A recent article published in the journal Communications Biology showed that chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest Reserve in Uganda, Africa, often steal bat droppings.
In fact, as early as 2015, chimpanzees in the area were revealed to eat "clay" on the ground.
Unexpectedly, only 2 years later, the chimpanzees here began to eat bat feces.
Not only that, but scientists have also found that the black and white colobus monkeys and antelopes here have the same hobby, and they also frequent the burrows of bats and feed on bat droppings.
Between 2017 and 2019, researchers observed chimpanzees eating feces 92 times, black and white colobus monkeys 65 times, and antelopes up to 682 times.
According to the research team, this is the first time in the 60 years that humans have recorded primate behavior that primates have been found to eat excrement.
It seems to only eat bat droppings, what's the mystery about that? What's so special about bat droppings?
From eating clay to eating feces, what did chimpanzees go through?
In 2015, researchers in Uganda discovered that chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest Reserve preferred to feed on dirt pits and termite mounds.
At first, the researchers didn't know if this behavior was a coincidence or intentional, and for what purpose!
Until someone discovers that the chimpanzee will dip the leaves in the pit when eating, and then put it in the mouth to suck it, this behavior will be repeated many times, and it feels like the chimpanzee is not dipped in muddy water to eat leaves, but purely to eat mud.
What's even more exaggerated is that some chimpanzees will directly pick up clods of soil on the ground, put them in their mouths and chew them, or directly scoop muddy water with their hands to drink.
In our cognition, chimpanzees mainly eat fruits, leaves, seeds and other vegetarian food, occasionally catch insects, dig bird eggs to eat, and in extreme cases, they will also eat cannibalism, especially those small underage individuals.
But no matter what, dirt can't be food for chimpanzees.
So why do chimpanzees in Uganda eat dirt uncharacteristically?
The researchers also found that the chimpanzee is very particular about eating soil, eating only clay and not the rest of the ground.
The researchers hypothesized that chimpanzees ate soil for two reasons:
First, clay contains calcium, magnesium, iron, sodium and other minerals, which are exactly what chimpanzees need, and clay is eaten as a nutritional supplement;
Second, in order to detoxify, eating soil is to neutralize the high content of tannic acid in food.
In the same way, bat feces are not the first choice for chimpanzee food, and the reason why they eat them is also because the body lacks nutrients, and these nutrients happen to be in bat feces.
Researchers studied bat feces samples and found that bat feces were high in nutrients, containing higher levels of potassium, magnesium, sodium and phosphorus than other foods.
Coincidentally, the nutrients in the manure are about the same as those of the defunct raffia palm in the area.
The time when chimpanzees began to eat soil and feces is also highly consistent with the time point when raffia palm slowly disappeared.
Before 2000, chimpanzees ate raffia for their nutritional needs, but since 2005, the tree has been greatly reduced, and local residents have begun to grow tobacco on a large scale, using the leaves of raffia to bundle and roast tobacco leaves.
By 2012, the tree had almost become extinct in the region.
So in 2015, chimpanzees were observed eating clay, and in 2017, they began to eat feces again.
In the final analysis, it is the lack of food that makes chimpanzees eat bat droppings, and human uncontrolled over-cultivation is the culprit!
Bat droppings have detected 27 viruses, one of which is a coronavirus that has never been encountered before
Originally, animals eating feces, except for being a little disgusting when they think about it, have no intrinsic effect on nature.
However, the droppings came from bats, and things were immediately complicated.
In the study, researchers from the United States, the United Kingdom and Uganda tested bat droppings and found 27 viruses inside, as well as an unknown coronavirus.
Scientists have long believed that bats are the "king of all poisons".
Some very deadly zoonotic viruses, such as Ebola, rabies, coronaviruses and Henipavirus, have been found in bats.
Bats are the best vectors for these viruses because they can coexist perfectly with them.
This means that bats can carry and transmit a wide range of viruses in their bodies, but they are not affected in the slightest.
This is a superpower conferred by the unique physiology of bats.
As the only mammal that can fly for long periods of time, bats need a very efficient metabolism and muscles to complete the flight, which causes their body temperature to be slightly higher, about 40 degrees Celsius.
At this temperature, it can inhibit the development of many viruses by itself.
At the same time, bats have very strong immunity on their own.
Even if the body is already infected, its immune system can still control the virus without triggering an inflammatory response. Without any symptoms, the virus can continue to latent in its body.
Although it is unclear how some viruses are transmitted from bats to humans, scientists believe that frequent stealing of bat feces can cause animals such as chimpanzees to become infected, and then pass them on to humans through various routes.
For this, scientists are worried: not now, does not mean that it will not appear in the future, this is a very big problem, chimpanzees must have been exposed to the terrible virus transmitted by bats, maybe the next pandemic will come soon!