4 ms·

Did learning to fly give bats super-immunity?

62 points by betadreamer 14y ago

csense 14y ago
I assumed from the headline that this would be a stupid article, but I took the time to read it anyway and found that this assumption was wrong. The premise sounds quite solid: The unique challenges of being a flying mammal require spending lots of energy. Which leads to lots of free radicals. Which leads to lots of DNA damage. Which increases selective pressure for DNA repair. Evolution normally doesn't select for organisms that are able to survive aging, because, from the standpoint of natural selection, once your reproductive years are past, your survival doesn't matter. That aging resistance would be an incidental benefit of general DNA repair mechanisms that evolved in response to a lifestyle that encourages free radical formation makes a lot of sense. The specific molecules and reactions involved in bats probably will provide important clues to the aging process in mammals, even if the adaptations in bats can't be translated directly into treatments for humans. How immunity and disease fits into this picture is less clear from the article. But the aging angle alone is enough to make this research very interesting.
- thaumasiotes 14y ago
  > Evolution normally doesn't select for organisms that are able to survive aging, because, from the standpoint of natural selection, once your reproductive years are past, your survival doesn't matter. The logic is actually a bit deeper than this. There's no reason you couldn't have an organism that "survived aging", and that could reproduce indefinitely. Obviously, given a potentially unlimited reproductive span, selection would come in on the side of longer lifetimes. As I've seen it presented, the logic of organism deterioration with age is that accidents happen, which means that, if you happen to have a life strategy which makes you momentarily better off, but permanently worse off, you may die of unrelated causes before suffering a net loss. As long as that can happen, we should observe aging: young organisms boosting their performance at the expense of their own future selves. (as an example: imagine you impress a girl by doing some death-defying stunt, and suffer more physical strain than your body is really designed for. If you were going to live forever, that might be a bad idea. If you're not, then maybe impressing the girl is worth the lower physical fitness you have afterwards.)
  - csense 14y ago
    > if you happen to have a life strategy which makes you momentarily better off, but permanently worse off, you may die of unrelated causes before suffering a net loss This is true, but irrelevant to the present discussion. If you can live and reproduce forever -- or for a very long time -- then the -EV of "permanently worse off" exceeds the +EV of "temporarily better off." My understanding of why we didn't evolve to have better gene repair and longer lives is that the ideal death and mutation rates in terms of species survival is some finite number greater than zero. Near-immortality, eternal youth and perfect genome repair would be great from an individual perspective, but from a species perspective, those things reduce the ability for genetic innovation. Too many mutations are bad, but not enough mutations are also bad. I would guess that the bats get around this by getting so much extra EV from occupying the unique ecological niche of "flying mammal" that the ability to occupy that niche overwhelms the negative aspects of a smaller mutation rate.
    - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
      >I would guess that the bats get around this by getting so much extra EV from occupying the unique ecological niche of "flying mammal" that the ability to occupy that niche overwhelms the negative aspects of a smaller mutation rate. You're assuming a smaller mutation rate. The article points out that bats generally don't live to die of old age, something else usually gets them first. A longer theoretical lifespan doesn't reduce the mutation rate if lifespans in practice are still modest. (If the first couple of hits on Google are any indication, bats typically live for a couple of decades.)
