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Biologists love bats Dan Feller enjoys an annual gardening job, a time to get out of the office and out in the wild to look for their stones — these are the 10 species found in the mountains and in Woodland. Bats are especially active during the summer, when it is their breeding season, and it is the time when their animals are most in love.
But this summer is a little different. Instead of seizing bats with ultrathin nets or special traps (no worries, no harm), Feller and many of his colleagues around the world count them away from the musical instruments that record their sonar phones. This is because of the risk of humans transmitting coronaviruses to bats.
It may sound strange, but the bats now need to be protected people. Of course, it is true that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that circulated around the world may have originated from bats in China before it infected other animals and then humans, a process called spillover. But humans can also transmit the virus to animals; is called return.
In Maryland, researchers like Feller are taking precautions to prevent the spread of viruses in all directions. “We’re taking a management approach and we’re not helping them anymore,” says Feller, who has been conducting annual research in Maryland since 1990. “We’ve reviewed some of the research we did. We’ve changed skills by the end of the year until we know more.”
Feller and others will read the bats this summer with the tools that record the music signs that animals use on the move, but do not look directly at them white nose disease, a devastating disease that has devastated more than 90 percent of the population since its inception four caves near Albany, New York, which killed more than 10,000 bats in 2007 alone.
Officials at the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have recently issued new instructions to biologists such as Feller, agreeing to wear protective equipment such as masks and respirators to reduce the risk of transmitting the virus as they approach bats or search caves where many animals live. they hide in winter.
“We treat bats the way we treat humans,” said Kristina Smucker, head of the Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks office, where she oversees research for researchers who study non-hunted animals. “We will use our protective equipment to protect the bats. This means wearing N95 clothing, gloves, your warmth, and do not work if you are diagnosed with the virus or if you are not sick. ”
Federal agencies offered the advice after consulting with wildlife and virology experts last year. The mice also included information from the first two experiments in which researchers detected bats in a coronavirus. In the file of first lesson, published in December, a team of scientists from the USGS, the University of Wisconsin, and Louisiana State University found that large bats (Epstesicus funds), one of the most common in the United States, was the fight against the disease. A study by German researchers in 2020 found that Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus), which is common in the Mediterranean, Europe, and North Africa, was contagious.
A USGS study looked at the potential for U.S. scientists and wildlife rangers who transmit the coronavirus to bats, and it found that at least 2 out of 1,000 bats could be infected if they did not respond. A 32-page survey was published in May on bioRxiv preprint server and has not yet received peer pressure or approval to be published in the press.
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