SAN DIEGO _ Early one Wednesday morning in January, in an exhibit at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, a fruit bat named Patty went into labor.
This should have been good news. Patty belongs to a colony of critically endangered Rodrigues bats, a species that almost went extinct in the 1970s. The bats exist in the wild in only one place _ a small island in the Western Indian Ocean _ and the colonies at the Safari Park and more than a dozen other zoos around the world form a kind of Noah's Ark for the future.
Bats are creepy to a lot of people, but they play important roles in ecosystems across the globe as pollinators, seed-dispersers and mosquito-eaters. Take away bats and the world would be a lot less lush and a lot more itchy.
So Patty's pregnancy represented another brick in the bridge of survival at a time when scientists say the planet is experiencing a "sixth wave" of extinction, with dozens of plant and animal species disappearing every day. Except Patty was in trouble.
A keeper found her on the ground of the exhibit, writhing in apparent pain. Her amniotic sac was visibly protruding.
The bat was rushed to the Safari Park's hospital. The staff there put her in a plexiglass box to keep her still and took an X-ray. Dr. Jeff Zuba could see that the pup was in the wrong position. The head was tucked against the body instead of pointing down into the birth canal.
With large animals, the veterinarian can reach inside and manipulate the fetus. But Rodrigues fruit bats are small, about 14 inches long as adults. They weigh less than a pound.
Zuba tried massaging the outside of the abdomen. The pup was stuck. They did an ultrasound and the fetal heartbeat was faster than normal, a sign of distress.
"It was time," Zuba recalled later. "These pups are important. We had to get this one out."
He'd never done a C-section on a bat. He was going to do one now.
In the operating room, the anesthesiologist put Patty under. She was placed on the table face up, her wings, feet and head strapped down. Zuba, wearing a headpiece with magnifying lenses, leaned in and made the incision. He took care to avoid nicking anything that would cause excessive bleeding. There are no blood banks for bats.
He pulled the pup out, and it started breathing right away. The umbilical cord was cut. Patty's incision was closed with the same kind of tiny sutures used on human eyes. The whole procedure took about 15 minutes.
While Zuba finished his work, the pup was handed to Lissa McCaffree, a keeper at the Safari Park's animal care center. She wrapped the bat in a blanket and drove in a pickup truck to the nursery a few minutes away.
At any given time, the staff there is helping to raise by hand a couple dozen different animals. But they didn't have much experience with bats. Only once before had they been asked to step in as substitute mom _ four years earlier, when Patty was born and her mother abandoned her.
The new pup was male. They named him Lucas.
