New World leaf-nosed bats stand out as the most versatile bat family within Chiroptera for their broad spectrum of ecological functions and ecosystem services. Paradoxically, phyllostomid bats, and bats in general in the region, face the negative impacts of several extrinsic threats that are mainly responsible for their population decline, in some cases driving them toward local extinction. Habitat loss and roost disturbance and destruction are the two main factors affecting them over their entire geographic range. Globally, 13 species (6% of 216 recognized taxa) have been assigned to threatened IUCN categories. At the regional level, percentage of threatened species stands below 32% (North America: 31%, Central America: 31%, South America: 26%, Caribbean: 12%). In the last decade, bat conservation activism and conservation-oriented research have increased significantly across the Americas and the Caribbean, generating measurable positive effects for many species, including many phyllostomids. These positive impacts are being achieved through the interplay between research, environmental education, and conservation applications as a function of regional and local conservation strategies. Emergence of new threats to bats in the Neotropical region, such as development of wind energy facilities and emerging and reemerging zoonotic viruses, calls for the intensification of these concerted actions on behalf of bats.

Brazil is a continental-sized country that harbors at least 93 species of phyllostomids. Although large tracts of its original vegetation cover are still preserved, some of the Brazilian biomes are under severe human pressure. In this chapter, we identify and discuss major pressures and threats affecting the protection of Brazilian phyllostomids. By using species distribution modelling and GIS techniques, we estimate the impact of land conversion on some species and discuss possible future scenarios. We also identify priority areas for bat conservation in the country, as well as challenges and opportunities that must be pursued to guarantee the protection for most of Brazil’s phyllostomids.

Focus on Neotropical bats, especially Phyllostomidae, has provided many rich insights into contemporary biogeography of the Earth’s biota, in particular from perspectives of describing patterns and searching for mechanisms underlying broadscale gradients of biodiversity. Here we review this large body of research. We begin by reviewing more classical approaches to describe and explain secondary gradients of diversity related to area, latitude, and elevation but also review more contemporary analyses involving primary gradients related to climate and history. Indeed, phyllostomid bats exhibit arguably some of the strongest biodiversity gradients in the world. Moreover, gradients of phyllostomid diversity reflect responses to a complex tapestry of climatic conditions such as precipitation, temperature and their seasonality combined with historical drivers of diversification such as spatially variable speciation rates and tropical niche conservatism. We end by making explicit some of the methodological challenges that limit our understanding of phyllostomid biodiversity gradients as well as highlight some of the more exciting novel approaches that promise much in terms of improving our understanding of the vast complexity of biodiversity gradients of Phyllostomidae as well as the mechanistic basis to these patterns.

In the past decades, bat ecology has developed considerably thanks to novel theoretical frameworks, as well as innovative tools for data collection and analysis. In this wind of change, network theory has become very useful to understand the complexity of the associations established by bats among themselves, with other organisms, and with their environment. We review how network science has been used to disentangle bats from the “web of life”, which main issues it is helping to solve, and how its application varies among studies including phyllostomids and other groups. We focus our discussion on the potential for using networks to study biological processes that shape bat systems of different kinds. Finally, we address new avenues for research, such as plant-animal interactions, movement ecology, and emerging diseases.

The study of structure of phyllostomid bat communities has a rich history that parallels the history of community ecology.  Classical approaches focused on deterministic structure resulting from biotic interactions or environmental heterogeneity.  More recently, the mechanistic basis of community structure has been distilled into four higher-level fundamental processes: selection, speciation, drift and dispersal.  Herein we summarize a vast literature of research on determinants of phyllostomid community structure and apply this new theoretical framework to improve our understanding phyllostomid community structure.  We categorized each of 232 studies identified in the literature as focusing on phyllostomid communities as to which of these four processes was addressed.  The vast majority of studies have focused on the process of selection, in particular to responses to anthropogenic habitat modification or other environmental characteristics such as food availably, elevation, latitude and seasonality.  The paucity of studies focusing on drift, speciation and dispersal is striking.  We provide a roadmap for future investigations that bridges the gap between a focus on selection and the other three higher-level processes. Focus on selection has not generated a unified understanding as to the selective forces that control the structure of phyllostomid bat communities, especially in the forces imposed by fragmentation versus those imposed by land-use change. Speciation rates need to be integrated in phyllostomid community structure in order to understand regional differences in species richness, abundances and trait distribution. We advocate for long-term studies to distinguish effects of drift from other forms of stochasticity, and a better grasp of dispersal is needed to determine how it homogenizes beta diversity but also how it interacts with other higher level factors.

