A closer look at bats as a coronavirus spreads across the globe
In the beginning there was one bat and one human. The Origin Story.
Between them, an intermediate host. Possibly the pangolin, a prehistoric-looking long-snouted anteater and the only mammal on Earth entirely covered with armor. Also, among the most widely illegally trafficked creatures, coveted as a bushmeat delicacy and for use — its crushed scales — in traditional Chinese medicine.
But there’s no hate-on for the pangolin, which may have dined on a bit of bat guano, or poop, before ending up at a wet-market for exotic animals in the city of Wuhan, epicentre of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, which has infected more than five million people around the planet. Somebody scratches his nose, rubs her eyes, zoonotic contact, animal to human transmission, and boom, PANDEMIC.
No, blame the bat out of hell, instead. Or, for certain conspiracy theorists, any of the three Wuhan labs which had been studying bat coronaviruses. Hundreds of the coronaviruses circulate among the 1,400 species of bats that come out at night, from Toronto to Guangdong. Seven new coronaviruses were just this month found lurking in Myanmar bats.
Bat virus has given us outbreaks of SARS, Marburg, Ebola — those last two are hemorrhagic diseases, involving bleeding out — and now COVID-19. Let us not forget rabies-carrying bats, as well. So, a crummy resumé.
“It’s certainly a challenging time right now to be a bat conservationist with all the misinformation of bats that’s going around,” says Toby Thorne, bat researcher at the Toronto Zoo, which launched its bat conservation program in 2016.
“One of the big threats they face is that we don’t understand a lot about their ecology. It’s hard for us to manage and conserve them without knowing that.”
Thorne’s “life-long passion” for bats was sparked when he caught his first one on a bat walk at a local park as an 11-year-old.
“Bats are a pretty big part of my life. The thing that fascinates me about bats is there’s so much stuff we don’t know about them. And they’re very unusual animals. They’re the only flying mammal. They find their way in the dark using sound. They make a lot of sound, but (they are) sounds we can’t hear.”
Although not definitively established, it’s generally agreed bats from Wuhan caves are the agents of this COVID-19 sickening. Not their fault, they’re just being bats. But man, they sure look the part of malevolent contaminant! Ugly things.
Thorne begs to differ.
“There are some crazy-looking bats. But the majority of them are cuter than people would imagine. There are some cute faces and some weird faces. Some emit sounds through their nostrils, big flaps of skin around their nose. But still, most of them look pretty nice.”
Only three bat species feed on blood (hematophagy): the common vampire bat, the hairy-legged vampire bat, the white-winged vampire bat. “There’s a lot of terminology associated with bats that has some variation on vampirism,” Thorne observes.
That certainly contributes to their macabre rep, bats long associated with the dark side, the morbid, the underworld. From ancient mythology to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” — Count Dracula disguising himself as a bat, flapping his wings against Lucy’s window — these suckers embody the eerie. Sleeping upside-down, cocooned, wrapped in their membrane wing capes. Only venturing out after dark, as if from the grave.
Am I guilty of lookism towards other species? Those who anthropomorphize animals might object. Maybe we should view bats through, you know, an intersectional lens, rather than impose our own inherent prejudices. Just as we’re not supposed to draw any adverse cultural inference from the gustatory tastes of some societies. Although it was that dimwit internet influencer, celebrity vlogger Wang Mengyun, who posted a video of herself tucking into a bowl of bat soup back in January, as the pandemic was beginning to ravage Wuhan. Following global outrage, Bat Soup Girl issued an apology, noting that it had actually been filmed three years earlier in Micronesia. “Sorry everyone, I shouldn’t eat bats.”
Not to be mistaken with “The Bat Woman”, Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli, the virus hunter, has spent the past 16 years haunting caves in her scientific pursuit of the species. It was Shi, who, in 2005, showed that the SARS pathogen was a bat virus, tracing it to a single population of horseshoe bats in a remote Yunnan cave. She has, in fact, identified dozens of SARS-like viruses, warning that there were more out there.
When patients in Wuhan hospitals started showing up with atypical pneumonia late last year, Shi was on the case, finding that samples from five of seven patients had genetic sequences present in all coronaviruses.
