Author:Shi Lan (Plagiarism must be investigated)
Why do some people say that the existence of bats is good for humans, but it is not good to eliminate them? Bats carry more than a hundred viruses, and more than 60 of them have the potential to infect humans, from the horrific Ebola virus to the former outbreak of the SARS coronavirus, which points to bats that are generally only found at night. This is also why many people simply and rudely believe that we should completely eliminate these virus "reservoirs". However, can the extinction of bats completely isolate the virus, and can the normal life of human beings leave the existence of bats?
As many people may not know, bats have different species like other species. Although bats are extremely adaptable to the environment, they are widely distributed around the world, but they are mainly concentrated in terrestrial ecological environments, and they are not found in terrains such as the Arctic and Antarctic and remote islands. Bats, which are pterodactyls, are subdivided into two suborders, larger and smaller, with the former, which feeds mainly on fruits, and is larger than the latter, which feeds mainly on bugs, blood and flesh.
These two different bat suborders, in addition to the differences in hunting and body size, also show different geographical distribution characteristics, the suborder Of the small bat is mainly distributed in the temperate and tropical regions of the eastern and western hemispheres, such as the chrysanthemum bat family and the vampire bat family; while the large bat suborder is distributed in the subtropical and tropical regions of the eastern hemisphere as a whole, including only 1 family of foxes. In the current natural environment of the earth, there are more than 900 kinds of bats known to exist, and there are about 81 species of bats distributed in China, becoming a mammal group of orders of magnitude second only to rodents.
Although the total number of bats is relatively large, they are also like other organisms on the earth, with the change of climate, there have been many species of bats the number of sharp decline, and even tend to the brink of extinction. But the difference is that the decline in bat numbers is also very much related to human activities, and people often have a wrong idea that they hunt bats together in order to protect wood and eliminate insects. As there are fewer and fewer places for bats to inhabit, it is inevitable that individual populations will remain smaller.
In fact, while bats carry a variety of viruses that can infect humans, their habitat is generally farther away from the area where humans live. Moreover, their haunting time is mainly concentrated at night, and it is generally difficult for ordinary people to directly contact bats. In other words, the life habits of bats have actually not disturbed each other with us humans. Moreover, not all bats carry terrible viruses, they play an important role in the balance of natural ecosystems, and the normal life of human beings is inseparable from the existence of bats.
Forests are known as the lungs of the earth, and about one-third of the forests on the earth need bats to "sow seeds", and many kinds of plants need bats to act as pollinators; at the same time, bats can also eliminate a large number of pests, equivalent to one-third of their own mass of insects, such as mosquitoes and nocturnal moths, etc., data can be reflected in up to 3000 / night. The vast majority of suborders of small bats prey on insects, and those nocturnal insects mainly control the rapid increase in numbers through the role played by bats.
People who believe that people who have some understanding of the biological chain should know that any kind of living creatures that exist on the earth are not isolated and are always located in an important link in the biological chain. In short, bats, in addition to sowing, pollinating and destroying pests, are also predators of other animals, such as snakes and monkeys, while some birds can eat bats in a day at about half of their daily food needs. Human beings are also in the earth's natural ecosystem, whether it is the loss of control of the number of pests, the reduction of the earth's forest area, or the lack of other animal food sources, it will have a very serious impact on the normal life of human beings.