If you want to ask who is the most poisonous mammal in the world, bats would say second, and no one would dare to be first.
As the only air force of mammals, bats have developed a lot of skills, including a stunt that shocks humans - and viruses coexist .
As the " Breaking Bad " of the animal world, bats carry 4 more than 100 kinds of viruses .
Bats eat fruit
Take any one of these, is fatal to humans .
So why did bats become the "poison kings"? How does it represent mammals taking to the sky?
Perhaps the story of bats is far more inspiring than what we know. From a marginal species , it evolved step by step into one of the most prosperous mammal groups .
A bat soaring into the sky
A bat soaring into the sky
It is often said that bats are and mice changed into after eating salt. In fact, this statement is wrong , bats and mice have nothing to do with .
If you look closely at the teeth of a bat, you can see that mice are rodents and have two pairs of iconic large incisors . Bats have sharp teeth, and at first glance, they are not from the rodent family.
In fact, bats are in a group of their own. In terms of biological classification, they belong to the order Chiroptera. This is a very ancient ethnic group that first appeared in fossils 455 million years ago.
Bats have nothing to do with mice
The ancestors of bats are very likely are homologous to today's Insectivora . They were first small mammals that lived on branches, and were even related to the ancestors of primates For a long time was neighbor to .
About 55 million years ago, the earth experienced a wave of global warming, and the glaciers at both poles melted. Since the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, the earth has ushered in a wave of forest prosperity.
In this wave of warming, the biggest winners are these arboreal animals .
During this period, 's earliest primate appeared. At the same time, 's earliest bat also appeared in the fossils.
The ancestor of bats
Although the bat is mammal, it is the "spiritual successor" of pterosaur . It evolved its forelimbs into skin wing structure .
is just that pterosaur extends one finger of its to form a skin wing , while bat extends its entire palm to form a skin wing .
After pterosaurs became extinct 10 million years ago, the skin-wing structure reappeared in the world, ushering in the long-lost competitor birds in the sky.
However, the first showdown between bats and birds can be described as tragic, because compared to the predecessors pterosaurs, bats have all shortcomings.
Pterosaur body structure
Breaking Bad development plan
Birds, as the surviving fire species of dinosaurs, have the strongest respiratory structure on earth - air bag system.
bats have nothing but and two lungs . This means that bats cannot fly too high , otherwise they will easily suffer from hypoxia.
Birds have the strongest vision of , and even can see ultraviolet .
The eyesight of bats is really terrible. They are not as good as their primate neighbors. At least primates have evolved trichromatic vision . There is no difference between bats and black and white blindness , which is very detrimental to their flying. .
Birds have excellent vision
In addition, bats' leather wings are extended from their palms, which causes them to concentrate all their strength on their upper limbs. As a result, their lower limbs are weak, and they are unable to take off on the ground.
Faced with various disadvantages, Bat made magical changes to himself.
If the respiratory system is not good, then can use the miracle to increase your heartbeat, thousands of times a minute . In this way, will increase the metabolism speed , and you will not be deprived of oxygen.
If the eyesight is not good, then the characteristics of mammals powerful hearing will be used to evolve echolocation .
The echolocation of bats
emits ultrasonic waves , and then uses the reflected ultrasonic waves to determine the situation ahead. If the strength of the lower limbs is not enough, then will hang upside down , and will use to free fall to take off .
Although bats have achieved the ultimate, they still have not shaken the ecological niche of birds. In order to avoid direct competition with birds, bats have changed to nocturnal.
Because for bats that use sound waves, the presence or absence of light has little impact on it. The bat has made up its mind, will be with darkness .
Due to living in dark and humid caves for a long time, and bats living in groups , it is easy for the virus to spread within the bat group.
Bats live in caves
But bats can " friendly coexistence " with these viruses, because bats have two unique skills. The first trick is to keep high fever , and the second trick is to DNA repair .
When a bat is flying, its heart beats at more than 1,000 times per minute, its metabolism accelerates rapidly, and its body temperature reaches a terrifying 140 degrees Celsius or more.
