Timothy Treuer, Ricardo Rocha, and Cara Brook write:

Bats get a bad rap.

From horror films to tabloid pages to Halloween, media and cultural depictions of our planet’s only volant, or flying, mammals have long generated and reinforced unfounded fear. Their evident role as original source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that produced the COVID-19 epidemic has exacerbated their unfortunate public image and even led to calls and active measures to cull or harass bat populations.

Such hostile attitudes make it harder to conserve bats and thereby safeguard the many critical benefits they provide us. What’s more, persecuting bats because of the diseases they harbor could easily backfire.

Before getting into that, let’s back up for a second.

The kernel of truth regarding bats and disease is that the former do host an unusual variety of the latter, including viruses that can be deadly when they spill into the lives of other mammals like us. Other authors have thoughtfully covered the direct and indirect role bats played in the emergence of the likes of Ebola, Nipah and SARS. Rather than rehashing that here, we’ll just point out that recent research has suggested a reason why bats have been the source of an eyebrow-raising number of disease outbreaks. In short, the unique stress of flight may have supercharged bats’ ability to tolerate aggressive immune responses to certain pathogens, triggering the co-evolution of virulent viruses. The more pedestrian immune systems of earthbound mammals struggle to cope when those bad boy virions enter their system.

But before throwing bats out with the bathwater on the grounds of disease risk, we must consider the rich range of benefits they provide us, including several ways they keep us healthy. Bats help regenerate our forests and provide us with fertilizer. They pollinate our food plants, from mangos to agave, in total more than 300 species of crops. They also gobble up so many insect pests in fields of cacao, cotton, corn and countless other cultivated species that without them we’d see more than $3.7 billion per year in lost production in North America alone. These hungry mouths are particularly important in less economically developed countries, where a number of different species offer free-of-charge pest control services by feasting on multiple agricultural pests each. [Continue reading…]