Collaborative team working on the dynamics of bats, humans, and pathogens. For more info see https://teapawt.net/t.co/uqRbfHcGiz
Joined September 2017
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This demonstrates a potential solution:
Restore and protect the trees that provide food for flying foxes in winter, in areas away from horse paddocks.
📷Vivian Jones
ALT Large numbers of silhouetted grey headed flying foxes (Pteropus poliocephalus) flying towards a mountain, against a dusk sky. Photo credit: Vivian Jones
Indeed, large winter flowering events have a protective effect on the risk of spillover and so are critical to the health of horses, people and bats.
One of the most valuable results was that Hendra virus spillover never occurred at times when winter flowering was abundant.
And importantly, the models were able to correctly predict the presence or absence of clusters of spillover.
The highest risk of spillover was from bats in agricultural areas after a food shortage, when no winter habitat flowered and produced nectar.
The models also showed that climate-driven food shortages preceded clusters of Hendra virus spillovers from these new roosts.
But this risk dropped to nearly zero if flowering in remnants of winter habitat was abundant and bats fused back into large nomadic populations to feed.
The models confirmed that strong El Niño events drive food shortages for flying foxes, and during food shortages, large nomadic populations fission into many small populations in urban and agricultural areas.
Large winter roosts of nomadic bats feeding in native forests became rare.
Roosts fragmented in urban areas.
Flying foxes shifted into new agricultural areas that did not provide native food over winter but allowed feeding on introduced plants, including those in horse paddocks
The study captured a rapid change in behavior of bats to this changing environment – from large nomadic populations to many smaller populations.
Previously, these behaviours had only been seen as very short-term responses to climate-driven starvation events
📷 Pat Jones
ALT A black flying fox hanging from one leg, in a relaxed pose, sleeping in the sun with green foliage in the background Photo Credit: Pat Jones. www.instagram.com/patjonesnaturephotography/
They show how flowering trees that provide nectar to flying foxes in winter have been extensively cleared for agriculture and urban development.
From 1996-2020, winter flowering became increasingly unreliable.
The study, by @BatOneHealth authors Peggy Eby, @ali_bat, @rainamontana, @PeterPjh18, Andy Hoegh, and others, presents long-term data and models that predict spillovers.
The data suggest an effective way to prevent the next pandemic is by protecting & restoring wildlife habitats
ALT A grey-headed flying fox adult female and pup peering through green foliage. Photo credits: Vivien Jones
Our new empirical study published in @Nature shows that rapid changes in bat ecology and behavior – driven by habitat loss and climate variability – drove the emergence of Hendra virus, a fatal pathogen in horses and humans.
nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
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Lastly, the team related cumulative shedding intensity to the number of spillovers near each roost. Virus shedding from bats showed a positive, but saturating relationship with spillovers, supporting the idea that pathogen excretion from hosts predicts downstream spillover risk.
To aggregate virus shedding into a single metric, the team calculated the area under each roost’s virus shedding curve. Newly established flying fox roosts had greater cumulative Hendra virus shedding intensity than historic roosts
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When our team separated roosts by ecological context & used generalized additive models, they found winter viral shedding pulses only in new roosts outside their historical winter range. After a food shortage, shedding pulses occurred in all roosts, but more so in the new roosts
