Photography / Li Jin
Every evening, on a pond about 5 kilometers from the Dashiwei Sinkhole in Leye, Guangxi, swarms of bats will fly over the water. It is a herd of rat-eared bats, which lie dormant in burrows under the D-Shek Wai sinkhole during the day and come out at night to feed.
< h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > bat in a dark home</h1>
This is a karst cave in Guangxi that has not been developed, after entering the cave, the light immediately dimmed, and the surrounding air was heavy, making people feel strange and quiet, so it was more cold. As soon as you enter the cave, you can see small meat balls lying on the top of the cave, and the orange-red light makes their orange-yellow skin and fluff softer. It was a large group of white-bellied tube-nosed bats that were still hibernating.
Further inside the cave, the cave is "warm in winter and cool in summer" and has a constant temperature throughout the year, which makes it unnecessary for another kind of bat to be crowded together, which is the marigold bat. The bats are hardly huddled together, but three or five upside-downs are gently pressed together and wrapped around their bodies with wing membranes. More individuals are hung alone in different positions on the roof of the cave, some distance away from each other, producing what they think is beautiful.
In the same cave , different species of bats differentiate into different habitat behaviors , and they congregate in different locations in the cave. According to the intensity of natural light, the cave can be roughly divided into 3 light belts: there are light belts, weak light belts and dark belts, although the creatures living in different zones are not the same, but the bats are almost all distributed, especially the weak light belt close to the cave entrance is the most abundant.
Photography / Huang Zhaoran
In a cave near the Dashiwei sinkhole in Guangxi, hundreds of large-hoofed bats hang quietly upside down on the rock wall to rest, and occasionally one or two of them fly around with their wings flared.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > not only blind, but also a source of nutrients in the cave</h1>
Cave creatures follow the law of "retrograde evolution"—some morphological or physiological traits evolve, and some "useless" traits degenerate. In the evolutionary history of millions and tens of millions of years, bats have become the most specialized mammals, not only have wings to fly, but also derived echolocation technology, avoiding competition with birds, giving up daytime life and choosing to live at night. What's more, they no longer rely on perching on trees or the ground, but choose to live upside down in caves!
In the cave next to the sinkhole, a rare fake vampire bat is shining brightly, and it is mostly active in the weak light zone, feeding on frogs, lizards or other bats, and the residue of food becomes another nutrient in the cave.
Bats are often asked whether they are blind, but they have eyes and are very sensitive to light sources, but their eyes have become "secondary organs" adapted to cave life. The eyes became smaller and further evolved in terms of hearing, deriving superb echolocation techniques – they use ultrasound waves that are inaudible to the human ear, emitted from the mouth and nasal cavity, and reflected sound waves are received by the ears and then transmitted by neural networks to the brain to analyze the surrounding environment.
Bats and others adapted to the special habitat of the cave and survived and successfully evolved to this day. The caves they inhabit are not innate to the earth, but also follow the laws of formation, evolution and development, caves are an ecosystem, and the species in them are never isolated.
There is almost no sunlight in the caves, and higher plants have difficulty surviving. Without producers who can "photosynthesis", there is no supply of organic matter in the cave. At this time, bats play an important role, and after they have eaten, they return to the cave every day to continuously excrete feces, making it a source of nutrition for other animals and even fungi such as mushrooms.
(Please cross the mobile phone screen to view) Drawing / Zhang Yu, Yang Hua
Schematic diagrams of common cave organisms – bats, small white-waisted swifts and other key members of the cave ecosystem are not the most typical cave creatures, although they inhabit and reproduce in the cave, they need to go out of the cave to feed.
< h1 class = "pgc-h-center-line" meets bats >: luminous sand, bird's nest, scientific research and game</h1>
Entering the cave, without lights and torches, humans will be unable to move. Turn on the light, you will find that although the cave is dark, it is not dead: overhead there are frightened bats, swifts flying by, looking down at the feet, hard rocks, covered with sticky bat dung, translucent stove horses, horses jumping and walking through it...
In the karst region of southwest China, you can find cavities and bats, and whenever you enter a cave, you can see piles of bat dung in the cave entrance area. Bat feces are called "luminous sand" in Chinese medicine, which is a herb for clearing heat and bright purposes.
Photography / Kai Li
In caves in southwest China, manure is carried in baskets and then placed in the fields as fertilizer. As everyone knows, the fragile ecosystem in the cave lacks these nutrients and will face famine or even complete disintegration.
In addition to luminous sand, the encounter between humans and bats is inseparable from a medicinal herb - bird's nest.
In the karst caves of southern China, the short-billed swiftlet is another animal that inhabits with bats and flies in the weak light zone at the mouth of the cave. Short-billed swiftlets breed in burrows, and the black nests they build on stone walls made of humus mud and saliva are famous bird's nests. In addition to the short-billed swiftlet, the small white-waisted swiftlet is also more common in some holes.
Photography / Zhang Jinshuo
Short-billed swiftlet – the owner of bird's nest.
Chinese medicine superstition "luminous sand" can treat eye diseases, ordinary farmers use bat dung as fertilizer for cultivated land, and humans often enter caves in order to collect expensive bird's nests, facing bats that live with short-billed swiftlets.
At the same time, the powerful biological properties of bats have attracted the attention of scientists, and scientific research activities on bats are increasing, and every contact between humans and wild animals will have the exchange of various pathogens.
