Has the world gone batty?

Many scientists believe that the coronavirus has come to us as the result of human contact with bats, whether that exposure occurred in so-called “wet markets” where wild animals (including bats) are sold as food and, ironically, as traditional medicine, or from people hiking through caves or other wild places frequented by one or more of the 1,400 species of the world’s only flying mammals. Whatever the point of contact, the bat-to-human hypothesis hasn’t done much good for bats’ already sketchy reputation.

Bats are unusual animals. Although appearance and behaviors vary dramatically, we tend to think of all bats as black rats with skin-covered wings, hanging upside-down in caves during the day and flying blind at night guided by squeaking sonar in numbers so great they appear as a dark cloud in search of blood (Just to that last point, while about a third of bat species suck the heck out of grapes and ripe mangoes, only three or four actually drink blood). Another unusual characteristic, bats also have a pretty unusual relationship with many virulent and terrifying illnesses. They can carry and transmit, apparently without suffering any ill effects themselves, the deadly viruses linked to Ebola and SARS, among others, and can even contract rabies and come away from that exposure unharmed. But blaming bats for COVID-19 makes about as much sense as being angry with the sun because of skin cancer. We need the sun, and bats play several crucial roles in the environment as pollinators and insect-eaters on a massive scale (insects themselves, of course, also linked to the transmission of human diseases).