- Ecologist Merlin Tuttle argues that too much research and media attention is focused on bats based on tenuous links to deadly disease-causing viruses such as Ebola.
- Live Ebola virus has never been found in bats, and virologists acknowledge that other animals may be involved.
- But scientists have plucked live strains of other dangerous viruses from bats, and researchers argue that continuing to study the association between viruses and bats (as well as other animals) will ultimately help us better prepare for future disease outbreaks.
A burned-out stump was all that remained by the time a team of virologists arrived in Méliandou in 2014. They had been hunting for the source of the deadly outbreak of the disease caused by Ebola virus that had begun late the previous year. A patchwork of clues had led the researchers to the tree’s charred remnants in this small Guinean village of not more than a few dozen families.
The tree had once been home to bats that locals would nab on occasion for a meal. It was also a spot where Emile Ouamouno might have been before he got sick. Emile, a toddler from Méliandou, is thought to be the first person to contract the illness in this outbreak. With little else to go on, scientists postulated that the origin of the virus that infected Emile might be the tree and its bats.
The virologists told a reporter for Science that they couldn’t confirm if people from Méliandou had burned the tree to get rid of the bats that they feared might be carrying Ebola virus. But ecologist Merlin Tuttle has little doubt that was the case. To him, this type of persecution is part of the pattern set in motion when there’s a whisper that bats might be involved in a disease outbreak.
“I personally have documented cases where hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of bats, were buried alive in their caves,” he added, “just because somebody had one of these crazy ideas before it was even tested and found not to be true.”
As recently as 2012, Tuttle and several colleagues traveled to a cave in Cuba’s Alejandro de Humboldt National Park where they hoped to watch a bat colony emerge. But locals, fearful of the disease-causing microbes that they assumed the bats carried, had sealed it shut by the time they arrived, he said.
Tuttle, a research fellow at the University of Texas, contends that the accusations pegging bats as wellsprings of dangerous viruses to diseases including Ebola are often premature and grossly exaggerated He says that premature speculation can ignite the type of backlash that he witnessed in Cuba and that he suspects occurred in Guinea.
“When somebody comes out with a scary headline, the bats can all get eradicated before anyone even finds out that the bats weren’t guilty,” he told Mongabay.
The outbreak of Ebola in West Africa was scary indeed, killing more than 11,000 people in 10 countries before fizzling in 2016. Once bats are linked to such an event, “Who in his right mind is going to tolerate bats around under those circumstances?” Tuttle said.
Bat fans
The septuagenarian has studied bats around the globe and continues his advocacy for bat conservation, not least for the benefits they provide us. The U.S. Forest Service reports that some 300 species of fruit trees need the pollination services of bats. And a study in Indonesia found that bats and birds boosted cacao yields by 31 percent, providing an annual bump in profits of $730 per hectare for farmers.
The biology and conservation of bats have been the focus of Tuttle’s 55-year scientific career. Now, he’s continuing his mission to vindicate them through his photographs, books, and popular articles, as well as a blog that rallies a vocal group of “bat fans.”
An undue emphasis on bats as disease carriers has bled into scientific research, Tuttle says. In a consistent refrain, he argues that a frenzy of speculative scientific evidence, followed by even more speculative — and sometimes hyperbolic — storytelling on the part of journalists, leads to the unwarranted killing of bats.
In Tuttle’s view, bats are about as suspect as other animals found in the forests of West and Central Africa, where all Ebola outbreaks have originated. Scientists have discovered that chimpanzees, gorillas, a skittish little antelope called a duiker and several rodents all tote Ebola virus RNA in their bloodstreams, although they’ve only found snippets, not entire genomes.
The isolation of a live strain of infectious Ebola virus from bats would indicate that bats are Ebola hosts, but so far that’s been elusive. Researchers have turned up antibodies to Ebola in blood from bats, but from many other animals as well. The discovery of these remnants from a battle between a bat’s immune system and a virus is often misinterpreted, said Jens Kuhn, a virologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
“That is very quickly taken as signs of [Ebola] infection by many people, but it doesn’t mean that,” Kuhn said. “Antibodies just means exposure to something that is Ebola-like.”
The upshot is that no one has found a definitive link between bats and any of 25 outbreaks since 1976. As a result, by the time the latest epidemic was winding down, studies began to emerge that expressed doubts about bats’ role in the disease.
The hunt for origins
What scientists are looking for — and what some think that a bat species might be — is the organism that carries the Ebola virus continuously in its population, known as a reservoir. Whatever this reservoir is, it doesn’t get sick or die itself, so it’s an essential source of the virus to other organisms.
