This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When humans get sick, we change our routines and try various solutions to feel better and get well, like staying in bed to rest, going to the doctor, getting medication from the pharmacy, using home remedies and more. Animals have their own methods to feel better when they're sick or even prevent illness: Dogs might eat grass to relieve stomach discomfort; chimpanzees in Tanzania chew on the bark of a plant to treat gut worm problems; tiger moth caterpillars eat toxic plants that might kill parasitic flies infecting them; and some species of birds line their nests with cigarette butts to repel pests like lice and mites.
A group of scientists in a multidisciplinary, intercontinental research project called SELFCURE are studying whether bats also change their behavior to feel better when they're ill. The three project leads—Ralph Simon from the Pattern Recognition Lab of the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) in Germany; Rachel Page, who leads the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) Bat Lab and the STRI Center for Animal Behavior in Panama; and Dan Becker, a disease ecologist at the University of Oklahoma who specializes in bat pathogens and immunology—assembled an international team to ask how bats alter their behavior when sick. Do they contract their foraging ranges?
Do they stay in their roosts to rest? Do they distance themselves from other bats? Do they eat leaves or fruits with medicinal properties?
Self-medication is a behavior that has been observed in many animals but has yet to be documented in bats. "We want to find out if bats eat certain plants or parts of plants when going through an immune challenge, to feel better or even to get cured," Simon explains. Bats are long-lived social animals with excellent spatial memory.
Some species communicate with others about good places to roost; others eavesdrop on each other's echolocation calls to find productive foraging patches. They can learn socially by observing other bats. Could they learn to self-medicate too?
Bats have long been misunderstood and maligned: Not only are many people afraid of them, but their reputation has declined further due to the rise in zoonotic disease—the transmission of an infectious illness from animals to humans. The increase in these transmissions, however, is highly linked to habitat destruction: Deforestation and urban development force wild animals to search for new dwellings in human-inhabited areas, potentially stressing bats and causing people to encounter them more often. SELFCURE researchers are looking at how bats adapt and react to infections and illnesses.
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