BEIJING, Dec. 7 (Xinhuanet) -- In order to have a tongue relative in length to that of the tube-lipped nectar bat (Anoura fistulata), the base of a human being's tongue would have to be stored in the rib cage.

    That's what the nectar bat does.

    Scientists, who recently discovered the bat in the cloud forest of the Andes of Ecuador also discovered its tongue is one and a half times its body length. That's longer than any other mammal, twice as long as any other bat, and second only to chameleons amoung vertebrates.

    They suggest the record-breaking tongue evolved to feed on a flower where the nectar is hidden at the end of equally long funnels, which also gives the nectar bat sole pollinating rights to the flower.

    Anoura fistulata flies flower to flower. It spends half a second dipping its tongue about seven times into the flower tube for nectar and collects pollen on its snout. The pollen grains get delivered to the next flower visited.

    Scientists led by Nathan Muchhala of the University of Miami studied the tube-lipped bat and two other nectar bat species by capturing and training them to drink sugared water through a straw. Video observations and pollen collected from their fur showed the tube-lipped bat was the exclusive pollinator of an elongated bell-shaped flower.

    Anoura fistulata showed a tongue extension of about 3.4 inches, while the other two nectar bats topped out at 1.5 inches.

    The tube-lipped nectar bat came up with an ingenious way of evolving a longer tongue without the usual drawbacks, said Muchhala.

    Just like humans, in bats the tongue begins at the base of the mouth, so the only way to stretch tongue length would be to grow an equally long nose. Tongue length correlated with snout length for 10 other nectar species, the researchers found.

    "Instead of evolving a longer jaw, it pushed the base of the tongue back and into the rib cage," Muchhala told LiveScience. Its tongue gets stowed between the heart and sternum.

    A bat's jaw works like a lever, so the farther away the biting teeth are from the base of the mouth, where force is applied, the weaker a bat's bite. Without a quick bite, a bat wouldn't be able to supplement its sugary diet with protein-packed insects.

    The tube-lipped bat, it seems, gets the best of both worlds -- a far-reaching tongue and a short nose. In fact, the scientists found insect parts in the bat's fecal matter.

    Muchhala suspects the bell-shaped flower and this nectar bat co-evolved, or influenced each other and evolved side-by-side.

    "This bat was just discovered last year, and now we've observed a very unique relationship with a local flower," Muchhala said.

    To confirm, he plans to measure snout length of tube-lipped nectar bats in different areas. If the bats have shorter tongues in areas where the local flowers have diminutive tubes and longer tongues with lengthier flowers, the finding would support co-evolution.

    (Agencies)