I am jealous of bats.
Bat is a mammal, I am also a mammal; and I am definitely a bigger mammal. I can’t fly while bats can! But I am jealous of bats not only because bats can fly I can’t!
There are many more thing about bats that makes us look at this species of mammals with awe! Although we don’t have a clear bat census — bats, as well as rodents, are the two mammals who probably outnumber humans.
[dropcap]Of all the mammals in this planet, 20% are bats.[/dropcap]
We humans are children compared to bats physical capability. A bat flies 5–6 hours non-stop nightly.
Their maneuvering capacity is even better than birds. When bats fly they can increase their metabolism so high that their heart beats over one thousand times a minute. Compared to that if our heart beats 300 times a minute for a few minute — it stops!
During flying bats body temperature peaks as high as 108F / 42C. A bat body can easily tolerate that high temperature. If that happened in human — the brain would have been fried leading to seizure!
To process all that much metabolism, bats have a pair of super kidneys that’s like 20 pair of human kidneys to remove all these metabolites!
Bats immune system is another nature’s wonder. If bat’s immune system is equivalent to Windows 10, our immune system may be like MS DOS!
Each Bat can carry over hundred types of viruses. Several types of coronavirus including SARS, MERS and current SARS — COV-2 live in bats, as do much more dangerous viruses like Rabies, Ebola, Nipah, Hendra!
See we are doing hand hygiene, social distancing — still we are struggling to safeguard ourselves from virus. Bats neither do hand hygiene nor they follow social distancing as they live in a crowded group setting. Yet they do not get sick of viruses!
Bat’s immune system can seamlessly handle these viruses for ages, coexist without harming each other. But if human gets one of these viruses, they either gets totally defeated in first attack or launch such an erratic immune response — it kills itself by its own action! And exactly the same thing we are seeing in coronavirus pandemic these days!
Bat, as well as rodents. are major reservoir of viruses and probably are the source of our current pandemic and probably a more deadly pandemic in the future.
Including three new coronaviruses those spilled over to human species in the last two decades, there are seven coronavirus in humans. Of these seven, it seems at least six came from to us from bats. Coronavirus 229E jumped from bat to human in ancient times. While the. SARS-COV-2 possibly jumped sometime last November!
One human cold coronavirus — HKU3 — it is probably the only one that came to us from cows! It probably happened about a hundred years ago. Although we don’t have a official record — scientists have some evidence that coronavirus HKU3 possibly caused serious illness when first jumped to humans!
If we take history as an indicator for the future — it is more likely that the next major pandemic will start with another virus from bat.
That’s why our human race will have to invest a lot of our resources in learning more about bats and the viruses that reside in them and the interactions between them!
Current SARS-COV-2 virus is presumed to be a bat virus. But we’ll never be certain about it unless until some day we’ll be able to collect, culture and isolate. this virus in a bat.
That’s what Dr. Linfa Wang 
did and still doing. The SARS outbreak happened in 2002–2003. We had a genetic sequence suggesting it’s bat origin. But that was not enough. We have to find it in a bat! Dr. Linfa wang of Duke Global Health Institute at Duke National University of Singapore did exactly that thing. He spent ten years time searching / crawling / climbing cave to cave in remote rural China. He would collect bat droplet and real bat sample swab and look for a genetic match! And after ten years search he finally found the SARS virus in a bat!
Then there is the bat lady, Dr Shi Zheng-Li 
of Wuhan institution of Virology. She is the first scientist in the world who isolated, identified and gene sequenced the SARS-CoV-2 virus. She is doing the same thing. searching for bats from cave to cave, locality to locality and screening those bats for viruses which can jump to human species in the future. As are two agencies in USA, PREDICT -1 and PREDICT -2. Unbeknownst to all of us -there is an active search for bat viruses, the virus that can attack us at some point in future!
