Originally published at: Watch these adorable rescue bats from the Amutat bat sanctuary | Boing Boing
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Those vids won’t play for me, but more power and resources to all bat rescuers!
I’ve been watching Megabattie’s vids for a couple years. She and many of her friends are involved in bat rescue in Australia. Meg rescues all types of bats, whatever their ages, and sometimes other critters, too. She works with megabats, raising flying fox babies; she says microbats are too small for her eyes, and her apt’s not set up to care for adolescent and adult flying foxes. The random critters, micros, and sub/adult flying foxes are sent to other carers.
Sometimes things don’t don’t go as we’d like with rescued animals; I recommend reading the descriptions for everyone who finds that hard to take - it is for me. There are plenty of happy vids, of her and her friend Maggie bottle-feeding babies, bathing and playing with them.
Meg also posts vids she’s sent from a rescuer friend, Mandi, who has big bat aviaries at her farm. Mandi works with all kindsa critters, and her farm animals’ appearances are always fun.
There are also vids from Second Chances Farm, where critters like wallabies and kookaburras are in residence.
Flying foxes are crucial for maintaining forest and rainforest health, scattering seeds and pollinating blossoms. Microbats often eat at least their weight in mosquitos each night, and many of them are also pollinators.
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Rescue bats fly flasks of scotch to lost hikers. Like St Bernard’s.
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Who’s an adorable zoonotic virus reservoir then? You are! You are!’
They are very sweet.
What is the airspeed velocity…?
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A bat is no more zoonotic than any other mammal or bird.
Reservoir host effects on the propensity of viruses to have been reported as infecting humans were rare and when present were restricted to one or two viral families. The data instead support a largely host-neutral explanation for the distribution of human-infecting viruses across the animal orders studied. After controlling for higher baseline viral richness in mammals versus birds, the observed number of zoonoses per animal order increased as a function of their species richness. Animal orders of established importance as zoonotic reservoirs including bats and rodents were unexceptional, maintaining numbers of zoonoses that closely matched expectations for mammalian groups of their size.
When the family-specific reservoir effect was not present, viral rather than reservoir taxonomy was the stronger predictor of zoonotic status (models 23 to 28 in Fig. 2A and SI Appendix, Fig. S3). Thus, our results provide no support for the special reservoir hypothesis, which predicted that viruses associated with certain reservoir groups would be more likely to be zoonotic.
Instead, both the total number of viruses associated with each reservoir group (“viral richness”) and the number of zoonoses matched expectations under the reservoir richness hypothesis. The absence of reservoir effects meant that viral richness was strongly correlated with the number of zoonotic species (R 2 = 0.88, P < 0.001; Fig. 3), consistent with a similar per-virus zoonotic risk across reservoirs.
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