Cotton Balls or Honduran White Bats?

Imagine you were walking along in the Honduran forest and you looked up into a leaf and saw these little white puffballs. You might think “Oh, how nice, I need some cotton balls to swab alcohol on my blisters” and reach up to find that they aren’t cotton balls at all but little bats with yellow noses! What tricks the natural world presents to us sometimes! Bats are supposed to be slender, black, scary and sleeping in caves but not these Central American marshmallow puff balls. They prefer to make tent houses underneath broad-leaf flowering plants. They are so very tiny (about 1.5 – 2 inches or 3.7 – 4.7 cm) that the adults look like babies, a hole colony of a dozen or more can be comfortable under those big leaves.