Show Notes
Note: This is a freely accessible serialized version of Lab Leak Fever. Audio voiceover was AI generated for accessibility. Find an overview of all chapters here or consult the book website for further information. A river of black drew a line through the darkening sky. Above the silver and gold ornaments on the pagoda’s crimson roofs at Wat Khao Chong Pran, the river flow turned southeast towards the fields. Rationally, I knew that the cave housed around two and a half million horseshoe bats, but observing a seemingly never-ending flood of hectic creatures fly out for more than forty-five minutes, I realized that I never truly appreciated just how many bats share the world with us. How little did we know about them? Physiologically, bats are extraordinary; they can speed up their metabolism 16 times, creating immense heat that would denature our proteins and fry our cells. A bat’s heart can beat up to 1,000 beats per minute, but it can also slow down to 6 beats per minute during torpor, a type of short-term hibernation. During a nighttime flight, its body temperature can rise to 42°C (107.6°F). Some species tend to live up to 40 years in vast, dense, and diverse colonies, which makes them uniquely suited as hosts to almost all viral families that befall mammals. However, bats do not appear to get visibly sick, and scientists cannot tell their age past adolescence. They have unique immune systems, which we do not yet understand, that do not overreact to viral infections. There are around 1,500 described bat species that have emerged from their last common ancestor over 60 million years ago. Because they are the only flying mammals, we conceptualize them all together under the umbrella term “bats,” as we do with “fish” in the sea. But based on genetic diversity, that simplification is rarely adequate. It feels like the equivalent of lumping giraffes and cows together with dolphins and whales, all of which diverged from a shared common Artiodactyla—even-toed ungulate—ancestor about fifty million years ago. It’s hard to justify thinking of them as the same, so why do we do it for bats? It is not an exaggeration to claim that bats come in almost all sizes, shapes, and forms, from the thumb-sized Craseonycteris thonglongyai—also known as the bumblebee bat, weighing just 1.5 grams and holding the title of smallest mammal on earth—to various majestic flying foxes with wing spans of over 6 feet, close to two meters. Some fruit bats look almost like dog puppies you’d want to cuddle and take home, while others might appear as if they’ve escaped from a horror movie production. The black river of horseshoe bats over my head would probably come closer to the latter for most people. We humans tend to be afraid of what we do not understand. These horseshoe bats are smaller insectivores (insect-eating bats) who get their name from the weird horseshoe-shaped disfigurement where their nose should be. Intuitively, we humans find them rather ugly—I was no exception, at least at first. I think this is partly because we assume their faces are weirdly deformed, like a fully cleft palate, rather than what they truly are: optimized. Horseshoe bats belong to a group of bats that echolocate—send out and receive sonar waves—primarily through their nostrils. Other bats rely primarily on their mouths. These varied shapes and forms in the middle of their faces, however, have intricate functionality for shaping their calls, impacting not only orientation but also their feeding and social lives, too. Given their enormous diversity, maybe it is not a surprise that bats exist in almost all variations of social structures, from eremites who don’t want to bother with others to ones who live in small family groups, villages, or even multicultural megacities. Some like to mingle with other bat species, while others are territorial and of the “get off my lawn” persuasion, with threatening grunts, fletching teeth, and all. These horseshoe bats flying overhead were no
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