Anti-bat views must not take wing: More informed people must bat for these much-maligned mammals

Bats have got a pretty raw deal in popular culture ever since Bram Stoker’s 1897 book 'Dracula' cemented the connection between largely unlovely ‘hand-winged’ chiroptera and the blood-sucking vampires of folklore. Not even the charisma of Batman, who made his superhero debut 42 years later, has been able to dispel that basic human wariness of bats. Although they are not the only creatures to carry coronaviruses, thanks to the current Covid-19-prompted information deluge, the world now knows that the zoonotic viruses (that jump from vertebrate animals to humans) Sars, Mers, Ebola and Nipah too transfer from them. This puts bats right up alongside mosquitoes — that spread malaria, chikungunya, dengue, Zika and West Nile virus — at the top of the zoonotic villains list.

So, ‘batman’ Dr C Srinivasulu of Osmania University’s Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Studies is a brave man indeed to make the timely assertion that all 1,400-odd species of bats are being unnecessarily vilified, simply because one kind are suspected to be the source of Covid-19. Moreover, not all coronaviruses are harmful to humans anyway — the six recently found in three bat species in Myanmar are not suspected to be so. Of the 142 types of bats found in India, two are even on the endangered list. Clearly, more experts must bat for these much-maligned mammals.