This causes the bat's immune system to start crazily when it flies, giving it the super resistance of .
plus its fast metabolism, many viruses in the body will be cleaned out in time.
Due to long-term high fever, the bat's DNA will break, so it has evolved a repair system , which can restore the incomplete DNA.
DNA break repair
However, no matter how you repair the damaged DNA, it cannot be 100% restored to its original appearance. In order to prevent genetic errors, bats are very compatible with .
means that after genetic changes, the same protein can be synthesized as in the past.
Scientists believe that some of the raw materials used by bats to repair genes may be directly taking the DNA fragments of these viruses, because the materials of the gene are similar in all organisms in the world.
With these two incredible skills, bats have coexisted with 4100 viruses in 0 million in , , Ebola virus , Nipah virus , coronavirus, rabies virus, Hendra virus Viruses, Magdeburg virus , etc.
In the end, the bat became like Breaking Bad, becoming a well-known "Poison King" in the animal world.
Various viruses
The Poison Master is coming
These viruses are nothing to bats, but for other animals, there is always one "suitable" for them .
A variety of viruses have broken out in human society. Other animals are just intermediate hosts . The real source is bats .
When bats are active at night, they will come into contact with other animals, and then expand the scope of infection through these animals .
Even if humans do not come into direct contact with bats, they can still be infected with the virus on them.
The worst thing is that after genetic analysis, bats belong to the order Chiroptera, and humans belong to the order Primates, and are distantly related..
Intermediate host civet
To be precise, except for the group of bag-bearing animals in Australia, the other mammals are Eutheria . They have diverged from each other in less than 100 million years . Generally speaking, they are still "one family" .
So this results in each other not being so "outside" each other, and everyone gets sick together.
As a flying animal, bats have a strong ability to migrate. They are basically a moving "poison bag" .
There are 62 species of bats in the world, second only to rodents. They are the second most prosperous group of mammals, and are found in areas other than the Arctic and Antarctic.
Bats are animals of the subclass Eutherium
, which leads them to bring the virus to all parts of the world, and everyone "shares it with bats".
What's even more terrible is that bats have a particularly long lifespan and can live 0 to 40 years in one breath, 10 times that of animals of the same size.
It stands to reason that its metabolism is fast and its lifespan will be very short. For example, the heartbeat of a shrew is also 1,000 times per minute, but it can only live for 14 to 15 months.
The fact that bats can live so long is related to the fact that it has fewer natural enemies and that can repair its own DNA.
A very short-lived shrew
After the extinction of bats
If such a terrible bat becomes extinct, will the earth become a better place?
The answer is no, the earth will become very bad instead.
Bats have existed for at least 50 million years and have already occupied an ecological niche in nature that cannot be banned.
Bats have a wide range of food habits. Some eat insects and can effectively control pests; some eat fruits and help spread seeds; some suck nectar and help pollinate plants.
There are also vampire bats, of course they are more likely to spread diseases.
Fruit-eating fruit bats
In fact, bats are more cautious and timid in character. They usually take the initiative to stay away from people and live in seclusion in deep old forests .
There is socialization and mutual assistance among bats. For example, the scary vampire bats will spit out the blood they suck and share it when their companions are short of food.
If a baby bat loses its mother, other female bats will adopt it.
The main reason why viruses from bats came to humans is because the scope of human activities has increased.
Whether people or domestic animals, the contact with bats has increased, which has led to bats to directly or indirectly transmit the virus to humans .
One of the transmission routes of bat viruses
For example, Ebola virus, which has had a serious impact in Africa, mainly parasitizes a kind of fruit bat, which is very large, weighing about 1 kilogram.
African people who were short of food caught bats to eat and were infected with the Ebola virus in the process.
Another example is Hendra virus , which is because horses raised by humans came into contact with bats and became infected, and then the sick horses came into contact with humans, resulting in zoonotic diseases .
Ebola virus is raging in Africa
Although bats are "Breaking Bad", they have never taken the initiative to poison. There is no reason for them to be exterminated, and they should not be exterminated.
