Saturday, January 22, 2005

A random thought

I'm reading on Neil Gaiman's Journal about his efforts to capture a bat loose in his house, and I find myself thinking, "Gosh, I hope he's careful. Bats are a major vector of rabies." We live just a few miles from a cave that hosts one of the largest bat colonies in Texas--even larger than the famous Congress Avenue Bridge colony, and several times a year there are stories in the news about how some schoolkids were playing hackey sack or somesuch with a dead bat that turns out to be rabid, and everyone gets wound up and a dozen shots are given all around. So Gaiman contracting rabies would indeed be a tragedy, and I'm quite certain he's not keen on the idea, but there is a certain perverse cool factor in knowing he'd be following in the footsteps of Edgar Allan Poe.

All of which is a long-winded way of getting around to the thought that spawned this wee-hours post in the first place: If bats are major vector of rabies for higher predatory animals, how the heck do bats (which are insectivores/herbivores for the most part) contract the disease in the first place?

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