ANDRZEJ KRAUZEPeople need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy.” So says Bruce Wayne at the start of Batman Begins, the first film in The Dark Knight Trilogy, explaining to Alfred Pennyworth, the family butler, why he has decided to return to Gotham and adopt an alternate persona. Wayne faces his crippling fear of bats (chiroptophobia), costumes himself appropriately, and the rest is movie legend—Batman becomes a superheroic symbol of good, and a box-office smash yet again.
Well, the “dramatic examples” involving real bats in two of this issue’s features should go a long way toward apathy reduction. Even though the winged mammals provide a host of beneficial ecosystem services, such as pollination, seed dispersal, and insect control, bats have been getting an especially bad rap lately, tarred as potential spreaders of lethal viral diseases, including Ebola, MERS, SARS, and Marburg hemorrhagic fever. In “Lurking in the Shadows,” Senior Editor Bob Grant examines the evidence that bats are involved in the spread of these deadly diseases, and reports on why bats seem to be such good reservoirs for pathogens. Bat biology and ecology are very unusual and not particularly well understood. The animals may be able to live with and spread viruses ...
