Image by Marcel Langthim from Pixabay
Bats have a significantly longer lifespan than other animals. the same size: making comparisons with humans we can say that only 19 species are longer-lived than humans and of these 18 are bats.
The other is the East African naked mole rat, Heterocephalus glaber, an underground animal with an amazing resistance to pain, which, like bats, adds a low risk of tumors to longevity and, like bats, is an important experimental model for study in this field.
In addition to being the only mammals to have acquired the ability to actively fly during the course of their evolution, bats also have the characteristic of being extraordinarily resistant to infections. But we know very little about the reasons why they enjoy such good health. Discovering whether there is a biological secret behind this well-being that can be exploited in medicine could therefore also represent a turning point for the prevention and treatment of many human diseases.
A new line of research on bats
For this reason, for some time now, both public and private research centers have been dedicated to the study of bats, and in particular their immune systems. With the pandemic, then, interest in them has grown even more, based on the well-founded hypothesis that, As with the first SARS virus, SARS-CoV-2 was also selected from among these animals. in the darkness of a cave in South China or Southeast Asia.
The public financing of this line of investigation, both from China and the United States, grew in 2021. Conferences that were until a few years ago reserved for a select few enthusiasts saw a surge in research participation. In just three years, the number of references to flying mammals in immunology articles more than tripled.
Image by Jose Miguel Guardeño from Pixabay
Image by Simon Berstecher from Pixabay
The difficulty of cultivating colonies.
For this reason, some researchers have faced the risks and logistical difficulties of capturing them, attempting to breed them in research centers. This is no easy task, since bats require favorable environments, have longer pregnancies, and reproduce much less than common rodents used in the laboratory. Of the 1450 known species, so far only a few have managed to breed in captivity.: they are mostly fruit bats, like the Jamaicans studied in Colorado or the Egyptians cultivated on the island of Riems, in Germany, in one of the excellence in the study of the most dangerous viral diseases, with level 4 biosafety laboratories (BSL -4).
Nothing to do instead for the "horseshoes", as bats are called Rhinopolus, those where the first SARS virus is believed to have selected and where many specimens genetically related to SARS-CoV-2 have been found. So far, no one has managed to create a colony that reproduces in captivity.
Understand your resistance to viruses.
In Asia, the largest bat colony is at the affiliated center of the Duke – National University of Singapore (Duke – NUS) Medical School, which you can count around 140 bats of the species Eonycteris spelaea (or Morning bat), fruit of the mating including some twenty specimens collected around Singapore between 2015 and 2016. By observing them, scientists try to understand the reasons for their longevity, their resistance to viruses, and the metabolism that allows them to fly.
The danger that comes from the caves, the bats
Meanwhile, fundamental research on the viruses inside bats continues, about the relationships between their evolutionary lines and about the mechanisms by which bats release infectious agents into the environment that are harmless to them, fundamental elements for the prevention of new emergencies.
In fact, we cannot forget that some of deadliest viruses that humanity has known have arrived precisely through contact with bats: from rabies to Ebola, from Hendra and Nipah to the coronavirus responsible for the first SARS, which at the beginning of the century caused hundreds of deaths.
Special guarded bats
Since then, as I mentioned here, bats have been observed in a special way, for among the many families of the order Chiroptera that groups them, thousands of coronaviruses circulate, many of which can be transmitted to humans. Efforts have intensified to solve the mystery surrounding the virus's origin: finding the animal that likely carried the virus to the Huanan fish market as an intermediate host would put an end to a dispute in which political reasons have too often prevailed over scientific ones.
Animals to reevaluate
Until now, most of the research done on bats has focused on the risks they can pose, and this approach has helped fuel the fear and disgust they generate in many people. However, bats are essential to ecosystems, and not just because they protect us from pesky mosquitoes: The US Department of Fish and Wildlife has calculated that, thanks to insect-eating bats, crop damage and pesticide use worth more than $3 billion a year, only in the United States. If they also gave us the weapon to better resist the attacks of viruses and age, perhaps we would learn to appreciate them even more.