[ad_1]
Biologists like bats Every year, Dan Feller gets excited about the summer fieldwork season, when it’s time to get out of the office and head out into the woods to find his quarry — in this case, 10 species found in the mountains and forests of Maryland. Bats are most active in summer because of their breeding season and when their insect prey is more abundant.
But this summer is different. Instead of catching bats with ordinary nets or special traps (don’t worry, they don’t hurt), Feller and many of his colleagues in the country count them remotely with acoustic devices that record sonar calls. This is because humans are at risk of infecting bats with coronaviruses.
It may seem strange, but now bats need protection humans. Yes, it is true that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that surrounded the world is likely to have come out of a bat in China to another animal and then jumped on people before a process called discharge. But people can also transmit viruses to animals; this is called spill.
In Maryland, researchers like Feller are taking steps to prevent viral transmission in both directions. “We’re taking a conservative approach and we’re no longer manipulating them,” says Feller, who has been conducting annual Maryland bat surveys since 1990. “We re-evaluated some of the research projects we had aligned. We changed the techniques of the year until we had additional information.”
Feller and others will count bats with devices that record the acoustic signals they use to navigate while animals fly this summer, but will not check them directly white nose syndromea devastating disease since its inception when bat populations declined by more than 90 percent four caves around Albany, New York, where in 2007 he killed more than 10,000 bats.
Officials from the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have recently issued new guidelines to biologists like Feller, recommending wearing protective gear such as masks and respirators when they have a close relationship with bats or reduce the risk of spreading the virus. research in caves where many animals hibernate in winter.
“We’re treating bats the way we treat the human community,” says Kristina Smucker, head of the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks office, where she oversees permits for researchers who study non-hunting animals. “We will use personal protective equipment to make the bats safe. That means wearing an N95 mask, taking on gloves, taking the temperature and not doing it if you have given a positive job or if you don’t feel well. ”
Federal agencies issued guidelines last year after consulting with experts in wildlife health and virology. The guidelines also included data from two previous experiments, where the researchers tested bats under the influence of coronavirus. In first examination, published in December by a team of scientists from the USGS, the University of Wisconsin and Louisiana State University, a large brown bat (Epstesicus fnscns), One of the most common in the United States was resistant to virus-induced infections. A separate study by German researchers in 2020 on Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus), The virus, which is common in the Mediterranean, Europe and North Africa, was somewhat susceptible to the virus.
The USGS study assessed the likelihood of U.S. scientists and wildlife managers infecting coravirus with bats, and found that less than 2 in 1,000 bats would be infected if no protective measures were taken. The 32-page study was published in May bioRxiv prepress server and has not yet received a review, nor has it been approved for publication in a journal.
[ad_2]
Source link