By January 7, Shi and her team determined this new virus, eventually named SARS-CoV-2, was the culprit. And its genomic sequence was 96 per cent identical to the coronavirus identified in the horseshoe bats, scrutinized in her lab. Which naturally freaked her out. As reported in March by Scientific American, Shi “frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling, especially during disposal.”
Crucially, they were not a perfect match. The virus hadn’t come from her lab, nor escaped from it. “That really took a load off my mind,” she told Scientific American. “I had not slept a wink for days.”
Shi repeated that not-me insistence in a later social media post. “I swear with my life (the virus) has nothing to do with the lab.”
Bats harbour thousands of coronaviruses, of which only a few hundred are known.
Point the finger at bats and bat-defenders will point the finger right back at humans. Erosion, deforestation depriving them of trees in which many live, and encroaching of their natural habitats. Homo sapiens are far more of a risk to bats than vice-versa.
Those wildlife markets where animals that may have been infected by bats are kept live until they are butchered on the spot for freshness; it’s contact contagion. (For its part, China banned the sale of exotic animals, including bats and pangolins, in wet markets in February).
Yet the tolerance for coronaviruses in bats and other animals — it doesn’t kill or sicken them — could ultimately help researchers understand if that super immunity can be clinically replicated, copied for humans.
Researchers are also looking at generating vaccines to spray colonies or administer it directly on a few bats, that would in turn spread among the colony during their ritual grooming of each other, the vaccine getting into the mucosal surface thereby developing a protective immune response to neutralize the virus.
Still, colour me chiroptophobic — fearful of bats.
And not just because of that time when I pitched my tent on a deserted island in the South Pacific, beneath a grove of palm trees, only to discover at sundown that those weren’t clusters of fruit hanging overhead but fruit bats, thousands of them, swooping and divebombing and chasing me into the lagoon.
At the Zoo, which on Saturday was to launch a drive-thru Scenic Safari, reopening to the public but no getting out of the car, visitors won’t be clapping their eyes on residents of the bat cave.
“We’re not handling bats for the time being,’’ says Thorne.
“We’re concerned about them catching a novel coronavirus from us.”
Tit-for-bat-tat.
In the beginning there was one bat and one human. The Origin Story.
Between them, an intermediate host. Possibly the pangolin, a prehistoric-looking long-snouted anteater and the only mammal on Earth entirely covered with armor. Also, among the most widely illegally trafficked creatures, coveted as a bushmeat delicacy and for use — its crushed scales — in traditional Chinese medicine.
But there’s no hate-on for the pangolin, which may have dined on a bit of bat guano, or poop, before ending up at a wet-market for exotic animals in the city of Wuhan, epicentre of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, which has infected more than five million people around the planet. Somebody scratches his nose, rubs her eyes, zoonotic contact, animal to human transmission, and boom, PANDEMIC.
No, blame the bat out of hell, instead. Or, for certain conspiracy theorists, any of the three Wuhan labs which had been studying bat coronaviruses. Hundreds of the coronaviruses circulate among the 1,400 species of bats that come out at night, from Toronto to Guangdong. Seven new coronaviruses were just this month found lurking in Myanmar bats.
Bat virus has given us outbreaks of SARS, Marburg, Ebola — those last two are hemorrhagic diseases, involving bleeding out — and now COVID-19. Let us not forget rabies-carrying bats, as well. So, a crummy resumé.
“It’s certainly a challenging time right now to be a bat conservationist with all the misinformation of bats that’s going around,” says Toby Thorne, bat researcher at the Toronto Zoo, which launched its bat conservation program in 2016.
“One of the big threats they face is that we don’t understand a lot about their ecology. It’s hard for us to manage and conserve them without knowing that.”
Thorne’s “life-long passion” for bats was sparked when he caught his first one on a bat walk at a local park as an 11-year-old.
“Bats are a pretty big part of my life. The thing that fascinates me about bats is there’s so much stuff we don’t know about them. And they’re very unusual animals. They’re the only flying mammal. They find their way in the dark using sound. They make a lot of sound, but (they are) sounds we can’t hear.”
Although not definitively established, it’s generally agreed bats from Wuhan caves are the agents of this COVID-19 sickening. Not their fault, they’re just being bats. But man, they sure look the part of malevolent contaminant! Ugly things.
