NEW YORK: Researchers have discovered four new species of African leaf-nosed bats - cousins of the horseshoe bats that are believed to have served as hosts of the virus that caused COVID-19.
The discovery, published in the journal ZooKeys, takes on special importance in the era of COVID-19, according to the researchers.
“With COVID-19, we have a virus that’s running amok in the human population. It originated in a horseshoe bat in China,” said the paper’s lead author Bruce Patterson, a curator of mammals at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, US. “There are 25 or 30 species of horseshoe bats in China, and no one can determine which one was involved. We owe it to ourselves to learn more about them and their relatives,” Patterson said.
“None of these leaf-nosed bats carry a disease that’s problematic today, but we don’t know that that’s always going to be the case. And we don’t even know the number of species that exist,” said Terry Demos, a post-doctoral researcher in Patterson’s lab and a principal author of the paper.
The bats that Patterson and Demos studied are leaf-nosed bats in the family Hipposideridae. (IANS)