Page 18 - Vampire Bat News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> if you think about what the animals are that are active in the air during the day, it's birds. and by being active at night, bats are not competing directly with birds. so the bats basically fulfill all the same ecological roles that birds do, only they do it at night. >> bats are unique mammals. though structurally in some ways they're similar to humans. so bats have four limbs. two of them are attached to the wings. >> two of them are the wings. >> okay. >> yes. they have all the same bones that humans do. the upper arm, the forearm there's two bones, the wrist bones, and then the bones t...

Bats. most of which are small insect-eating varieties like the big brown bat and the little brown bat. but in the southeastern parts of the united states, in particular in texas, there's an abundance of one species. the mexican free-tailed bat. in fact, bracken cave just outside san antonio is believed to be home to the single largest colony of bats in the world. >> every year during the spring and summer, i think there are something like 30 million bats in this case. >> in the cave? >> in the cave. in the summer. there are so many bats that the local weather stations use their doppler radar. ...

Of the pandemic, green spaces have become a refuge. for a few moments each day, we can stop and watch the wildlife, see the seasons change. but with this renewed focus on our environments, from the oceans to the land, from insects to exotic plants, life on earth is declining at an astonishing rate. and time is running out to repair this damage according to a un report published this year. and the pandemic, too, is linked to this destruction. coronavirus is thought to have first emerged in bats, and eventuallyjumped to humans,

In the drc over a decade, including many coronaviruses in bats. so, it's bats that get tracked. bats are linked to many zoonotic diseases, notably covid-19 and ebola. >> now we put it in the bag. you have to be really careful or they bite. >> the virologists have told us that whilst they haven't found the ebola virus itself inside them, they have found the antibody. so these are in a sense a sentinel species, an early warning system for humanity. >> reporter: a net can prove fatal, start an epidemic, or worse. so could a cross-infection from an unknown host, from bats, to chickens, to children...

Then the samples are sent for more investigation. most of them survive capture and are returned to the wild. the congo's population has almost doubled in two decades to around 90 million. this puts the forest under strain and closes the gap between people and the new diseases that could kill them. the scale of the destruction of the rain forest here in the congo is not yet on the scale that we've seen in the amazon. a great deal of it is a result of local farmers who clear the land and farm it for a few years. the problem is that that causes fragmentation of the rain forest, increasing the sur...