Their bodies and immune systems are really strange. They can get loaded up with tons of diseases but can still manage to outstrip the disease due to their metabolism and immune system. They act as pools of disease. But also are excellent pollinators and eat mosquitoes and other bugs that must be kept in check.

The worst things we can do are build new housing developments in freshly clear cut forests. Diseases that have always been in the bat population suddenly go from 50 miles in the remote woods to someone’s backyard table. A bat has taken a fruit-laced dump on it. Your big dog eats it, and then licks your SO’s hands 20 minutes later. She rubs her eye with the feces-laden saliva, and suddenly, a novel pathogen erupts.

I remember being in college (pre-covid) a biotechnology professor telling us about how zoonotic spillover events happen. He was studying ebola and how it would occasionally kill everyone (or many) in a remote village who came into contact with bats or other creatures often. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, as he basically said it was a matter of time till something like it happened again, but way, way worse. Fast forward a number of years and 1,000,000+ dead Americans later, and we now know that we got off extremely easy.