But not all scientists hunting for an Ebola reservoir are fixated on bats.
“There is something that doesn’t quite fit in my head with this Ebola-bat story,” said Siv Aina Leendertz, a virologist at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. “I don’t think that it’s enough evidence at the moment to say that Ebola continuously circulates in bats.”
Leendertz published a review in 2016 where she posited that the chain of infection might include an aquatic insect like a mayfly. She said it was just an example to demonstrate how another animal could be involved that might be “completely wrong.”
“If we are only focusing on the fruit bats,” Leendertz added, “we might miss other things that could give us more information, more clues, more pieces to the puzzle.”
Still, the antibodies that researchers have plucked out of bat blood demonstrate that bats “definitely have something to do with it,” she said.
For most of us, pegging bats as dangerous harbors of disease-causing viruses isn’t too much of a stretch, Kuhn said.
“It totally fits into our narrative about bats that they also carry very evil things.”
Satan in Dante’s Inferno takes a bat-like form. Their nocturnal nature touches on our most basic fear of the darkness and the unknown. And of course, the vampire Dracula can shapeshift into a bat in the famous Bram Stoker novel.
But like Leendertz, Kuhn advocates casting a broader net to track down the animals that connect us to viruses like Ebola. He has a hunch that an insect or another arthropod might be involved in the transmission of Ebola virus from animals to humans — perhaps a tick, delivering the infective agent into the blood of another host animal before it gets to us.
Our association with bats, both in lore and in real life, dates back millennia — think the cave dwellings of our early ancestors. And that’s one reason Tuttle sees their reputation as flying disease distributors as so improbable.
“There are millions and millions of people every year that eat bats,” he said. “I wish that there was a good reason that people shouldn’t eat bats because it’s caused the extinction of some, and it’s certainly threatening many others.
“The truth is, there is no evidence that eating bats has caused any pandemics or major disease outbreaks,” Tuttle added.
Kuhn agrees that this close relationship points to the involvement of some other organism. If bats are the sought-after reservoir of Ebola virus, Kuhn said, “Why don’t we have one outbreak of Ebola after another?”
The answer? “There’s more to [it] than just bats,” he said.
An image problem
Until about 20 years ago, bats were known mostly for being carriers of the rabies virus — although then, as now, the chances of contracting rabies from a bat were astronomically small, with an average of fewer than three cases a year in the U.S.
Beginning in the late 1990s, however, scientific research to investigate bats’ roles in the transmission of other diseases began in earnest. A bevy of viruses tied to bats stormed onto the epidemiological scene beginning in the late 1990s.
After that, “Bats became hip,” Jens Kuhn said.
Nipah virus, which causes potentially fatal encephalitis, struck Malaysia in 1998. It made pigs sick, and it killed more than half of its victims, who were mostly pig farmers. In 2003, researchers isolated live Nipah virus from the urine and saliva of seemingly healthy bats, and studies now refer to the fruit bat genus Pteropus as the “wildlife reservoir” of the disease.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) appeared in Asia in 2003, sickening 8,100 people. Scientists figured out that humans probably picked up the SARS-causing virus from civets for sale at local markets, and researchers have never pulled the live virus from a bat. However, in 2005 a paper, titled “Bats Are Natural Reservoirs of SARS-Like Coronaviruses,” appeared in the prominent journal Science.
Once the science community had made the connection, however tenuous, between SARS and bats, that’s what most people remembered, Tuttle said, not that they hadn’t been able to find the live virus.
“There’s never been any proof that SARS came from bats,” he added.
Indeed, many scientists who publish such research qualify their conclusions and explain that more work is needed. Yet such nuance is often lost on the media.
In a 2014 report on the inception of Ebola in Guinea published in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, the authors refer to fruit bats as “potential reservoirs” of Ebola virus. But primed by what Tuttle sees as an overemphasis on bats in the realm of virology research, one news story on that paper stated unequivocally that fruit bats “are reservoirs of the virus.”
Investigations probing the relationship between bats and viruses led to new hypotheses about the role of bats in the spread of disease, and they revealed new insights into how their immune systems handle viruses. Journalists and the public then latched onto aspects of bats’ unique biology as the beginning and the end of the story of how viruses get from animals to humans.
Kuhn investigates many of the virus families associated with bats, and he said that the “weak” links that scientists have found, such as with Ebola, are easy to exaggerate.
For example, popular news outlets use the fact that bats fly to explain how these viruses get from one place to another. That’s a “dangerous simplification,” Kuhn said, that has been “completely overhyped in the media.”
It also ignores other flying animals, Tuttle said.