Thorne begs to differ.
“There are some crazy-looking bats. But the majority of them are cuter than people would imagine. There are some cute faces and some weird faces. Some emit sounds through their nostrils, big flaps of skin around their nose. But still, most of them look pretty nice.”
Only three bat species feed on blood (hematophagy): the common vampire bat, the hairy-legged vampire bat, the white-winged vampire bat. “There’s a lot of terminology associated with bats that has some variation on vampirism,” Thorne observes.
That certainly contributes to their macabre rep, bats long associated with the dark side, the morbid, the underworld. From ancient mythology to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” — Count Dracula disguising himself as a bat, flapping his wings against Lucy’s window — these suckers embody the eerie. Sleeping upside-down, cocooned, wrapped in their membrane wing capes. Only venturing out after dark, as if from the grave.
Am I guilty of lookism towards other species? Those who anthropomorphize animals might object. Maybe we should view bats through, you know, an intersectional lens, rather than impose our own inherent prejudices. Just as we’re not supposed to draw any adverse cultural inference from the gustatory tastes of some societies. Although it was that dimwit internet influencer, celebrity vlogger Wang Mengyun, who posted a video of herself tucking into a bowl of bat soup back in January, as the pandemic was beginning to ravage Wuhan. Following global outrage, Bat Soup Girl issued an apology, noting that it had actually been filmed three years earlier in Micronesia. “Sorry everyone, I shouldn’t eat bats.”
Not to be mistaken with “The Bat Woman”, Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli, the virus hunter, has spent the past 16 years haunting caves in her scientific pursuit of the species. It was Shi, who, in 2005, showed that the SARS pathogen was a bat virus, tracing it to a single population of horseshoe bats in a remote Yunnan cave. She has, in fact, identified dozens of SARS-like viruses, warning that there were more out there.
When patients in Wuhan hospitals started showing up with atypical pneumonia late last year, Shi was on the case, finding that samples from five of seven patients had genetic sequences present in all coronaviruses.
By January 7, Shi and her team determined this new virus, eventually named SARS-CoV-2, was the culprit. And its genomic sequence was 96 per cent identical to the coronavirus identified in the horseshoe bats, scrutinized in her lab. Which naturally freaked her out. As reported in March by Scientific American, Shi “frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling, especially during disposal.”
Crucially, they were not a perfect match. The virus hadn’t come from her lab, nor escaped from it. “That really took a load off my mind,” she told Scientific American. “I had not slept a wink for days.”
Shi repeated that not-me insistence in a later social media post. “I swear with my life (the virus) has nothing to do with the lab.”
Bats harbour thousands of coronaviruses, of which only a few hundred are known.
Point the finger at bats and bat-defenders will point the finger right back at humans. Erosion, deforestation depriving them of trees in which many live, and encroaching of their natural habitats. Homo sapiens are far more of a risk to bats than vice-versa.
Those wildlife markets where animals that may have been infected by bats are kept live until they are butchered on the spot for freshness; it’s contact contagion. (For its part, China banned the sale of exotic animals, including bats and pangolins, in wet markets in February).
Yet the tolerance for coronaviruses in bats and other animals — it doesn’t kill or sicken them — could ultimately help researchers understand if that super immunity can be clinically replicated, copied for humans.
Researchers are also looking at generating vaccines to spray colonies or administer it directly on a few bats, that would in turn spread among the colony during their ritual grooming of each other, the vaccine getting into the mucosal surface thereby developing a protective immune response to neutralize the virus.
Still, colour me chiroptophobic — fearful of bats.
And not just because of that time when I pitched my tent on a deserted island in the South Pacific, beneath a grove of palm trees, only to discover at sundown that those weren’t clusters of fruit hanging overhead but fruit bats, thousands of them, swooping and divebombing and chasing me into the lagoon.
At the Zoo, which on Saturday was to launch a drive-thru Scenic Safari, reopening to the public but no getting out of the car, visitors won’t be clapping their eyes on residents of the bat cave.
“We’re not handling bats for the time being,’’ says Thorne.
“We’re concerned about them catching a novel coronavirus from us.”
Tit-for-bat-tat.
