Since the outbreak of the new crown, we have re-realized a creature - bats, and many of the viruses known to mankind are from bats. According to relevant data, the number of detected viruses is as high as 100 species, and there are about ten kinds of pathogenicity for mammals, such as Ebola, SARS virus and so on, which are more familiar to everyone.
So why do bats carry so many viruses and have no effect on themselves? This comes from its special defense system, when the virus wants to enter the bat's body, its own immune system will respond quickly, isolating the virus from the cell and preventing the virus from damaging itself.
At the same time, a study published in eLife also showed that this defense mechanism of bats, although it can quickly and effectively isolate the interference of viruses, also makes bats a unique host for rapid virus reproduction and highly infectious viruses.
Viruses are no longer a threat to bats, but when they are transmitted to ordinary mammals, they quickly crush their hosts, resulting in a high fatality rate because humans do not have a special immune system like bats.
If you think that bats are the only way to do this, you are wrong! In addition to a large number of viruses in bats, there are also some deadly toxins. How harmful is this? Reference to the Chamorro people, a native of Guam, who once suffered from a neurodegenerative disease, and you know its dangers.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="6" > mysterious disease</h1>
Around the 1940s, the indigenous people of Guam developed a neurodegenerative disease that combined symptoms such as alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. Patients lose control of their bodies little by little, then lose their intelligence and memory, and eventually die of respiratory muscle paralysis.
The disease is strange, with an incidence of fifty to a hundred times more common in the region than in the average American (around the 1940s). But after the 1940s, the incidence of local people began to decline again, and by the 1960s, there were almost no more patients.
In order to find out the cause of this, scientists investigated the local area and eventually identified a traditional local food source, the iron tree. Here to popularize science, iron trees are poisonous plants. However, the cause of the local indigenous disease is not this.
The Chamorros use iron tree seeds to make flour, and iron tree seeds contain a harmful substance called BMAA. However, in the chamorro people's food manufacturing process, they magically removed most of the harmful substances in the seeds of the iron tree, including BOAA, and the remaining amount was far from enough to poison human nerves.
The mystery remained unsolved until another "delicacy" emerged, the fox bat. Fox bats are a traditional local delicacy, and during grand festivals, locals will cut foxbats into pieces and then boil them into soup with grain, salt and other condiments.
The fox bat they eat is a large bat that looks like a fox and feeds mainly on fruit. Before the U.S. military came to Guam, it was more difficult for locals to catch fox bats, and they could generally be caught in trees, and the success rate was relatively low.
However, this situation changed after the shotgun landed on the island, and later the United States designated Guam as a military base, and the fate of the fox bat was even more difficult. Due to the huge flow of people, some people also like the local traditional food, foxbats have also suffered, and some people have to eat several fox bats a week.
This situation continued until 1945, when it came to the attention, and it was not until 1973 that the law explicitly prohibited the hunting of foxes. Unfortunately, it was all too late, and in 1974, there were only a hundred or so Mariana fox bats left in Guam, and it was declared extinct four years later.
Among them, human hunting is the main reason, in addition, the impact of species into species, deforestation, etc., have become the accelerator of the accelerated demise of Marianna's fox bat. Fox bats, which had the role of spreading pollen and seeds locally, are now gone, no doubt a serious blow to the ecosystem at that time.
Although locals have introduced foxbats from other places, this is still not the best solution to the problem.
Back to the main topic, as mentioned above, Guamese people like fox bat food, so what is the connection between this and the neurodegenerative disease they suffer from?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="32" > the source of the mysterious condition</h1>
In fact, this is related to the dietary habits of foxbats, the main food of foxes is fruit, and the seeds of the iron tree are also in their recipes. After years of consumption, the BMAA in the iron tree finally flows into the fox bat through the iron tree seed. The BMA contained in a fox bat is not enough to cause substantial harm to the human body.
However, in nature, there is a "biological enrichment phenomenon", which means that if you want to increase 1 kilogram of meat, you may need to eat 10 kilograms of pork to achieve it. Therefore, the toxins present in the iron tree will gather in the body of the fox bat, and the human beings at the top of the food chain have the most toxins in the body, and the risk of poisoning is the highest.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="34" > summary</h1>
Although the cause has been found and the mystery has finally been solved, it is not worth our excitement. I'm not against humans hunting wildlife, but before that, I hope to add a restriction that "humans can reasonably hunt animals" rather than blind, disorderly and savage hunting.
Consider that before the U.S. military came to Guam, fox bats were difficult to capture, and their survival was still quite passable. As a result, as soon as the shotgun appeared, the number of fox bats dropped exponentially, which is sad for animals!