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A single mosquito bat (Pipistrellus pygmaeus) eats thousands of mosquitoes every night
Photo: Steffen Schellhorn / imago images
In the Saxon district of Bautzen, during the corona pandemic, there were discussions about tiny sub-tenants in a school that weigh just a few grams: bats.
A lot of money was spent on the new building for the nest boxes for the animals.
But now some people apparently had doubts as to whether nature conservation was right here.
Couldn't the animals at school pose a threat to the children?
After all, the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus is said to have only become a human threat in bats.
In Bonn, unknowns went one step further than just discussing.
A bat quarter was deliberately demolished there.
A shaft through which the animals fly into a basement where they hibernate was damaged.
It is unclear whether the attack was aimed at the animals. But since the outbreak of the pandemic, researchers and nature lovers have been reporting more and more problems with bat protection. There had already been attacks last year, when in China, where bats are actually considered a good luck charm, some people no longer wanted to tolerate the animals in their houses and political voices were also raised to kill the animals. Hundreds of animals were burned in Peru for fear that they could transmit the virus.
The more than two dozen bat species in Germany that are under nature protection are currently particularly in need of protection.
Many animals have only awakened from hibernation a few weeks ago and are looking for their summer quarters.
All winter long they lived on their fat reserves.
Some animals are emaciated and first have to eat their reserves again.
The fact that the image of animals has always been poor doesn't make the work of conservationists and researchers any easier.
Many people view bats with suspicion and disgust.
They had the image of the dark bloodsucker who stalked his victims as the ominous creature of the night.
Only a few of the approximately 1400 species worldwide are vampires.
None of these occur in Germany.
Now bats are also notorious as virus-throwers, reports the biologist Simon Ripperger from the Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Research in Berlin. He refers to a study according to which the general appreciation of bats in the population has declined since the pandemic. That coincides with his experiences. A Chinese study showed that even more educated people, including even experts on bats, sometimes misunderstood the connection between corona and bats. For this, abbreviated representations in the media, but also in scientific papers, are at least partly responsible, the researchers write. A not yet published work by the Berlin urban ecologist Tanja Straka and her colleague Christian Voigt,For which many bat researchers were interviewed, the results are similar: In Germany, too, the acceptance of the animals has decreased. Some even reported being asked if the animals should not be killed.
When Ripperger is out and about with colleagues in Berlin to catch bats, he is often approached by curious passers-by.
The language then almost inevitably comes to Sars-CoV-2.
"At least half of the people comment on Corona," the biologist told SPIEGEL.
He is concerned that the reputation of animals as drivers of pandemics is manifesting itself.
Christian Drosten found a number of corona viruses in bats years ago.
But the Sars-CoV-2 strain responsible for the pandemic has not been detected in German bats.
There is no danger from the animals, emphasizes Ripperger again and again.
And the investigations by the WHO in China into the origin of the pandemic do not give any current cause for concern.
It is true that the variant of the coronavirus developed in bats at some point.
But another animal was responsible for the transmission to humans "probably to very likely", according to the last report.
There were changes between the genomes of the pandemic strain and that of bats that must have taken several decades of evolution to complete.
It is unlikely that viruses can now pass directly from bats to humans.
Key position in the ecosystem
German bats don't have it easy anyway. Of the roughly two dozen species that live in this country, only two are not endangered. Many feel comfortable in caves, trees and sheds. And some species such as the brown long-eared bat or the broad-winged bat like to seek out cavities in buildings and thus live close to humans. But such accommodations have also become less due to building renovations. In addition, wind turbines and the consequences of intensive agriculture are causing problems for the only mammals that have ever learned to fly. Their nutritional basis is endangered by the loss of insects.
The animals occupy a key position in the ecosystem, as many researchers emphasize.
They serve as pollinators of plants and distribute seeds.
They also devour annoying stinging animals to an astonishing extent.
A single mosquito bat, one of the smallest species in Germany, eats thousands of mosquitoes in just one night.
And even animal droppings help nature grow.