      - csense 14y ago
        > if lifespans in practice are still modest They aren't. The article says: "For an animal of their size, [bats] also age very slowly..." I'm assuming that, without their gene repair mechanism, they would have been more in line with other animals their size, and occasionally died of old age. So the gene repair mechanism does extend the bats' lifespan. To do good science, of course, you'd have to confirm this by an experiment to raise some bats that lack the gene repair mechanism and measure their deaths due to old age against a control group. Or better yet, do a fantastically expensive long-term experiment comparing bat colonies with and without the DNA repair mechanism, and measure their genetic drift over time. Of course, I haven't done those experiments. If someone else does them, and shows results contradictory to my assumption, it'll be a great scientific discovery. But in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it seems like it's a safe bet that the DNA repair mechansim would reduce mutation rates on its own, and anything that makes the bats live longer would also reduce mutation rates on its own, and having both longevity and DNA repair together would reduce mutation rates at least as much as either by itself. You may say decades of lifespan is "modest" by human standards, but much more relevant comparisons would be to bats without the DNA repair mechanism -- or, if data is lacking on those, to closely related mammals of similar size.
sukuriant 14y ago
Why are bats the litmus test for rabies, then? That just seems a bit odd. And why is rabies so prevalent/dangerous in bats that even breathing the air in bat caves can get you the disease?
- blhack 14y ago
  >breathing the air in bat caves can get you the disease? For reference, there are two possible cases of this. Two. This is not a common thing.
- NickNameNick 14y ago
  The article doesn't say the bats dont get infected, it says infection has very little affect on the bats health.
- huggah 14y ago
  Dangerous for humans, you mean. The fact that a species can survive while being so disease-ridden that they routinely kill the animals they infect seems to lend credence to the "super-immunity" claim. I'm not sure this is actually the case for bats, but assuming your statement is true, it seems to be evidence for the presence of super-immunity, rather than against.
  - executive 14y ago
    Dangerous for some humans, you mean. Clearly not dangerous for Mr. Wayne.
- wisty 14y ago
  Bats live in massive colonies, so diseases can spread like wildfire. That's probably why their immune systems are good, too.
hughlomas 14y ago
Consider it from the disease's perspective. Ebola doesn't 'target' humans. Ebola's obvious symptoms and mortality rate in humans limit its ability to spread efficiently. The flu virus or cold virus has been far more successful in penetrating the human ecosystem. Perhaps Ebola has been selected for being stable in the bat ecosystem. The mobility of bats also makes them an excellent transmission vector, which a virus would ideally want to be non-symptomatic.
gus_massa 14y ago
Very strange, I'd like to see more evidence. Is there some analogous adaptation for birds? Flying / non-flying birds?
- abecedarius 14y ago
  Birds are also long-lived, compared to mammals of similar size. One of Nick Lane's books discussed this and something about their adaptations against damage from respiration -- either Oxygen or Power, Sex, Suicide, I forget which.
lostlogin 14y ago
Given the massive die offs from the fungal infection that is completely devastating US bat populations, I'd say their immune systems may be unique, but they aren't miraculous. The outlook for North American bats is very grim. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_nose_syndrome http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_nose_syndrome

