If you want to ask who is the most poisonous mammal in the world, bats say second, and no one dares to be first.
As mammals' only air force, bats have developed a skill, including a shocking stunt - coexisting with viruses.
As the "breaking bad" of the animal kingdom, bats carry more than 4,100 viruses.
Bats eat fruit
Any one of these is fatal to human beings.
So why do bats become "poison kings"? How does it represent a mammal flying into the sky?
Perhaps the story of bats is far more inspirational than we know, evolving from a marginal species to one of the most prosperous mammalian groups.
A soaring bat
A bat soars into the sky
Folk often say that bats become changed after rats eat salt, but in fact, this statement is wrong, bats and mice have nothing to do with each other.
A closer look at the teeth of bats shows that rats are rodents with two pairs of iconic front teeth, and bats are one-sided fangs that are not rodents at first glance.
In fact, bats are a school of their own, biologically belonging to the order Pterodactyl, a very ancient ethnic group that first appeared in fossils as early as 55 million years ago.
Bats and mice are okay
The ancestors of bats are likely to be cognates with today's insectivorous order, originally small mammals living on branches, and even neighbors with primate ancestors for a long time.
About 55 million years ago, the earth suffered a wave of global warming, the glaciers of the entire poles melted, and the earth ushered in a wave of forest prosperity since the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.
The biggest winners in this wave of warming are these arboreal animals.
During this period, the earliest primates appeared, and at the same time, the earliest bats also appeared in fossils.
Ancestors of bats
Although a mammal, bats are the "spiritual heirs" of pterosaurs, evolving their forelimbs into leather wing structures.
It's just that pterosaurs extend one of their fingers to the wings, and bats extend their entire palms to the wings.
10 million years after the extinction of pterosaurs, the leather wing structure reappeared in the rivers and lakes, and the birds' skies ushered in a long-lost competitor.
However, the first duel between bats and birds can be described as tragic, because compared with the predecessor pterosaurs, bats are full of shortcomings.
The body structure of pterosaurs
Breaking Bad Grower Program
Birds, as the surviving fire of the dinosaurs, have the strongest breathing structure on earth, the air bag system.
Bats have nothing, just two lungs, which dooms bats not to fly too high, otherwise it is easy to lack oxygen.
Birds have the strongest vision and can even see ultraviolet rays.
Bats' eyesight is too abusive, they are not as good as their primate neighbors, good primates have evolved tricolor vision, bats and black and white blindness is no different, which is very bad for their flight.
Excellent vision of birds
In addition, the bat's wings are extended by the slap, which causes them to concentrate their strength on the upper limbs, resulting in weak lower limbs, and they cannot take off flat.
Faced with all kinds of disadvantages, bats have made magic changes to themselves.
If the respiratory system does not work, then vigorously perform miracles, enhance their heartbeat, thousands of times a minute, so as to increase the rate of metabolism, there will be no lack of oxygen.
If the vision is not good, it will play the characteristics of the strong hearing of mammals and evolve echolocation.
Echolocation of bats
Ultrasonic waves are emitted, and then the reflected ultrasonic waves are used to determine the situation ahead. The lower limb strength is not enough, so use the upside-down method and use free fall to take off.
Although bats have achieved the extreme, they still do not shake the ecological niche of birds, and in order to avoid direct competition with birds, bats are nocturnal.
Because for bats that use sound waves, light and no light have little effect on it. Bats have made up their minds to stay with the darkness.
Due to the long-term residence in dark and damp caves, coupled with bat colonies, it is easy to cause the virus to spread within bat colonies.
Bats live in caves
But bats can "coexist friendly" with these viruses, because bats have two major skills, the first is high fever, and the second is DNA repair.
Bats have a heartbeat of more than 1,000 beats per minute when they fly, their metabolism accelerates extremely faster, and their body temperature reaches a terrifying 40 ° C or more.
This causes the bat's immune system to start wildly while it is flying, giving it super resistance.
Coupled with its fast metabolism, many viruses in the body will be cleared out in time.
Due to long-term high fever, the bat's DNA will break, so it has evolved a repair system that can restore broken DNA.
DNA fracture repair
However, no matter how much damaged DNA is repaired, it cannot be restored to its original appearance, and in order to prevent genetic errors, bats are very compatible.
That is, 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 to take the DNA fragments of these viruses directly, because all organisms in the world have similar genetic materials.
With these two anti-heavenly skills, bats coexist with 4100 viruses in more than 50 million times, Ebola, Nipah, Coronavirus, Rabies, Hendra, Magdeburg and so on.
In the end, the bat became the appearance of a desperate poisoner and became the famous "poison king" in the animal kingdom.
Various viruses
The Poisoner has arrived
These viruses are nothing to bats, but for other animals, there is always a "fit" for them.
There are many viruses that have erupted in human society, and other animals are only intermediate hosts, and the real source is in bats.
When bats are nocturnal, they come into contact with other animals and then pass through these animals to expand the scope of infection.
Even if humans do not have direct contact with bats, they can be infected with the virus on their bodies.
The most tragic thing is that after genetic analysis, the pterodactyl order where bats are located is distantly related to the primate order where humans are located.
Intermediate host civet cat
To be precise, except for the long-bag animals in Australia, the rest of the mammals are all subclasses of euphropods, which have diverged from each other for less than 100 million years, and are still "one family" in general.
So this leads to not being so "out of sight" with each other, and what diseases everyone gets together.
As a flying animal, bats have a strong ability to migrate, basically a moving "poison bag".
There are 962 species of bats worldwide, after rodents, and the second most prosperous group of mammals, spreading beyond the Arctic and Antarctic.
Bats are suborder eutherapia
This has led them to bring the virus around the world, where everyone "has bats to share" together.
What's more, bats have a particularly long lifespan, living for 30 to 40 years in one breath, 10 times that of animals of the same size.
It is reasonable to say that its metabolism is fast, and its life span will be very short, such as the shrew's heartbeat is also 1000 times per minute, but it can only live for 14 to 15 months.
The fact that a bat can live so long is related to its relatively small number of natural enemies and its ability to repair DNA.
Extremely short-lived shrews
After the extinction of bats
Such a terrible bat, if extinct, the earth will be better?
The answer is no, the earth will get very bad.
Bats have been around for at least 50 million years and already have an inviolable niche in nature.
Bats have a wide range of feeding habits, some eat insects, and can effectively control insect pests; Those who eat fruit can help sow seeds; There is nectar absorption that helps the plants pollinate.
There are also blood-sucking bats, which of course are more likely to transmit disease.
Fruit bats that eat fruit
In fact, the personality of bats is more cautious and timid, and they generally take the initiative to stay away from the crowd and live in the deep mountains and old forests.
There is social and mutual assistance between bats, such as the frightening vampire bat, which spits out the blood they have sucked and shares when their companions lack food.
If a baby bat loses its mother, then other female bats will adopt it.
The main reason why the virus in bats has come to humans is because the range of human activities has increased.
Contact with bats increases, both for humans and domestic animals, which has led bats to transmit the virus directly or indirectly to humans.
One of the ways bat viruses are transmitted
For example, the Ebola virus, which has a serious impact in Africa, mainly parasitizes a fruit bat, which is very large, about 1 pound.
Africans who lack food catch bats to eat, and in the process become infected with Ebola.
Another example is the Hendra virus, which is a zoonotic disease caused by human horses that come into contact with bats, are infected, and then the sick horse comes into contact with humans.
The Ebola virus is raging in Africa
Although the bat is a "breaking poisoner", it has never actively poisoned, it has no reason to be extinct, and it should not be extinct.