This project measures and models movement and social interactions in two bat species and how these behaviors may influence spread of bat coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, among bats and between bats and humans. Zoonotic diseases, such as bubonic plague, Lyme disease, flu, Ebola, rabies, and COVID-19, are caused by pathogens transmitted from animals to people, with devastating effects on humans. Not all potentially zoonotic pathogens will emerge into humans, however, in part because movements of animals and their social interactions with each other and with humans affect the transmission and spread of pathogens. It is, therefore, important to know more about behaviors of animals that are potential sources of zoonotic diseases so that disease dynamics can be better understood and predicted. Viruses will be identified by molecular techniques in bats in the desert southwest of the United States, and the same bats will be followed with GPS trackers and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags (the same “microchips†used to identify pets) to understand flight patterns when out of their roosts and contacts among bats within roosts (“contact tracingâ€). The information obtained will be useful for predicting the spread of viruses in bats, and is of relevance to SARS-CoV-2 should it ever “spill back†from people to North American bats. The broader impacts of this work include a collaboration with a local science education group to educate middle-school students about zoonotic diseases and epidemiology. The project will also provide opportunities for training of undergraduate and graduate students at New Mexico State University, a Hispanic-Serving Institution.
Research at the intersection of animal movement, social behavior, and disease ecology is key to understanding the dynamics of zoonotic diseases within animal hosts. How animals move through their environments and how they interact with both conspecifics and heterospecifics can influence the transmission and spread of zoonoses. This project will investigate how animal movement and multi-species host social network contacts shape risk of transmission of both endemic coronaviruses and potentially the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 within and among North American bat species. This work is facilitated by ever-smaller animal tracking devices and advances in pathogen detection using genomic techniques, allowing the research team to characterize the movements, social interactions, and “viromes†of individual bats through time. By repeatedly sampling bat viromes, the researchers will determine which viral strains are harbored by individual bats through time. North American bats host multiple coronavirus strains, and there is a risk that SARS-CoV-2 may “spillback†from humans into bats. The researchers will also characterize the movements of individual bats using GPS tracking, and will use contacts among RFID-tagged bats and fluorescent-powder tracking to construct multi-species social networks for bats that share a roost. Integrating the movement and social behavior of bats with their viromes will advance our understanding of within-host dynamics of zoonotic pathogens. Undergraduate and graduate students will be involved in the research, and educational resources targeted to middle schools will help students whose lives have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic understand the origins of zoonotic diseases and basic concepts in epidemiology.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