“OK, they can travel long distances, but so do birds and insects,” he said. “They’re not the only thing that can travel long distances.”
One news report, under the headline, “Why Killer Viruses Are On The Rise,” called bats “arguably one of the most dangerous animals in the world.”
Part of the story had been reported from Gomantong Cave in Malaysian Borneo, home to the swiftlets that spin the nests used to make bird’s nest soup, a favorite dish in parts of Asia. Workers climb to the cave’s ceilings twice a year for the profitable harvest after the birds have vacated their homes. The boardwalk loop into the cavernous 90-meter-high (295-foot) gash in the forest is also popular with tourists, and they’re not unlikely to pick up some sort of, ahem, souvenir dripping from the cave’s ceiling and the millions of bats and birds that reside there.
The story warned, “There could be Ebola in the poop that lands on your shoulder.”
Not only has Ebola virus never been found in Malaysia, but neither have any members of its family, the filoviruses. It’s inaccurate to imply a risk of Ebola to cave visitors, but the sentence’s broader, cheeky implication is that bats are constantly slinging around deadly viruses. If that’s the case, Tuttle said, why haven’t any of the nest harvesters or visitors gotten sick or touched off an outbreak after they left the cave, especially since humans have been doing pretty much the same thing there for hundreds of years?
“There is no evidence that any human in the whole world history has ever got any disease from poop landing on their shoulder from a flying bat,” he said.
Tuttle uses his website to excoriate such media reports, which he argues put bats at risk of retaliation, including one on Mongabay in April 2016 that’s since been corrected.
The bat stops here
Just how big an effect does the intentional killing of bats have? In a 2016 study, a team of bat researchers tried to put some numbers to that question, as well as the other causes of bat decline worldwide, by reviewing cases of bat deaths going back to 1790.
Up until the beginning of the 21st century, they did find that “intentional killing” by humans was the most significant cause of deaths, often because people viewed them as pests. Then around 2000, as wind turbines began to pop up, they became a leading cause of death. So did white-nose syndrome, a potentially fatal disease in bats caused by a fungus. But the study didn’t turn up evidence that people have ramped up efforts to destroy bats in the past 100 years, even when the bats-as-disease-carriers line of research began about two decades ago.
Paul Cryan, a bat biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and an author of the research, recognizes that the perception of bats affects the way we treat these animals.
“It seems that people stigmatize and vilify things they don’t understand, and bats are among the most misunderstood animals out there,” Cryan wrote in an email. But, based on the team’s research, “I would not expect extermination efforts to increase as new information on diseases and bats comes to light,” he added.
Tuttle found the study’s conclusions lacking. He said that Cryan and his coauthors’ research did not account for the fact that journals stopped reporting “deliberate human killings” of bats in the 1980s, potentially ignoring more recent incidents.
Since that time, “Scientific journals have almost exclusively only published hypothesis-testing papers, meaning no further reporting of deliberate human killings that previously were at least sometimes reported,” Tuttle said.
Even if they’re not reported, he is adamant that bat killings continue. “In Mexico and the remainder of Latin America, it is sometimes difficult to find a hollow tree that hasn’t been burned to kill bats (mistakenly feared as vampire bats),” Tuttle said. “And, with new speculation, bat killing there may get even worse.
“In my experience, wherever I go worldwide, people who fear bats attempt to kill them,” he added.
Tuttle is frustrated with his fellow scientists, many of whom have followed the fashionable line of bat-focused disease research to lucrative grants.
In late 2014, in the midst of the Ebola crisis, the U.S. House of Representatives approved $1.77 billion in funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “for Ebola preparedness and response,” which included money to support scientific research between 2015 and 2019.
That money hasn’t all gone to bat research, but Tuttle says it’s out of whack with the threat that Ebola poses to us. What’s more, he suggests that the desire to keep that funding flowing is twisting the conclusions that researchers and journal publish, though he’s hesitant to single out scientists by name.
These reports do often carry warnings about the value of bats to the ecosystem and that the evidence linking bats to viruses shouldn’t be seen as a justification for killing them. Many news articles also highlight the importance of bats in controlling insects and pollinating crops as a way of discouraging retribution.
But, Tuttle said, such qualifying statements often appear late in the text, after the frightening, attention-grabbing, and potentially dangerous news appears.
One such study appeared in the journal Virus Evolution in early June 2017 and laid out a case for considering bats “the major evolutionary reservoirs” of coronaviruses, the group that includes the viruses that cause SARS and MERS.
The aim of this study was to find viruses that aren’t yet known to science. It’s part of an effort led by researchers with the PREDICT project, a $100-million effort funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to cut the risk of global pandemics.
