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For many of us, when we think of bats, we think of one thing. rabies. the threat of that virus is often misunderstood. >> it's not very common for americans to get rabies. >> dylan george is a former white house adviser for biological threat defense. >> in any given year there's anywhere from zero to one to two people might get infected from rabies in bats or potentially from foxes or raccoons or skunks. >> rabies has actually been around for 2,000 years. for most of that time, if you got it, it was a death sentence. without treatment, it's 99.9% deadly.

Amazon, could have 100 species of bat. >> the smallest bat in the world, it's this tiny thing in thailand that weighs less than a penny. the biggest bat in the world has more than a six-foot wing span. there's a bat that lives in the cloud forests of ecuador that has the longest tongue of any mammal. this thing has a tongue that is 1 1/2 times the length of its body. if you stick your arm straight out in front of you and imagine your tongue could touch your fingers, it's three times that long, so it can get into a flower to pollinate. >> wait a minute. so relative to its body size, if i stick ...

What species are in there. then what we do is set up nets outside and catch bats as they fly out in the evening and go back in the morning. >> we do everything we can to ensure the safety and well-being of the animals and we have a basic set of samples we collect. oral swabs, fecal pellets, blood. and we take measurements. >> over the course of eight months, they sampled caves all over southern china and then they took all these samples back to the lab. >> it really took the better part of eight years of consistent and persistent sampling, testing, different horseshoe bat populations around un...

>> when the wing is around the face like that, they're using their wings as built-in blanket. >> he's part of a larger movement that's been taking place for the last three decades in the united states, teaching people why these creatures should be protected, not feared. >> we're all here for one purpose and for one target and one direction, and that's to help these animals and to help people understand why these animals need our assistance. they're so much like us. they are different looking, different colors, different sizes, different shapes, different importances, different jobs that they d...

>> the same adaptation, also, favor them to carry virus. >> it doesn't appear that they get sick, or very sick, when they are carrying viruses that can be deadly in other people and animals. >> so, could studying bat immunology help us, humans, create possible treatments to fight this current and future pandemics? what do you think is the greatest challenge in terms of finding a treatment or cure for these viruses? >> well, to my mind, the greatest challenge is the number of unknown viruses that are out there. i mean, we think there are about 1.7 million unknown viruses of the type that can ge...