South America’s short-faced fruit bats are the descendants of “reverse colonists.”
When it comes to colonizing new habitats, island species tend to get the short end of the stick. Typically, organisms from the mainland invade an island and take over—pushing the natives to near extinction. But sometimes, colonization can go the other way. In a rare case of “reverse colonization,” researchers in Brazil found that the short-faced bats now living in South America originally arrived from nearby Caribbean islands. Read more in Hakai.