what is the deal with bats? The paper made a handful of salient points, the first of which put the rest in perspective: Bats come in many, many forms. The order Chiroptera (the “hand-wing” creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat. Such diversity might suggest that bats don’t harbor more than their share of viruses; it could be, instead, that their viral burden is proportional to their share of all mammal diversity, and thus just seems surprisingly large. Maybe their
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"Bats: Important Reservoir Hosts"
continues throughout the chapter...
