It‘s the other way round, they sound like a perfect reservoir for viruses. They might have benign viruses on top of the deadly ones in their system. Why should there be a selection for deadly ones if they are a great reservoir for virus amplification?

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Not to mention, and I'm speculating bathed in ignorance here, you don't ever have one bat. If a bat colony is hosting a particular virus, and 50% of the colony are so affected by disease that they can't function well enough to infect you, that still leaves a lot of bats that presumably have been exposed and carry the infectious agent and are function well enough to get you sick, too.

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Science communicator here with a specialty in illustration and design. I'm currently collaborating with a carnivore ecologist on a lab logo/brand! :]

Do you have any insights on bridging SciComm with creative fields? Also, do you ever encounter times in your own research where visuals would enhance the conversation?

How do you make time for everything? I feel like just being an ecologist or science communicator or tiktokker is a full time job in their own!?

Any animal that lives away from humans is a good scapegoat to blame laboratory created viruses on. Imagine in resident evil if Umbrella could just be like, Oh monkeys did it! Wasnt me! Bats did it! Wasnt william birkin in the lab

Have any tips for someone applying for a Nat Geo Level 1 grant for the first time?

You must have sampled a lot of different cuisine in your travels, what's your favorite pastry?

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Currently finishing my undergrad and headed into a gap year - I recently jokingly said that my absolute dream job is to be a scientist so passionate and prolific in my field (and communication) that I can become a ‘TV scientist’.

My main interests are biodiversity and wildlife ecology; how did you enter into the field of wide-scale scientific communication? Additionally, do you find that passion for wildlife and communication is almost ‘exploited’ in the industry? (Thinking interpretation jobs, I’ve loved every one I’ve had but to be offered minimum wage for jobs requiring a degree is really disheartening!)

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Are there another examples or plans to fix an ecosystem similar to the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone?

Fair, but not really. I used a wrong word. While I agree that your response is correct in pretty much every respect, it highlights the consequence of rudimentary practices in a de-centralized field.

To the first point, "the term hybrid is used for this very reason, as juxtaposed with species." Obviously, I wasn't clear enough in my meaning that you felt the need to point that out, so I'll just own that mistake.

As to the rest, I'm sure you know "species" denotes "a population capable of producing viable offspring." So why would we ever use a different word? Outdated understandings lead to outdated naming conventions which persist after the science has surpassed the action. A hybrid, by definition in the context of biological evolution, is "offspring produced by more than one species." That's an explicit indication regarding the presence of distinct populations or a statement about the capacity to produce viable offspring. One of these criteria is affected, otherwise they should just be called the same species, sub-species or maybe even same ring-species from the very get-go.

Like taxonomy as you mentioned above, asserting primacy to the factor of a population is more on the arbitrary side of things. It's a blurred line in many respects. Viability, however, is not.

Most people tend to think of species as a label. A is this, B is that, etc etc. Consequently, they gloss right over the correlating feature that A is NOT B, B is NOT C, and so on. The underlying question is "Are A and B the same species, or of different species?" Well, it's science, and we can test that, or at least keep our eyes peeled for a test performed by nature. Are they able to diffuse alleles into a receiving population without impediment? That's a closed-ended question. While the answers to that tend to be found somewhere along a spectrum, it's a tighter constraint on subjective opinion, and is consequently the preferred approach. Veering the other way by calling mixed-plant offspring "hybrids" is, for lack of a better description, kind of missing the point in so many ways. That's a practice rooted in history, but not so much in the core of science, which is testability/falsifiability. Since the discovery of DNA and the commercial availability of DNA tests or other advances in tech/science, there's hardly an impetus to use that more-arbitrary decision making process as a place-holding crutch until such a time as a verifiable answer becomes possible anymore. We can police that up, we just typically don't.

We tend not to go back and re-label things accordingly chiefly because it conflicts with naming rights, plus the fact that it's a rather large undertaking that would require updating an entire field. That's pretty much it.

With respect to the viability of f2 generation hybrids, eh... re-classifying the parent generations in the manner described above erases the issue you present, which is essentially what a debate surrounding the relationship between humans and Neanderthal is all about. That all boils down to motivation or a sense of importance to "get it right" rather than a question of if hybrids are viable or not, or if our definitions need to change at all.

So yeah, "hybrid" absolutely does imply that the offspring are not viable. We just incur some leftovers because the history of taxonomy is loaded with examples that represented the best effort possible at the time, which in turn leads to a lot of people still doing it now.

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Youre REALLY kink shaming BDSM people arent you?

They are mammals (so, somewhat similar to humans in some ways.....ie they can carry viruses that can also infect other mammals like humans), they fly long distances (they can spread things far and wide), they come into contact with humans (anecdotally, but I remember being in Sydney Australia at night and seeing a ton of bats flying around above). All three factors together = they are good at spreading disease.

Those are both the medium filtering out certain colors of light, reducing its intensity. It doesn't change the photons.

The only thing that changes photons is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescence

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Iirc bats also manufacture large quantities of their own vitamin C in a symbiotic relationship with the viruses living mostly in their hair follicles and triggering vit C production as viral loads increase. Humans either don't make their own endogenous VitC or only make a miniscule amount

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What music do you play? And how the heck do you find time for everything you do?? You basically have my dream job, perhaps one day..