It wasn't until 2003 that a SARS outbreak brought the fact that wild animals carry the virus to the public. The study initially pointed the source of the virus to the civet cat, and in 2013, Yuan Guoyong, a professor at the University of Hong Kong School of Medicine, pointed out that the natural host of the SARS virus is not a civet, but more likely a bat called the "Chinese chrysanthemum bat". People began to struggle to find evidence of "convictions".
On November 30, 2017, Shi Zhengli's team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a research paper in the journal PLoS Pathogens, an authoritative journal on international pathogens, saying that after collecting thousands of Chinese chrysanthemum bat specimens in various provinces in China, a group of Chinese chrysanthemum bats carrying SARS-like coronavirus were finally found in a remote cave in Yunnan Province, through sequencing and sequence comparison. The SARS-like coronavirus was found to be highly homologous to the SARS virus that broke out in 2003.
After screening villagers in villages near Batcave for virus antibodies, Shi Zhengli's team found that many villagers had antibodies related to SARS-like coronavirus in their bodies. This successfully confirmed that bats are the natural host of the SARS coronavirus, and for the first time detected antibodies to the potent virus Nipah virus and Ebola virus in bats in China, and found new viruses carried by multiple bats.
After pointing to the natural host, it raises a question: how does the virus in the bat reach human society and explode?
In fact, the feces of bats, swifts, rodents, porcupines, grey forest owls, purple howling plovers and many other animals living in caves are the food and habitat of many invertebrates. If you look down at bat droppings, you can always see horses, snails or snails.
The feces of higher animals such as bats and the carcasses of animals in caves are the food sources of fungi, while protists, horses, fleas, heteroptera and other animals feed on fungi; sycamores and aquatic shellfish feed on bat droppings in the water, and spiders, fish and amphibians prey on these animals in such a cycle, forming a wonderful and special cave animal community or ecosystem.
More often, the virus spreads through the food chain. In nature, there are many animals that prey on bats, such as monkeys, civets, lemurs, raccoons, possums, cats, birds of prey, snakes, of which birds and snakes are the main predators. The virus circulates in the food chain, and at some point it will cause mutations, and the large number of human hunting and eating of wild animals provides convenient conditions for the widespread epidemic of the virus.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-center-line" > protecting human beings without disturbing nature</h1>
Most bats sneak in caves and do not overlap with the main range of human activity. So in most cases, humans are infected with these viruses through intermediate hosts such as civets, domestic pigs, horses, dromedary camels, etc., rather than directly from bats.
In 1998, the outbreak of Nipah virus in Malaysia was caused by human activities deep into the forest that fox bats intersected with pigs in captivity, and pigs infected with the virus as an intermediate host caused the Nipah virus to spread in humans.
People in many parts of Africa prefer to eat braised or grilled bats, and the chilling Ebola virus has been linked to direct contact with bats by locals. The bat soup that has recently been circulating on the Internet actually comes from Palau – in Southeast Asia, predatory bats are the traditional eating habits of some local residents.
Photography by Peter Neumann, on Unsplash
Bats are huge and diverse , with about 1107 species worldwide , and it is estimated that nearly one-fifth of all mammals are the second largest group after rodents. The habit of bats in groups provides a perfect environment for the spread of the virus, and the ultra-high density of intimate colonies allows the virus to spread rapidly. This perfect wild virus gene pool is a mobile biological arsenal for humans.
However, if humans are not directly exposed to bat feces and blood, do not eat unquarantined wild animals, and do not invade the natural habitat of bats, the virus will not find the opportunity.
Almost every disease from bats is accompanied by the intrusion of human activities into nature. In the face of the epidemic, instead of fearing bats, what we need to do more is to fear nature.
Original source: "China National Geographic" Chinese Traditional Edition 2014.03 "Weak Light Zone - Dark Homeland Dominated by Bats"
Original author: Zhang Jinshuo, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Resources
· ZHANG Hailin,ZHANG Fuqiang,HU Tingsong,YU Jing,FAN Quanshui. Research progress on virus pathogens associated with important zoonoses carried by bats in Yunnan Province[J].Journal of Chinese Zoonotic Diseases,2017,33(09):821-827.
Li Wendong,Liang Guodong,Liang Bing,Hu Zhihong,Shi Zhengli,Zhang Shuyi. Research progress on bat-borne viruses[J].Chinese Virology,2004,19(4):418-425.
Yan Yansheng. The significance of bats as reservoir reservoirs for zoonotic zoonotic diseases in China[J].Journal of Chinese Zoonotic Diseases,2019,35(8):677—682.
· SME Science Story. What's so special about bats that they can hide so many deadly viruses in their bodies? 》
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/muHHsE1BESbQiPNfFEqpWg
Cat Alliance CFCA: "Why did the coronavirus pneumonia only break out in 2003 and 2020"
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/tH8rH-Q34MpMI9Zs8o_QFw
· BioWorld. "After 15 years, the Wuhan Virus Institute finally confirmed that the culprit of SARS SARS is bats, and the prevention method is very simple"
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Kvr4Hn3uTnHCCSXhQK6gtg
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line">- END -</h1>
Copyright Notice: The copyright of the graphics and text of this article belongs to the traditional version of "National Panorama Geographic" and "China National Geographic" Chinese, if you need to reprint, please contact "National Panorama Geographic".
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