It provides important nutrients not only for trees, but also for some animal species.
It is known that some salamanders feed on bat excrement in caves.
Agriculture also benefits from the product.
The manure was traded as a valuable raw material for fertilizer.
Bat protection is worthwhile - even for economic reasons
In addition, the animals' nocturnal eating activities can be converted directly into financial benefits for the farmers. Because the animals also eat some pests from crops. Thanks to their fine tracking system, they catch tons of insects on their nightly forays. In a study, researchers once calculated the amount of crop protection products farmers in the USA save by using bats. In total, it should be billions of US dollars, a "Science" study estimates the amount. Field experiments in which the bats were denied access to insect-rich maize fields also confirmed the rapid increase in pests when the mammals could no longer fly to the fields. The damage caused by eating also increased fungal diseases in the plants.
So, even from an economic point of view, there may be good reasons to invest in the protection of bats.
But how do you succeed in improving the image of animals?
Researchers and bat conservationists have been discussing this particularly intensively since the pandemic.
On the one hand, the scientific community must educate about the risks of diseases that originate in the animal kingdom.
But on the other hand there is a risk that the reputation of whole taxa can suffer.
“Right now I keep proclaiming that we need our bats.
We can learn a lot from them that we need now and in the future, «said Johannes Mohr, biologist at the District Office in Forchheim in Upper Franconia.
What Mohr means by his statement: Bats are useful for medical research. Because on the one hand the animals harbor many viruses. But on the other hand, they are apparently very well protected against disease. Even in large colonies there are hardly any violent waves of disease. Interferons - proteins that can have an antiviral effect - are possibly responsible for the animals' good immune defense. If one could uncover the secret of the good bat immune system, it might be possible to derive insights that also protect humans, so the hope is. Research into the bat organism has already been crowned with success, says Mohr. A vaccine against rabies could be obtained from bats. The animals are still considered carriers of this disease,albeit extremely seldom.
Getting rid of the evil bat myth
Mohr is responsible for ecological development in Forchheim and is involved in a bat project that has the character of a beacon, as his colleague Ripperger describes.
The Franconian Alb offers bats very good living conditions by German standards.
Little agriculture disturbs nature there, and the karst rock offers caves that bats like to use as shelter.
Almost all of the species living in Germany have already been identified in the region.
That is why bat researchers hang around there more often.
In order to document the movements of the animals, they set up a tracking system and converted an old ocean container into a field laboratory.
The metal box at the edge of the forest quickly attracted curious families from the area.
This initially resulted in an art project with local schools. The children covered the container with self-made bat motifs and learned a lot about the animals in the process. "This is the only way to get the myth of the evil bat out of our heads," says Mohr. Another idea with which the researcher is doing public relations is the species identification pass, a kind of Panini album of the local animal world. The children can acquire knowledge about bats, but also about other species with a bad image such as snakes or amphibians through workshops and excursions. The best strategy for nature conservation is imparting knowledge, which has now been proven by studies, says Ripperger. "Such projects dispel prejudices and create enthusiasm for nature."
There seems to be something to one of these prejudices, which can be found over and over again: bats actually provide a reservoir for viruses that can be dangerous to humans. The risk of such so-called zoonotic infections appears to be increased. But as researchers write in a paper, on closer inspection it is similarly high in other animal groups such as rodents. It is possible that one has simply looked very closely at bats and examined them in more detail, says the renowned bat researcher Merlin Tuttle.
And in the end it is the person who increases this risk through their actions. The destruction of habitat, hunting or, for example, the wildlife trade make a significant contribution to creating the potential for transmission in the first place. It would be better to just leave the animals in their natural habitats.
In Forchheim, the biologist Mohr is happy that his strategy of using children as ambassadors for the bats seems to be working. In the forest, while analyzing the ultrasound signals that the animals emit for orientation purposes, the researchers came across the acoustic fingerprint of nymph bats. The species has only been known for a few years, and little is known about the tiny animals. The citizens were happy about the possible find. Since then, the forest has been popularly known as the nymph forest.