Roosting With Bats: Nature’s Most Misunderstood Mammal

By Dr. Tigga Kingston | Originally published April 17, 2020

Bats have earned an unwarranted reputation as disease spreaders since the Covid-19 outbreak. With April 17 marking World Bat Appreciation Day, Dr. Tigga Kingston sets out to provide the full picture on these misunderstood mammals.

It’s 7:20pm at the edge of the rainforest of Krau Wildlife Reserve in Peninsular Malaysia. Plaintive calls of nightjars herald the transition from day to night as silhouettes of bats flitter in the twilight.

Bats do not spread Covid-19 — you can only catch it from other people. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes Covid-19. A related virus, RatG2013, was isolated from an intermediate horseshoe bat from China in 2013, leading to suggestions the bat virus jumped to people. Research shows this is extremely unlikely. The key part of the virus that enables it to infect people is not from bats — the closest match identified is from a pangolin.

What is becoming clear is that human activities are making viral spillover events more likely. Habitat disturbance stresses animals, making them more susceptible to viruses and more likely to produce high viral loads. Humans are encroaching on wildlife habitat and trading or consuming wildlife, increasing exposure opportunities.

Why Bats Matter

Bats provide enormous ecological and economic value worldwide. They are important pollinators and seed dispersers for hundreds of plants. Most famously, they are the key pollinator of durian — an 18 billion dollar industry. No bats means no durian.

The wrinkle-lipped free-tailed bat roosts in caves in the thousands and millions. One colony in Thailand of 2.6 million bats eats about four tonnes of plant-hoppers — a major rice pest — in a single night. Across Thailand this one species saves about 2,892 tonnes of rice annually.

Loss of habitat is a major challenge facing bats globally. About half of Southeast Asia’s bats roost in caves that are being lost to tourism disturbance, guano harvesting, and limestone quarrying for the cement industry. Intense hunting of large fruit bats is pushing many species toward extinction.

What Can We Do?

The solutions are familiar: habitats must be protected and restored, wildlife exploitation must stop, and the world’s ecosystems must be kept healthy. Creating buffers between human settlements and wildlife is essential for protecting both public and environmental health.

Bats are long-lived mammals — some species live more than 30 years — that typically give birth to only one pup per year. Their populations cannot withstand sustained disturbance or intense hunting. Every bat that survives is important.