believe “Stinky Phil” is a lone
representative of his species who lost his way — or was blown over from
Cuba during hurricanes that churned the Caribbean but bypassed the
Florida Keys in the summer of 2004.
The bat’s presence in Key West has prompted Carolann Sharkey, president
of the Key West Botanical Garden Society that manages the garden, to
begin creating a “Stinky Phil” Bat Center and exhibit near the area
where the creature is regularly sighted. Slated to open in the summer of
2005, the center is to include information on Cuban fig-eating bats and
other bat species, as well as a telescope that visitors can use to scan
the foliage for Phil.