For the last 20 years, scientist Rodrigo Medellin has worked to protect a particular endangered species of bat that just might help protect something else in danger – your tequila.

Growing up in Mexico City, Medellin always knew he wasn’t like other children. His first word was “flamingo.” He kept vampire bats in his bathroom. And don’t tell his kids, but he almost flunked out of junior high because he spent so much time with animals.

“There was a deformity in my brain,” he tells The Plate on a recent visit to Washington, D.C. to promote a BBC documentary about his work called “The Bat Man of Mexico.”

That “deformity” vaunted him to the head of the Society for the Conservation of Biology,