Tuttle upbraided the new study immediately, arguing in a written response he shared with Mongabay that bats are easy to catch in large numbers, making them good study subjects. As a result, finding a lot of viruses in them wasn’t surprising. (Ironically, Tuttle said that many of the scientists looking for diseases in bats use a trap that he invented.)
“If I had many millions of dollars to look at you for viruses, I could find a lot of new viruses and I could make up a hell of a lot of scary tales about how they’re related to things that were dangerous,” he added.
Tuttle wrote in a June 14 post on his website that the research propagates “the needlessly sensational presentation of bats as exceptionally dangerous animals.”
“Many viruses are innocuous or even beneficial, including some that are closely related to deadly ones,” Tuttle wrote on July 2. “Also, the number of viruses found in bats is not necessarily indicative of risk.”
He also said that the “exceptional diversity” of coronaviruses found in bats should be expected, given that bats themselves are “an exceptionally old, diverse, and widespread group.” At around 1,300 species, one in every five known mammals is a bat.
The Virus Evolution study ran under the benign title, “Global patterns in coronavirus diversity.” But it spawned media coverage under headlines such as “Bats are global reservoir for deadly coronaviruses,” which ran in the news section of the journal Nature.
The hunt for viruses that haven’t yet caused an outbreak or been proven harmful to humans has drawn criticism from other scientists as well. Michael Osterholm questions the value of spending so much to find these previously unknown viruses. He is an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, and he also leads a team that’s been working to rapidly develop a vaccine for Ebola virus since 2014.
Osterholm advocates putting more effort toward developing vaccines and getting them into the hands of healthcare workers, rather than building up our catalog of viruses with unknown consequences.
“I don’t care if you have a fire truck that’s big, red and shiny,” he said. “If it doesn’t have an engine in it, what good is it?”
The bat we know
Still, Osterholm said bats are clearly linked to “very serious infectious diseases,” and he voiced his concerns about disregarding all evidence that associates bats with disease.
“This concept that any description of bats carrying these viruses is somehow unwarranted or dangerous to bats — I think that’s naïve,” he added.
Jens Kuhn agrees that given what we’ve learned about bats and viruses in the past two decades, especially with Ebola virus, further research is warranted.
“You have to go by the data that you have and not the data that you don’t have,” Kuhn said. “There is enough of this kind of anecdotal, weird evidence that would lead me to believe that bats are somehow involved in that [Ebola] puzzle.”
While Kuhn emphasizes how different these viruses are — “You can’t throw them all together” — he offers an answer to Tuttle and Osterholm’s challenge to the value of identifying viruses new to science. Understanding how these viruses evolve and are related to each other could ultimately help us be better prepared for outbreaks, he said.
Right now, it’s a quest in which scientists sit at the very frontier of their knowledge. Never mind the tip, Kuhn said: “We haven’t even seen the iceberg yet.”
Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, is one example of what researchers like Kuhn can glean from those relationships. The MERS coronavirus — in the same family as the SARS virus — can cause pneumonia and diarrhea. Of the roughly 2,000 people infected since 2012, 35 percent have died.
Tuttle pointed out that when MERS broke out in 2012, scientists and the media didn’t look far for a culprit.
“Before they knew anything about it, they practically bet the bank — they predicted in writing — this is almost certainly coming from bats,” he said.
In fact, epidemiologists eventually discovered that the virus had springboarded — or spilled over — into humans from a common animal in Saudi Arabia: camels (Camelus dromedarius). Epidemiologists use the term ‘spillover’ to refer to the juncture when a virus-carrying host slips the virus it is carrying to an organism of a different species.
But humans domesticated camels thousands of years ago. If our humped companions were the ultimate reservoirs of the MERS virus, meaning that they have been carrying the virus without showing signs of disease, it stands to reason that we would have noticed a spillover to humans before 2012.
Kuhn said that shared history left public health researchers with a big question: “How the heck did this virus get into dromedaries?”
When virologists checked out the lineage of the MERS virus, they found that “Every single neighbor is a bat coronavirus,” he said. “The most logical conclusion is that this is actually a bat virus that jumped into dromedaries,” making bats a likely host and possibly a reservoir of MERS virus.
MERS isn’t the only such disease. In 2009, a CDC-led team collected a live filovirus called Marburg from fruit bats known as Egyptian rousettes (Rousettus aegyptiacus) that roost in African caves by the tens of thousands.
Marburg virus infections have led to about a dozen outbreaks in humans since 1967, stemming mostly from contact with caves. Its deadliest recorded offensive in 2005 killed 90 percent of the 252 people who contracted the disease in Angola.
