“By compiling and analyzing a huge amount of government data, environmental economist Eyal Frank, the study’s sole author, discovered that in regions with outbreaks of white nose syndrome, a wildlife disease that kills bats, the rate of infant mortality increased by nearly 8 percent relative to areas without the disease.
There’s a clear reason for this, according to the paper. Most North American bats eat insects, including pests like moths that damage crops. Without bats flying about, farmers spray more insecticides on their fields, the study shows, and exposure to insecticides is known to harm the health of newborns.”
https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/370002/bats-link-babies-death-study-white-nose-syndrome
“Compared to other mammals, bats have a lot of surface area, and that means they tend to lose water more easily through evaporation across their skin”
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“bats are at risk of drying out and dying from dehydration.”
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“Temperatures above roughly 105°F can cause heat stress or even death among many species, especially if the animals nest in trees outside, where they’re exposed to the ambient temperatures. Heat waves in Australia, for example, have caused dozens of mass die-offs of flying foxes, big fruit-eating bats that use their noses and large eyes instead of echolocation to find food.”
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“Wind turbines kill hundreds of thousands of bats each year in North America alone, and globally they are known to harm more than 30 bat species. Typically, the bats — most of which are migratory species — die from colliding with turbine blades, though it’s not clear why these animals are drawn to them.
Making these threats more troubling is the simple fact that bat populations don’t recover quickly after die-offs, whether or not they’re climate-related. It goes back to their flight-enabled physiologies: Unlike birds, which drop their eggs off at a nest, bats have to fly while pregnant, which isn’t easy. That’s why most bats only have one pup per year”
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“they face a wide range of threats beyond climate change, including a disease known as white-nose syndrome, which has killed millions of bats in North America.”
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“By eating agricultural pests, such as moths and beetles, bats also provide up to $53 billion in economic value each year in the US alone. They eat pests that bother us, too, including mosquitos. And of course, bats pollinate agave plants as they slurp up their nectar, which give us, among other things, tequila.”
https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/24048465/bats-endangered-climate-change
“Kuhn believes that it’s not likely that novel coronavirus spread directly from bats to humans, but that one or more animals at the market in Wuhan were infected by bats and served as an intermediate host in the transfer of the virus from bats to humans. It’s thought that humans then came in contact with an infected animal, or animals, at the market. How exactly the virus was transmitted is still unknown, but some theories include a human consuming an infected animal or touching an infected animal during the butchering process.”