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Most organisms, including pathogens, have a relatively narrow temperature range they operate in. Hence why we get fevers in order to fight them off. Bats spend
by neaden 1y ago
Most organisms, including pathogens, have a relatively narrow temperature range they operate in. Hence why we get fevers in order to fight them off. Bats spend most of the time too cold, then get up to the equivalent of a high grade fever for an extended time. Here's a paper on the subject https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4012789/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4012789/
- thaumasiotes 1y agoThat covers the first sentence. How does it connect to the second one? So far, you've described how you would expect bats to carry very few diseases, because diseases that found themselves inside a bat would be killed by the temperature fluctuations. It does not appear to follow that bats should be hosting a lot of diseases at any given time.
- jollyllama 1y agoYou've made an interesting counterargument that I've never come across before. I'm purely speculating here, but maybe the diseases in question (rabies, nipah) are otherwise so deadly that they'd normally just kill the host, but in bats, they linger on. All that to say, that bats aren't necessarily hosting more diseases relative to other animals, but they harbor diseases at the more lethal end of the virulence to transmission tradeoff spectrum.
- thaumasiotes 1y agoWhat do you mean, counterargument? A "counterargument" can only exist relative to an argument. So far there hasn't been an argument. To recap: 1. "A big reason bats carry a lot of diseases is that they have large temperature fluctuations." 2. "How does the one lead to the other?" 3. "Diseases can't tolerate temperature fluctuations." That's gibberish, not an argument. Combining two random (or in this case, contradictory) sentences doesn't make an argument.