Researchers have since found that bats can carry an infectious form of Marburg virus for months in their colonies without visible symptoms. What’s more — and this is a really important piece of the puzzle — they can eject bits of the virus in their saliva, feces and urine.
The fact that it can circulate in their systems for an extended period of time has led many scientists to deduce that bats are “at least a host” of Marburg in the environment, said Kuhn. That does not mean that Egyptian rousettes are the ultimate reservoirs. But such a strong connection to one filovirus does seem to hint that Ebola, another filovirus, might also reside in bats in a similar way.
The odds in our favor
The fact that bats can survive the effects of Marburg virus seems to lend support to the idea “that bats have unique physiological relationships with microbes,” Paul Cryan said.
Part of that has to do with how bats live their lives. As flying mammals, bats expend a lot of energy, which raises their internal temperature. This constant feverish state can be particularly destructive to DNA unless an organism can evolve a solution. Cryan said he remembers “getting a chill” a few years ago as he read a study in Science postulating that bats’ unique immune system, honed over millions of years of evolution to repair DNA damaged by flight, might help explain why they can handle such a close association with viruses.
Humans don’t have such clever adaptations to handle microscopic invaders, so the thinking goes, and that leaves us more vulnerable than bats to the diseases that viruses and other organisms cause.
Even without such adaptations, the likelihood that humans will contract a virus from bats is infinitesimally small, Tuttle said. His hometown of Austin, Texas, has an enviable safety record with bats. Spectators from around the country gather on spring evenings to witness the exodus of perhaps 1.5 million bats from under a bridge on Texas’ Colorado River. In the 1980s, public health officials worried that someone would contract rabies, but Tuttle campaigned for the bats to be left alone. Instead of getting rid of them, officials acted on his advice and posted signs asking visitors not to handle the bats.
“Thirty-five years later, we’re still waiting for the first person to be harmed by a bat,” he said.
Globally, people are much more likely to get rabies from dogs, as they’re responsible for about 99 percent of cases.
Tuttle also points to his own extensive history with bats in dozens of countries with little more than a rabies shot as the only line of defense.
“I’ve done everything you can do to get exposed to some of these supposedly … deadly viruses,” he said. “I’m still very healthy at 75.”
The good health that most scientists enjoy from developed countries might be enough to keep a virus at bay, Kuhn said. Guinea and the other Ebola-endemic countries are among the world’s poorest.
“It is very possible that you need to be immunosuppressed to get the first infection going,” Kuhn said, “to make that species jump.”
Tuttle draws on statistics to demonstrate the rarity of diseases associated with bats. He pointed out that in the past 40 years, Ebola, Marburg, MERS, Nipah, SARS, and a viral disease called Hendra have together caused just 15,000 human deaths. By comparison, he said, during that time frame some 2.2 million people are conservatively estimated to have died from rabies transmitted by dogs, which is itself considered to be rare.
“It just caught huge headlines because it was sensational and different,” Tuttle said of Ebola. “This disease is trivial compared to a lot of other causes of human mortality.”
But to Kuhn, that’s a dangerous justification.
“This is, of course, true for any disease in history when it started,” he said. “The moment you have an outbreak with 11,000 deaths, it’s probably worthwhile trying to figure out where the virus is coming from.”
Deforestation and roads continue to open up new areas of wilderness bringing us into closer contact with animals and any disease-causing viruses they carry. With that sort of novel exposure, along with humankind’s increased mobility and rising population, the next Ebola outbreak could afflict a hundred thousand people, Kuhn said.
“Yes, it’s a hypothetical scenario, but it’s not necessarily an unlikely scenario,” he added, “as this outbreak in western Africa has shown.”
One thing is clear — that we will share our future with these zoonotic diseases, regardless of the reservoir and whether they spill over from bat, pig or camel.
“To be clear,” Tuttle said in an email, “I recognize that bats can transmit some scary diseases, just like all other animals, especially humans.”
As a population ecologist, he acknowledges our ever-shifting relationship with other species, and, bats aside, how difficult it is to predict just how bad the next spillover of disease from animals to humans will be.
“I don’t know of anybody with my kind of training who doesn’t think we’re headed for some really serious bumps in the road,” Tuttle added.
Shreya Dasgupta and Rebecca Kessler contributed reporting.
Banner image of a minor epauletted fruit bat in Kenya © Merlin Tuttle.
Follow John Cannon on Twitter: @johnccannon
Editor’s note 8/31/17: At Merlin Tuttle’s request three statements were amended to better reflect his views.
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