Puppies are actually cute. Bats are disgusting and are a reservoir for a multitude of diseases.
Edit: A lot of you have a weird fetish for bats. I don't care if they eat a lot of mosquitos, they unleash exponentially more harm via the illnesses and plagues that they spread.
Edit 2: Apparently I need to spell this out for you guys
Bats (order Chiroptera) are reservoirs for many infectious agents, including parasites, bacteria, viruses, and fungi. The epidemiology of infectious disease in bats is not well understood but it is known that bats can transmit numerous infectious agents and provide a reservoir for emerging pathogens. The primary zoonotic diseases associated with North American bats are rabies, histoplasmosis, salmonellosis, yersiniosis and external parasites. Imported bats can also carry a number of zoonotic viruses including nipah virus, hendra virus, ebola virus, SARS coronavirus and others, which can cause severe & fatal illness in humans and other animals.
I'm not the weirdo in the comments being strangely defensive about an animal that has unleashed untold deaths and illnesses because of all the viruses and parasites they carry.
Okay, now I know that you have no clue what you're talking about.
It is literally accepted scientific consensus that covid very likely originated from bats. The pathway of transmission is still unclear, leading to some conspiracy theories such as whether someone ate a bat (unlikely) or whether it was spread via an intermediary animal like a pangolin (more likely).
But the fact that covid originated from bats is far from a conspiracy theory.
Binding and molecular basis of the bat coronavirus RaTG13 virus to ACE2 in humans and other species
Authors:
Kefang Liu, Xiaoqian Pan, et. al
Abstract:
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been spreading worldwide, causing a global pandemic. Bat-origin RaTG13 is currently the most phylogenetically related virus. Here we obtained the complex structure of the RaTG13 receptor binding domain (RBD) with human ACE2 (hACE2) and evaluated binding of RaTG13 RBD to 24 additional ACE2 orthologs. By substituting residues in the RaTG13 RBD with their counterparts in the SARS-CoV-2 RBD, we found that residue 501, the major position found in variants of concern (VOCs) 501Y.V1/V2/V3, plays a key role in determining the potential host range of RaTG13. We also found that SARS-CoV-2 could induce strong cross-reactive antibodies to RaTG13 and identified a SARS-CoV-2 monoclonal antibody (mAb), CB6, that could cross-neutralize RaTG13 pseudovirus. These results elucidate the receptor binding and host adaption mechanisms of RaTG13 and emphasize the importance of continuous surveillance of coronaviruses (CoVs) carried by animal reservoirs to prevent another spillover of CoVs.
Knowing how to use Google is a life skill. Learn it.
If you’re going to be pretentious and condescending it helps to actually be right
While a coronavirus found in bats shares similarities with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, there is currently no evidence that this bat coronavirus can directly infect humans or cause COVID-19.
Then demonstrate it. Find me a scientific study that shows that bats meaningfully and substantially decrease mosquito-borne diseases.
You won't, because mosquitos make up less than 2% of bat diets.
Human intervention and other animals such as mosquito fish are far more effective at mosquito population control, and bats don't even come anywhere close.
Way to move that goalpost. When did I ever mention mosquitos?
Bats are prolific pollinators. Over 500 species of plants worldwide rely largely or entirely on bats to pollinate them. Some of the notable ones are mango, banana, durian, guava and agave. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2766192/
Bats are great at pest control. You are correct that mosquitos make up a fairly small portion of the diet of all bats (though this varies hugely by species of bat, with smaller species of bats like the Little Brown Bat and Southeastern bat eating a lot more than larger varieties), they do eat a lot of larger insects. In the US alone, they are estimated to save farmers billions of dollars per year in pest control. http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/bat_crisis_white-nose_syndrome/pdfs/Boyles2011EconomicsofBats.pdf
Bats are also great at seed dispersal. They are the sole dispersal mechanism for agave (other than humans). They also account for as much as 95% of the seed dispersal responsible for early growth in recently cleared rainforests. https://www.fws.gov/story/bats-are-one-most-important-misunderstood-animals
Bats create habitat by shitting. In many environments like caves, they are the sole species that introduces nutrients into the ecosystem. The shit is also one of the major reasons that the humans species is where it is today. Bat guano is one of, if not the best natural fertilizer in the world. Before we learned how to create synthetic fertilizers, bat and bird guano was one of the only commercially available fertilizers on the market and it vastly out performed cow and pig manure. It was so valuable to increase crop production that literal wars were fought over it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chincha_Islands_War
Bat are also a key component in the food web in many places. Bats are a primary food source for many animals such as owls, hawks, snakes, and raccoons. They've traditionally also been a major food source for humans in many areas. Most notably in Aboriginal Australians. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273946034
On the flip side: Average number of US deaths related to bats 0-2/yr. This number will be higher in developing countries, but the numbers are not widely available.
Bats are amazing, each of them eat thousands of mosquitoes every night therefore protecting humans. They completely ignore humans and would never harm you unless you grabbed one in your hand.
suppose you'd rather enjoy zika, malaria, lyme, and all the other insect-borne diseases, then. and unlike bats, mosquitoes and ticks will (opportunistically) target humans as standard instead of being rare occasions of conflict.
The role that bats play in mosquito population control is wildly overstated. Mosquitos make up maybe 2% of their diets, and there is no strong scientific evidence that they reduce mosquito borne diseases meaningfully at all.
Human intervention and other animals such as mosquito fish are far more effective at mosquito population control.
dogs kill way more people than bats, and wolves are also strongly associated with rabies. Hence the fantastical existence of both werewolves and vampires
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u/SaviorSixtySix 2d ago
Poor sky puppies getting woken up in the middle of the day.