62 points by betadreamer 14y ago

I assumed from the headline that this would be a stupid article, but I took the time to read it anyway and found that this assumption was wrong. The premise sounds quite solid: The unique challenges of being a flying mammal require spending lots of energy. Which leads to lots of free radicals. Which leads to lots of DNA damage. Which increases selective pressure for DNA repair. Evolution normally doesn't select for organisms that are able to survive aging, because, from the standpoint of natural selection, once your reproductive years are past, your survival doesn't matter. That aging resistance would be an incidental benefit of general DNA repair mechanisms that evolved in response to a lifestyle that encourages free radical formation makes a lot of sense. The specific molecules and reactions involved in bats probably will provide important clues to the aging process in mammals, even if the adaptations in bats can't be translated directly into treatments for humans. How immunity and disease fits into this picture is less clear from the article. But the aging angle alone is enough to make this research very interesting.

thaumasiotes 14y ago
> Evolution normally doesn't select for organisms that are able to survive aging, because, from the standpoint of natural selection, once your reproductive years are past, your survival doesn't matter. The logic is actually a bit deeper than this. There's no reason you couldn't have an organism that "survived aging", and that could reproduce indefinitely. Obviously, given a potentially unlimited reproductive span, selection would come in on the side of longer lifetimes. As I've seen it presented, the logic of organism deterioration with age is that accidents happen, which means that, if you happen to have a life strategy which makes you momentarily better off, but permanently worse off, you may die of unrelated causes before suffering a net loss. As long as that can happen, we should observe aging: young organisms boosting their performance at the expense of their own future selves. (as an example: imagine you impress a girl by doing some death-defying stunt, and suffer more physical strain than your body is really designed for. If you were going to live forever, that might be a bad idea. If you're not, then maybe impressing the girl is worth the lower physical fitness you have afterwards.)
- csense 14y ago
  > if you happen to have a life strategy which makes you momentarily better off, but permanently worse off, you may die of unrelated causes before suffering a net loss This is true, but irrelevant to the present discussion. If you can live and reproduce forever -- or for a very long time -- then the -EV of "permanently worse off" exceeds the +EV of "temporarily better off." My understanding of why we didn't evolve to have better gene repair and longer lives is that the ideal death and mutation rates in terms of species survival is some finite number greater than zero. Near-immortality, eternal youth and perfect genome repair would be great from an individual perspective, but from a species perspective, those things reduce the ability for genetic innovation. Too many mutations are bad, but not enough mutations are also bad. I would guess that the bats get around this by getting so much extra EV from occupying the unique ecological niche of "flying mammal" that the ability to occupy that niche overwhelms the negative aspects of a smaller mutation rate.
  - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    >I would guess that the bats get around this by getting so much extra EV from occupying the unique ecological niche of "flying mammal" that the ability to occupy that niche overwhelms the negative aspects of a smaller mutation rate. You're assuming a smaller mutation rate. The article points out that bats generally don't live to die of old age, something else usually gets them first. A longer theoretical lifespan doesn't reduce the mutation rate if lifespans in practice are still modest. (If the first couple of hits on Google are any indication, bats typically live for a couple of decades.)
    - csense 14y ago
      > if lifespans in practice are still modest They aren't. The article says: "For an animal of their size, [bats] also age very slowly..." I'm assuming that, without their gene repair mechanism, they would have been more in line with other animals their size, and occasionally died of old age. So the gene repair mechanism does extend the bats' lifespan. To do good science, of course, you'd have to confirm this by an experiment to raise some bats that lack the gene repair mechanism and measure their deaths due to old age against a control group. Or better yet, do a fantastically expensive long-term experiment comparing bat colonies with and without the DNA repair mechanism, and measure their genetic drift over time. Of course, I haven't done those experiments. If someone else does them, and shows results contradictory to my assumption, it'll be a great scientific discovery. But in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it seems like it's a safe bet that the DNA repair mechansim would reduce mutation rates on its own, and anything that makes the bats live longer would also reduce mutation rates on its own, and having both longevity and DNA repair together would reduce mutation rates at least as much as either by itself. You may say decades of lifespan is "modest" by human standards, but much more relevant comparisons would be to bats without the DNA repair mechanism -- or, if data is lacking on those, to closely related mammals of similar size.

sukuriant 14y ago

Why are bats the litmus test for rabies, then? That just seems a bit odd. And why is rabies so prevalent/dangerous in bats that even breathing the air in bat caves can get you the disease?

blhack 14y ago
>breathing the air in bat caves can get you the disease? For reference, there are two possible cases of this. Two. This is not a common thing.
NickNameNick 14y ago
The article doesn't say the bats dont get infected, it says infection has very little affect on the bats health.
huggah 14y ago
Dangerous for humans, you mean. The fact that a species can survive while being so disease-ridden that they routinely kill the animals they infect seems to lend credence to the "super-immunity" claim. I'm not sure this is actually the case for bats, but assuming your statement is true, it seems to be evidence for the presence of super-immunity, rather than against.
- executive 14y ago
  Dangerous for some humans, you mean. Clearly not dangerous for Mr. Wayne.
wisty 14y ago
Bats live in massive colonies, so diseases can spread like wildfire. That's probably why their immune systems are good, too.

hughlomas 14y ago

Consider it from the disease's perspective. Ebola doesn't 'target' humans. Ebola's obvious symptoms and mortality rate in humans limit its ability to spread efficiently. The flu virus or cold virus has been far more successful in penetrating the human ecosystem. Perhaps Ebola has been selected for being stable in the bat ecosystem. The mobility of bats also makes them an excellent transmission vector, which a virus would ideally want to be non-symptomatic.

gus_massa 14y ago

Very strange, I'd like to see more evidence. Is there some analogous adaptation for birds? Flying / non-flying birds?

abecedarius 14y ago
Birds are also long-lived, compared to mammals of similar size. One of Nick Lane's books discussed this and something about their adaptations against damage from respiration -- either Oxygen or Power, Sex, Suicide, I forget which.

lostlogin 14y ago

Given the massive die offs from the fungal infection that is completely devastating US bat populations, I'd say their immune systems may be unique, but they aren't miraculous. The outlook for North American bats is very grim. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_nose_syndrome http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_nose_syndrome