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DecafWriter t1_j9io79z wrote

It depends on what species of bat you're referring to but as a blanket statement, it seems bats have the ability to limit certain responses to diseases like inflammation. It's not that bats are immune to viruses or anything, they simply have a much higher tolerance for diseases. A lot of the damage caused by illnesses is our body's reaction and how it fights it off. Things like fever which is designed to kill off infections also significantly disrupts the body and in some cases can cause as much if not more damage than the actual infection or virus.

Bats have the ability to control their body's response to diseases much more than other animals. This may also explain their relatively long lifespans. So they can act normally despite carrying a viral load that would make other animals like humans go nuts trying to get rid of it.

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stu54 t1_j9iup9h wrote

Makes me think the fact that many bats eat mosquitoes would expose them to many diseases from a variaty of other animals. Also, bats are often communal, so pathogens that can spread among the bats are selected for.

Insectivoir bats can't eat if they are weak so the bats' immune response has evolved to best handle frequent outbreaks of all sorts.

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FiascoBarbie t1_j9jep2p wrote

bats also have fairly high body temperatures.

Meaning that anything they have is unlikely to be susceptible to fever and will be fine in the high temp of a human body with a fever.

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Goser234 t1_j9l5h82 wrote

When you say "fairly high" how does that compare to like cats and dogs? I only ask because they also have a warmer body temperature and was wondering if we could see a similar, if downplayed, effect

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andanother12345 t1_j9lbvce wrote

In general the smaller the mammal the faster it's metabolic rate (with some exceptions). A faster metabolic rate generates more heat. Flight also requires a lot of effort and the metabolic rate goes quite high while animals are flying. In birds we see a typical core temperature of 102-109F and bats 99-106F.

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UDPviper t1_j9mf5mf wrote

And since bats are the only mammals that fly it would be a good guess to say they might have the highest body temperature of all mammals.

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thumpngroove t1_j9mg1kc wrote

Just the fact that they are mammals and can cover large distances make them pretty effective diisease vectors, it would seem.

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Westbrook_Level t1_j9j7fz3 wrote

Yes if you think about it communal bats living in a cave are like humans living crammed in a city, the absolute worst case scenario for disease transmission in a population. Maybe even worse because they don’t have houses they retreat to and are constantly exposed to everyone crawling around.

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HungerISanEmotion t1_j9j0ybu wrote

So viruses hoping from bats to humans have a greater potential to be deadly then viruses which hop from human to dogs. Wouldn't this create a bias because... viruses hoping from bats would get much more attention, and viruses hoping from dogs, pigs, cows would be mostly benign and remain undetected.

Or in other words, bats are not a good virus vector at all, instead they are a vector for deadly viruses.

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foodfood321 t1_j9khwyy wrote

Iirc bats also manufacture large quantities of their own vitamin C in a symbiotic relationship with the viruses living mostly in their hair follicles and triggering vit C production as viral loads increase. Humans either don't make their own endogenous VitC or only make a miniscule amount

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Nudelklone t1_j9ky4wn wrote

It‘s the other way round, they sound like a perfect reservoir for viruses. They might have benign viruses on top of the deadly ones in their system. Why should there be a selection for deadly ones if they are a great reservoir for virus amplification?

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WestguardWK t1_j9k3jzi wrote

Also, they can fly (enabling long distance transmission) and critically, they are mammals

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series_hybrid t1_j9k4fet wrote

Also, bats are very social, and sleep in clusters. If one gets something, it will spread rapidly if it is spreadable...

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evil_burrito t1_j9kvefd wrote

Not to mention, and I'm speculating bathed in ignorance here, you don't ever have one bat. If a bat colony is hosting a particular virus, and 50% of the colony are so affected by disease that they can't function well enough to infect you, that still leaves a lot of bats that presumably have been exposed and carry the infectious agent and are function well enough to get you sick, too.

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ThisIsTheOnly t1_j9mjpqg wrote

The reason this seems counter-intuitive to me is, if our immune system becomes dysfunctional as in AIDS/HIV then a simple cold becomes life threatening.

How do bats not die of infection if their body doesn’t have an immune response.

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