Many phyllostomid species, especially frugivores in subfamilies Carolliinae and Stenodermatinae, are common members of neotropical mammal communities. As in other animals, population sizes of these bats reflect the size of their resource base – large for fruit and much smaller for nectar and animal prey. Colony sizes are correlated with the size of their roost structures – larger in cave or cave-like roosts – the most common roost type in these bats – and much smaller in tree or foliage roosts. Stenodermatines and animalivorous species live in smaller colonies than most other phyllostomids. From a landscape perspective, phyllostomid populations occur either in a few relatively large colonies in widely scattered caves or in many smaller, more closely spaced colonies in trees, including foliage. Colony size in many species often changes seasonally in response to changes in resource availability and reproductive activities. Because of their low reproductive output, growth rates of most phyllostomid populations are low, and many species likely live at their habitat’s carrying capacity as set by resource levels and roost availability. Some species, usually plant-visitors, undergo altitudinal or latitudinal migrations. Most phyllostomid populations harbor substantial amounts of genetic variation, and the extent of genetic subdivision between populations (or metapopulations) tends to be low. Habitat destruction or fragmentation, widespread in the Neotropics, will undoubtedly have important consequences for phyllostomid populations with animalivorous species being more strongly affected negatively than plant-visiting species because of their smaller population sizes and lower mobility in fragmented landscapes.

In this chapter I describe the complexity of roosts and their importance to understanding the ecology of phyllostomid bats and related noctilionoids, with an emphasis on the relationships between roosts, sociality, energetics, and species distribution. Detailed description of the roosts of phyllostomids is often neglected, due in part to the misconception that factors such as thermal stress are unimportant in tropical ecosystems. Although a number of systems for classifying roosts have been developed in the past, these schemes are in need of revision, as our knowledge about the ecology of bats has increased. I present a revised classification of roost types and identify gaps in our knowledge. In some respects this system of classification remains inevitably subjective, pending the accumulation of more detailed data. New directions for the characterization of roosts are suggested to allow an improved description of bat roosting ecology.

Frugivory is a hallmark of the Phyllostomidae, and frugivorous species in subfamilies Carolliinae and Stenodermatinae are among the most common mammals throughout the Neotropics. In this chapter we discuss the coevolution of fruits and phyllostomid frugivores; the morphological and other traits that these bats use to detect and process fruit; their foraging behavior and its consequences for seed dispersal; and the network structure of this coevolved mutualism and its conservation implications. Frugivorous phyllostomids have been interacting with fleshy-fruited angiosperms for about 20 Ma and currently disperse the seeds of hundreds of species of plants found throughout angiosperm phylogeny. They are especially important dispersers of early successional plants. Collectively, the feeding and foraging behavior of these bats creates strongly leptokurtic seed dispersal curves, but whose long tails can sometimes lead to the colonization of new habitats. Two foraging guilds (or modules in network parlance) have evolved: an understory guild of carolliines and Sturnira bats and a canopy guild of mostly stenodermatine bats. Ecological redundancy likely exists within these two guilds, but it is threatened whenever bat diversity is reduced by natural or anthropogenic factors. Climate change is one such factor, and its effects warrant careful monitoring.

One-quarter (56) of the species of Phyllostomidae have adapted to a primarily nectarivorous diet and serve as pollinators for hundreds of species of flowering plants.  Here we review the ecology and evolution of these bats and the flowers that rely on them.  A suite of adaptations allows them to feed from flowers efficiently, including elongated rostrums, long, extensible tongues, reduced dentition, well-developed olfaction and spatial memory, and the ability to hover.  These adaptations evolved independently in two phyllostomid subfamilies, the Lonchophyllinae and the Glossophaginae, which differ profoundly in their tongue morphology and nectar-feeding behavior: glossophagines have mop-like tongues with papillae covering the distal tip and lap nectar during flower visits, while lonchophyllines have straw-like tongues with papillae-lined grooves along the side and pull nectar through these grooves while keeping the tongue immersed in the nectar. Flowers adapted to bat pollination tend to have dull colors, strong scents, copious pollen and nectar production, and particularly well-exposed flowers.  Despite heavy reliance on these flowers, nectar bats will often feed opportunistically on insects and fruit as well, particularly during times of the year when flowers are scarce. However, dietary data are still lacking for many species.  More research is also needed to better understand how nectar bats locate flowers, in terms of the degree to which they rely on vision, olfaction, echolocation, and spatial memory in different phases of foraging bouts.

The common vampire bat Desmodus rotundus, white-winged vampire bat Diaemus youngi, and hairy-legged vampire bat Diphylla ecaudata are the only mammals that feed exclusively on blood. Their blood-feeding lifestyle shapes virtually every aspect of their biology. Adaptations linked to blood-feeding include changes to morphology (e.g. dramatically reduced dentition, unique terrestrial and arboreal locomotion), physiology (e.g. anticoagulants in their saliva, an ability to rapidly eliminate water from blood meals), sensory ecology (e.g. infrared thermoperception, specialized low-frequency hearing), and social behavior (cooperative food sharing). There is even evidence for an adaptive loss of a cognitive trait: vampire bats lack the otherwise ubiquitous phenomenon of taste aversion learning, presumably because blood from live prey is never spoiled. From an evolutionary perspective, the traits that vampire bats have both gained and lost illustrate adaptive tradeoffs and the link between form and function. Vampire bats are the primary reservoir for bovine rabies virus in Central and South America, so understanding their biology has implications for agricultural development and public health.