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COVID-19 is a clear reminder that when muscles are weak, unforgiving headache and sore throat, we should cancel all our plans. But it turns out that we are not the only ones in the animal kingdom to practice this public health measure. Recently published research shows that vampire bats separate from those around them when they feel sick.The team tracked 31 vampire bats in the wild, half of which were injected with molecules that gave them viral-like symptoms, without disclosing them to any disease, after closely monitoring their behavior using sensors to track them. The researchers found that "sick" bats hang out with bats less, spend less time near each other, and "less socially connected with those in good relationships." In short, they split. Society leaves the community
it's the same when we have the joker flu, and we feel distressed and we don't want to get out of bed,” says Simon Ripperger, lead author of the new study, published this week in Behavioral Ecology. ] You won't go to have beer with your friends because you don't feel like that. This hidden social aloof is what we research here.How the host's behavior when they are contagious is one of the most important predictors of how quickly infectious diseases can spread, said Dana Hawley, a biologist at Virginia Tech who was not involved in the research. It's a challenge to answer that question in wildlife and humans. "I found this to be a wonderful and exciting study," she said in an email to Popular Science.
The study suggests that, at least in bats, the behavior accompanying illness may have social implications. "This study helps explain why we feel sick when we are infected with colds and the flu," evolutionary biologist Damien Farine. The University of Zurich said in an email to Popular Science Farine was not involved in the current study. Our behavior when we are sick "can be a sign that we need to stay at home and make way for others from infecting us again," Farine said.Biologists have studied the social networks of vampire bats for decades. Their society is the most complex in the animal world. Previous research in the lab has shown that when these bats are unwell, they interact less with their peers.Ripperger and a team at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute want to test those findings in the wild.
So, on April 24, 2018, when the last sun set over Belize's Lamani Archaeological Reserve, the team placed mist nets on every possible exit of a hollow tree with about a hundred vampire bats piled up. They captured 41 females, and eventually only 31 of them didn't know how to remove the sensors. They sprayed half of the bats with a watery salt solution, it had no effect on their bodies and the other half with lipolysaccharides, a harmless substance that tricks the immune system. Of the animal to believe that the infection occurred within a few hours
The team then installed a tiny mini-computer backpack on each bat to track the mammal's trajectory and exchange data with the rest of the sensors. This allowed the team to make a detailed map of how much each bat moved, how close the animals were with each other and how close they all were. An hour after the bats were injected and tagged, they returned to the forest
The team monitored animal interactions for three days. As expected, during the first six hours the bats have lipopolysaccharide Running through their veins is less mobile than placebo recipients. During this time, "sick" bats hang out on average with four fewer "healthy" companions, too, and their interactions are shorter, they last 25 minutes less than "healthy" bats with each partner. On average, "healthy" bats have a 49 percent chance of dating. But there was only a 35 percent chance of being "sick" twenty-four hours later, the effect was much less pronounced. Two days later, the previously "sick" bats interacted at the same rate as the rest of the group.
Hawley, of Virginia Tech, said considering how the behavior of sick and healthy animals affects disease progression is an exciting open-ended question. “It seems that the sick bats are essentially withdrawing from the interaction. But are healthy bats also avoiding bats that "look" sick too?
For Ripperger, recently published data could help researchers understand and possibly model the true transmission of pathogens in bats' communities. “We can use the same dataset to simulate the spread of that pathogen because we know how close and long the bats are. This is really interesting.From an evolutionary perspective, the study also questions why choice is conducive to such individual behavior, as they are unlikely to benefit the entire pathogen. (Because it will reduce the ability to spread) or the patient (because it is already having an illness), Farine said.Studying social distances in non-human animals helps us understand how [This practice], which feels unnatural and difficult for us, is a natural strategy for social animals, ”says Dana Hawley. But helps people to live in a wider context
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