Massively so. I dig them.
I don’t want to diss them. I just know a guy who went into a bat-cave in Venezuela, doing work on spiders which live there.
He came back to our lab. Didn’t feel so well after a couple of weeks. When I saw him again, and asked where he had been off to the last three or so months, I assumed he had been on another field trip.
He had been in hospital for ten weeks. Caught a lung infection from the bats in that cave, and a fungal superinfection from the bat feces on top of that. He really didn’t look so well.
Since then, I’m a bit careful around bats.
However, I did work in some very poor African countries, and had several close encounters. Some of them were so cute I almost forgot my cautious approach.
